If I am not grotesque, I am nothing

"I have one aim — the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." Beardsley said it in 1896, and he meant it as a method, not a complaint.¹ This is Isolde, from Wagner's Tristan, raising the cup of the potion that will bind her to her lover until they die.² Beardsley drew it in 1895 and, unusually for him, in colour.³

In colour, for once

Almost everything Beardsley made was black and white — a line so precise and so strange it fixed the look of the 1890s. Isolde is one of the few exceptions: three inks — black, vermilion and teal — printed as a colour lithograph and given away with the October 1895 issue of The Studio.⁴ The signature in the lower corner, in teal, is his own.⁵

Six years, then gone

Beardsley's whole career fits in about six years. Self-taught, tubercular since childhood, he worked as if he knew the arithmetic: art editor of The Yellow Book at twenty-one, notorious for the Salomé drawings, dead at twenty-five in a hotel in Menton.⁶ On his deathbed, a convert by then, he begged his publisher Leonard Smithers to destroy his erotic drawings. Smithers kept them.⁷ The grotesque outlived the regret.

A line built to print

Beardsley took his flatness from Japanese woodblock and from Whistler — pure black shapes, hard contour, next to no shading.⁸ It is a line built for reproduction, and it loses nothing on cloth. What you wear is the colour Isolde: three inks, the drawn line — his, not a copy of it.