'His Wretched Hand': Aubrey Beardsley, the Grotesque Body, and Viennese Modern Art
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[1] University of Miami
University of Miami
Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 40, Nº. 3, 2017, págs. 554-581
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Between 1903 and 1905 reviews of Aubrey Beardsley's art -and body- appeared throughout the contemporary press in "fin-de-siècle Vienna". Within this critical reception, Beardsley's 'wretched hand' was posthumously viewed as the literal instrument of his grotesque drawings, as well as a synecdoque for his 'destroyed' body. Through an examination of the contemporary literature, this essay investigates the extent to which Beardsley's repertoire of erotic and grotesque figures was in dialogue with similarly 'grotesque' images created by the Austrian artists Gustav Klimt and Julius Klinger. This study additionally builds upon the current scholarship examining the proliferation of the pathological body in turn-of-the-century Viennese art. The fact that critics were responding to Breadsley's body and oeuvre at precisely the same moment that detractors were disparaging the 'diseased' and pornographic figures in Klimt's "Faculty Paintings" suggests that the grotesque body had become synonymous with modernism in Vienna by 1905.
