Maybe this story can help you read it He was an editor of the art-literary journal The Yellow Book and quickly became a prominent figure of the Decadent movement, a pioneer of Art Nouveau and a major proponent of Aestheticism. He intentionally confronted the moral double-standards of Victorian culture and used ‘obscenity’ to question and provoke, particularly in his priapic pastiches.
The art and literature of the Decadents were born of the Romantic belief that passion was closer to the essence of the human experience than rational thought. They generally saw the modern progress around them as a victory of machine over man, of social control systems over individual freedom. The Decadent movement is complex as there was no published manifesto, but by definition must have grown out of the individual responses of those aligned with its core ideologies.
One of the first blatant and self-declared Decadents was the French poet Charles Baudelaire who redefined the meaning of the term in his infamous 1857 poetry collection, Les Fleurs du Mal, for which he was prosecuted for “insulting public decency,” due to its dark eroticism and for ‘championing’ the darker desires. Of course, the repressive regime of nineteenth-century France failed to appreciate any irony or understand its use of deliberate provocation.
This approach became a central feature of Decadent art. They sought to outrage and annoy the sections of society that outraged and annoyed them. They were a kind of early ‘punk’ movement, intent on using shock and disgust as tools to call-out the double standards of the oppressive and highly conservative establishment, thus challenging what was promoted as societal norm.
The tools at their disposal were vicious satire and obscenity. If their art and literature could provoke outrage, then it must be doing something radical and moving things in what they saw as the ‘right direction’ for positive change.
Probably the most important Decadent on the British scene was Oscar Wilde who believed that art should be the ultimate freedom and should be driven by the pursuit of all desires, with the desire for personal liberty being the greatest. The Decadents rejected the accepted ideals of beauty and challenged aspects of society that perpetuated the outmoded moral beliefs that they saw as a mechanism for the elite to exert control over the masses.
Beardsley shared this interest in using personal freedoms to effect social change in the pursuit of greater equality. He saw the power that imagery could have over the rational intellect of the viewer and how it could be used to challenge attitudes.
Like all Decadents, he wanted to challenge the double-standards of Victorian morals where a gentleman may visit a brothel on the way home from church while his pure and chaste wife prepared Sunday dinner for him. Or the politician who condoned child-labour because it increased profits…
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