Конструювання скандального образу Обрі Бердслея: академічний підхід
Construction of Aubrey Beardsley’s scandalous image: academic approach

Summary/Abstract: The public image of Aubrey Beardsley is inseparably linked with ‘succèss de scandale’ implying a distinct sexual flavour. In his classic book The Eighteen Nineties (1913) Holbrook Jackson declared the artist to be ‘a corner stone of the Temple of the Perverse’, and it has constituted a challenge for Beardsley scholars not to refer to Jackson’s definitions ever since. Alongside Wilde, Beardsley came to emblematize ‘the notorious "yellow nineties"’. In addition, he was constituted as a romantic rebel figure in the era of militant Philistine hypocrisy as it was perceived by Beardsley and other avant-garde artists of his circle. His ‘passionate perversities’ were seen as an assault against sexual repression of the period, or as Beardsley’s scholars put it, as ‘the artist’s gauntlet flung in the face of Victorian sexual mores’ [Zatlin L. G.]. However, we find it useful to suspend the opposition of the artist and general public and identify other forces participating in creation of the ‘Beardsley craze’ amidst more recent Beardsley scholars. Therefore, the essay argues that the Beardsley’s heritage known at the beginning of the twenty-first century is not identical to the presumably sexualized art that shocked Victorian viewers. Although interest in Beardsley has never been deficient, there were two significant outbursts of it in the twentieth century. First of all, a sensational rediscovery of Beardsley took place in 1966 when a big retrospective exhibition was organized at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Within the exhibition, the most sexually explicit drawings, including erotic illustrations to Aristophane’s ‘Lysistrata’, were for the first time exhibited and publicized. The next understandable activation of the ‘Beardsley industry’ was connected with the centenary of the artist’s death and took place in the nineties. Revising studies by Linda Zatlin and Chris Snodgrass, we found out that the analysis presented by the pillars of the ‘Beardsley industry’ isolates an autonomous message of Beardsley’s art by seizing to recognize its actual recipient. The inclusive range of drawings covers all the Beardsley’s creative periods and omits the fact that different drawings were of unequal visibility to the Victorian conventional public for whom those drawings have been supposed to present a challenge. Analysis of revised contemporary iconographies of Beardsley’s drawings and Beardsley’s publishers’ lists of publications reveals that some of Beardsley’s works that are nowadays widely referred to by critics were known only by connoisseurs during the artist’s lifetime Edition of Aristophane’s Lysistrata with Beardsley’s erotic pictures which plays such a significant role in his reputation of the Victorian sexual provocateur was distributed privately among the publisher’s wealthy clientele. Several expurgated and thereby unrepresentative version of drawings from ‘Lysistrata’ set were reproduced in posthumous collections of Beardsley’s works. Two sexually explicit drawings for Juvenal, ‘too free for general circulation’ illustrations for Lucian’s True History and widely discussed by scholars images of cross-dressers for Mademoiselle de Maupin, were all published after the artist’s death in limited editions. Beardsley’s works that appeared in artistic periodicals, his poster designs, and also his Rape of the Lock illustrations served as general points of reference for contemporary Victorian public, while some of the artist’s late drawings that often were known only to restricted audience or did not appear in print in the nineteenth century at all, turn out to circulate in scholar representations of Beardsley’s art and impact. Although the approach explicates some peculiar meanings of Beardsley’s work invested by today’s viewers with their contemporary optics, it can hardly contribute to the reconstruction of the work’s actual recipient at the moment of its appearance in the late nineteenth century. To conclude, the ‘Beardsley industry’ succeeded in constructing the myth of the artist as a sexual liberator as well as in constructing an averaged and homogenized ‘Victorian’ recipient of his art.

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