Sexuality in Aubrey Beardsley's Story of Venus and Tannhäuser
Aubrey Beardsley wrote The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser during the fin de siècle, the end of the Victorian Era. This decadent work, following Baudelaire's credo "art for art's sake first of all," portrays sex and sexualities in a playful manner. In addition to mocking conventional Victorian moral codes, and parodying pornographic conventions, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser also supports Foucault's idea that the Victorian Era witnessed a diffusion of sexualities.
The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser was originally toned down and modified for publication in 1897 in The Savoy, a magazine that Beardsley served as art editor, under the title of Under The Hill. According to Stanley Weintraub, Venus and Tannhäuser was "the literally undisciplined and Rabelaisian original. But the longer manuscript's [Venus'] first eight chapters had sufficed for only four refashioned chapters of the purified and playfully footnoted Savoy text [Under the Hill]" (168).
Venus and Tannhäuser is a decadent work, though the term "decadent" is difficult to define. As Elaine Showalter notes, the term had antithetical connotations at the end of the century. On the one hand, it was "the pejorative label applied by the bourgeoisie to everything that seemed unnatural" (169). But artists who embraced decadence as an aesthetic credo " . . .rejected all that was natural and biological in favor of the inner life of art, artifice, sensation and imagination" (170). Heather Henderson and William Sharpe note that these opposing connotations are typically combined in standard definitions of the term, since "In most cases the word [decadent] suggested an ultra-refined sophistication of taste allied wit...
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Judy Chicago comments in her essay that she “had been made to feel ashamed of her own aesthetic impulses as a woman, pushed to make art that looked as if it had been made by a man.” The idea that female artists were not permitted to draw from their personal experiences completely undermines the basis of what art is. Art provides context of culture: it adds meaning and relevance to the time that it was created, and the artists’ personal experiences is what drives the artwork, and society, forward. Chicago’s blatant truths about women and their art in the early 70’s describes the struggles of walking between the worlds of femininity and the regular world talked about by Woolf. It’s impossible to deny the importance of femininity. If one is not
The French 1884 oil on canvas painting The Song of the Lark by Jules-Adolphe Breton draws grasps a viewer’s attention. It draws an observer in by its intense but subtle subject matter and by the luminous sun in the background. Without the incandescent sun and the thoughtful look of the young woman, it would just be a bland earth-toned farm landscape. However, Breton understood what to add to his painting in order to give it drama that would instantly grab an onlooker’s interest.
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In doing so, the audience will be thinking when watching every other ad during the ad breaks, whether it is a Tide Ad or not. Since Tide are the leading laundry detergent brand in the United States, the ad was aimed to boost brand likability and to maintain market share, rather than to be informative and hard selling, and in addition, the use of a hashtag, #TideAd, shown at the end of the commercial is extremely powerful as most people within their target age demographics are on social media which will help to spread their advertisement and help them connect to a larger global audience. Alternatively, the purpose of the 1950s Print Tide Ad is to convey to the audience that by buying this product their life would become easier and their clothes would be a lot, cleaner and brighter. The advertisement glamorises the idea of being a housewife and portrays the product to young women connotating that it would help them to have a “perfect” lifestyle by exclusively using Tide. Through using bright, primary colours, the 1950s Print Tide Ad which appear simple and basic, implies to the audience that deciding which washing powder to use is as simple as the colours on the advert, to entice the audience and make the product seem exciting and new and to connotate the positive associations that the producers want the
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His timeline and life story begs to be romanticized: from his death at the age of 26 to his decadent time in Paris with Oscar Wilde and others, Beardsley reveled in the mysticism of his own life. Through his highly distinctive and recognizable artistic style of black ink illustrations, he received near instantaneous acclaim as he sought to shock his audience out of complacency (Benekovitz) with stunningly grotesque works like “The Dancer’s Reward” (1894) from Salome. As an editor once observed in 1895, Beardsley’s “ruling passion is a desire to astonish the public with the unexpected,” (Kahn, C22) and by that manifesto, Beardsley put up a spectacle with thought provoking illustrations that introduced a new iteration of the Art Nouveau. Beardsley delighted in the act of putting on a production, particularly when it came to himself as he crafted a mystifying public face that exuded an air of artistic voyeurism. Anna Gruetzner Robins lays out this particular persona in her article, “Demystifying Aubrey Beardsley” asserting that his persona, “…combined an extravagant version of sartorial elegance with a belligerent conversational style, a mixture of ‘common language and popular idiom’,” (442). In an interview, Beardsley himself claimed, “if I am not grotesque, I am nothing,” (Meis, II) and it is that statement that further returns him to his station as the Victor Frankenstein of Art Nouveau. He set out to create something disturbingly haunting and striking, both in his illustrations and his writings. If he cannot bring forward the fantastically witty and erotic reality that rests in the subconscious of his Victorian society, then he is not successful as above all, Aubrey Beardsley was a performer. He lived in a world of dualities: The dichotomy between the reality of his health and the robust artistic persona he
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