Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the life and work of Aubrey Beardsley. This was a clearly laid out show going through Beardsley’s life chronologically. It struck me how rare it is to have a show of the work of an illustrator and print maker in a main stream gallery and realised it was a good follow up show to last year’s William Blake. The show was hung well for these new days of social distancing and I did wonder if it had been rearranged during lockdown. I was fascinated to learn that his style of having large areas of black in his work was due to a new print technique which he exploited. It was a nice touch to have copies of all the issues of the illustrated journals, The Yellow Book and The Savoy, with which he was associated. Unlike other shows on him I’ve seen, this covered the period after the Oscar Wilde trial well. I’d always assumed he ran away but actually a lot of his most radical and erotic work was from this period. It was fun to see a section with ...

Small display at the National Portrait Gallery of three photographs looking at Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley was a notorious artist of the 1890s and the famous picture of him by Frederick Evans was here of his head in profile held in long languid hands.   The commentary said that Evans described Beardsley as a gargoyle! I was interested in a later picture of Beardsley in Menton where he went for his health shortly before he died. It shows him an Vuillard like room with highly patterned wall paper and a crucifix on the wall showing his conversion top Catholicism earlier that year.