The Beardsley Industry by Jane Haville Desmarais

Author:Jane Haville Desmarais [Desmarais, Jane Haville]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138341135
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

Context

Between 1893 and 1914, the reaction of the French establishment to contemporary English art changed from keen interest to a wary acknowledgement. This change of attitude was partly a reaction to the increasingly insular nature of English art practice. In general, as English art became ever more hostile to foreign influences, so the French critics became more protective of their own art traditions. ‘N’abandonnons pas, n’abandonnons jamais les belles qualités frangaises de logique, d’ordonnance, d’harmonie, de simplicity et de mesure’ (Let us never ever abandon the beautiful French qualities of logic, order, harmony, simplicity and measure),7 was the rallying cry of one French critic. ‘L’art anglais contemporain... n’est pas sorti spontanément, comme chez nous, de la joie d’admirer, de la joie de voir, du bonheur d’oublier ... C’est un enfant du Devoir; ce n’est pas un enfant de l’Amour’ (Contemporary English art ... did not spontaneously emerge, as in our case, from the joy of admiring, the joy of looking, from the happiness of forgetting ... It is a child born of Duty; it is not a child born of Love).8

This reserve the French expressed was counterbalanced by their enthusiasm for British designers and decorative artists, especially those artists who worked within a reproductive medium such as book illustration and poster design. The French respect and admiration for British design and decoration was widespread and reflected the tradition of British excellence in those fields. In a review of L’Exposition Internationale du Livre Modeme a l’Art Nouveau for the Revue Blanche in 1896, for example, Edmond Cousturier wrote that ‘Les Anglais ont tout autrement et mieux compris l’esthetique du livre’ (The English have better understood, and in an entirely different way, the aesthetic of the book).9 The British tradition of excellence in book design was seen to culminate in the work of William Morris, whose bold designs and diverse talents were greatly admired on the Continent. At a more popular level, the late nineteenth century also saw a boom in poster art, and, in general, the French excelled in this medium, being more enthusiastic about art for ‘the man in the street’. It was part of their democratic struggle to liberate art from consumption purely by the ruling classes and to create an art culture in which everyone could share. Painters such as Jules Chéret and Toulouse-Lautrec were leading lights, changing the conception of the poster and making it more dramatic. However, the posters of Beardsley and Dudley Hardy were also praised; the writer Louis Octave Uzanne commented that ‘L’Angleterre eut ses Professionnels de l’Affiche ... déjà cette demiere ecole triomphe avec raison’ (England has its Poster Professionals ... already this latter school triumphs and justly so).10 The avant-garde periodical, the Courrier Français, contributed most to the promotion abroad of work by British decorative artists. In 1894 it ran a series of articles on ‘Les Artistes Anglais’, which included Beardsley, Phil May, Dudley Hardy, Chantrey Courbould, Adolf Eckhardt and Frederick Pegram. The Courrier Français propelled Beardsley towards an international public, and

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