Tag: Exhibition

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Beardsley 150

John Cooper1 Comment
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872 – 1898)
Aubrey Beardsley sesquicentennial

While Beardsley’s brief career was cut short aged 25 by his death from tuberculosis, he made an impact as a brilliant and daring innovator who often caused controversy by using satirical imagery to push gender and sexual boundaries.

On view at the Grolier Club in New York City from September 8 through November 12, 2022 is ‘Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young’—an exhibition drawn from materials in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection in the UD Library, Museums and Press.

The exhibition highlights the rebellious quality of his art and writing, celebrating the eternally young Beardsley, and exploring the meteoric rise of the 19th-century British artist, who became a monumental figure in book and magazine illustration, graphic arts and poster design, and the history of gender and sexuality.

The exhibition is assembled by a long-time Grolier Club member, Mark Samuels Lasner, and reflects both his own interests and expertise and those of his partner, Margaret D. Stetz, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware.

Together they have curated this exhibition, and you can preview Margaret’s excellently assembled labels for project in an online version here: Grolier Club Online.

For those visiting the Exhibition Gallery in person the hours are Monday to Saturday, 10 AM—5 PM, and there will also be a printed catalogue coming later this Fall.

At the risk of being oxymoronic, Margaret Stetz is a most energetic decadent. Earlier this year we enjoyed her masked but still ‘in-person conversation’ on The Decadent Aubrey Beardsley at the Rosenbach in Philadelphia; and she also gave a talk in London at the recent conference AB 150: The Artist Resurgent organized by the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths in association with the Aubrey Beardsley Society and Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. There have probably been myriad other events in between.

Also speaking at the conference was another Oscar Wilde Society stalwart: Anne Anderson of Exeter University, who, in turn, will be giving her own impressions of the Beardsley style in ‘Aubrey Beardsley: Enfant Terrible of the 1890s’ as part of three-part series of online lectures in September and October entitled: The Wilde Years: 1870-1900.

And to complete a female triumvirate of expertise, no review of contributors to the Beardsley oeuvre would be complete without reference to the canonical and comprehensive Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné, a two volume set by Linda Gertner Zatlin, representing the first complete presentation of the provocative, modernist, graphic works of Beardsley. It is an essential work for both serious scholars and occasional researchers.

Aubrey Beardsley. A catalogue raisonné.
Zatlin, Linda Gertner

Preview the book here.

Beardsley and Vyvyan Holland

You may recall a post I made a few years ago about a CBS-TV arts show called ‘Camera Three’ which aired at 11:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 12, 1967.

It took the form of an interview with Brian Reade, then curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and contained reference to the V&A’s Aubrey Beardsley exhibition which had transferred to New York’s (then-named) Gallery of Modern Art.

During that segment there occurred a rare TV appearance by Oscar Wilde’s son, Vyvyan Holland. Not long after my article appeared the clip disappeared from the Internet because the owner had closed their YouTube channel. However, I have found it again.

Take a look below: filmed just seven months before Vyvyan Holland died in October of that year, it provides a chance to see his unassuming manner as he reveals personal experiences such as shooting moose and witnessing the bedridden (and bearded) Beardsley.

The part containing Vyvyan Holland begins around minute number 20.

[Creative Arts Television / Bridgeman Images: FOOTAGE Numero CTA620164]

Video link: Aubrey Beardsley discussion:

© John Cooper, 2022

Announcement · News

Book Mark

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lasner-collection
Materials from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. Photo: University of Delaware Library.
Exhibition and Symposium

Mark Samuels Lasner has long been recognized as an authority on the literature and art of the late Victorian era. He is also a collector, bibliographer, typographer, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library.

To those offices he can now add the honorific of benefactor.

For recently Mark donated his private library, the extensive Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, to the University of Delaware. It has been housed since 2004 in the Morris Library, and now becomes largest and most important gift of its kind in the university’s history.

Continue reading “Book Mark” →
Article

Richard Le Gallienne

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Richard Le Gallienne (Alfred Ellis)

Richard Le Gallienne is the subject of an exhibition in his home town of Liverpool to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. The event is being curated by two stalwart supporters of late-Victorian authors and artists, Mark Samuels Lasner and Margaret D. Stetz—authors and artists themselves.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Liverpool Central Library will bring together these and other scholars and collectors from the UK and the US for a one-day symposium about the city as a literary and cultural centre at the end of the 19th century.

Speakers at the symposium will address topics such as Liverpool and the late-Victorian lecture circuit; the actress Dame Ellen Terry and her theatrical tours in Liverpool; Robert Louis Stevenson’s connections to Liverpool; the career of Sir William Watson as a poet from Liverpool; J. M. Whistler’s links to Frederick Leyland and to Speke Hall; Gerard Manley Hopkins’s years as a priest in Liverpool; bibliomania and the book-collecting culture of late-Victorian Liverpool.

A signature focus of the exhibition, however, is the connection between Oscar Wilde and the Liverpool-born writer, Richard Le Gallienne—a relationship that began with their exchanging books of poetry, Wilde inscribing his: “To Richard le Gallienne, poet and lover, from Oscar Wilde / a summer day in June ’88.”

Much has been made by Neil McKenna of this early liaison. Indeed, the pair continued to exchange poetry and, along with it, much sentiment. One such was a poem given by Le Gallienne to Wilde as a ‘love token’, as he put it. However, the case for reorientation is that Le Gallienne was thrice married and wrote erotic poetry about women too, such as this homage to the olfactory appeal of their undergarments, as the euphemist might describe it.

Le Gallienne visited United States several times, eventually becoming a resident, and while the focus on him will no doubt enhance an appreciation of the relationship between Wilde and his acolyte, few will realize how close Le Gallienne came, on one such visit,  to undermining it [1]:

To coin a phrase, to lose one book may be regarded as a misfortune, however, a more informed observer of Le Gallienne’s habits would simply conclude the likely carelessness of his being absinthe minded.

I prefer the more prosaic view that by seemingly carrying Wilde’s Poems around with him for thirty-odd years Poor Richard had eventually fallen under the thrall of its contents:

I did but touch the honey of romance —
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?
Helas!, Oscar Wilde, 1881.

The exhibition runs through the end of October.

[1] The Publishers Weekly, Volume 101. F. Leypoldt, 1922.