The Art of the Book

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The Art of the Book The Fin-de SiècleSalomes
Strange Symbiosis

• According to Jack Stewart, the aesthetic and
  decadent movements of the 1890s are marked by
  increasing symbiosis of the arts forms and
  themes mutate and migrate, as one medium
  fertilizes another.

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William Morris Kelmscott Chaucer
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John Lane The Yellow Book
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• John Lane was already half established as
  appointed publisher to the clique of writers who
  represented, in the public mind as in their own,
  the new aesthetic attitude, which was emphasised
  by the novel aspect of their books. Strangeness
  was valued for its own sake by those who held,
  with Poe and Bacon, that it was an attribute of
  all excellence.
• Arthur Symons, An Unacknowledged Movement in
  Fine Printing The Typography of the
  Eighteen-Nineties, The Fleuron A Journal of
  Typography 7 (1930).

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Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing Before Herod, 1876
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Alice Guszalewicz as Salome (mistakenfor Wilde)
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Symbolist Manifesto (1886)

• In this art, scenes from nature, human
  activities, and all other real world phenomena
  will not be described for their own sake here,
  they are perceptible surfaces created to
  represent their esoteric affinities with the
  primordial Ideals.

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• Beardsleys style Beardsley could be Baroque,
  Empire, Pre-Raphaelite, Japanese, and
  sometimes all of those together in the same
  picture.

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Aubrey Beardsley, Jai Baisé ta Bouche Iokanaan.
The Studio 1 (April 1893).
According to Wilde, Aubrey was the only artist
who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the
seven veils is, and can see that invisible
dance.
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Félicien Rops
The Saturday Review on Salome 24 March
1894Illustration by means of derisive parody
of Félicien Rops, embroidered onto Japanese
themes, is a new form of literary torture and no
one can question that the author of Salome is on
the rack.
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Japanese Print Hiroshige, Sudden Shower, 1857
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Aubrey Beardsley, The Stomach Dance for Oscar
Wilde, Salome. London John Lane, 1894.
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Aubrey Beardsley, Enter Herodias, original
version for Oscar Wilde, Salome. London John
Lane, 1894.
Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilet of Salome I,
original version for Oscar Wilde, Salome.
London John Lane, 1894.
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Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilet of Salome I,
original version for Oscar Wilde, Salome.
London John Lane, 1894.
Oscar WildeDear Aubreys designs are like the
naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes on
the margins of his copybooks.
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Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilet of Salome II,
altered version for Oscar Wilde, Salome. London
John Lane, 1894.
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• The drawings are flat blasphemies against art.
  Burne Jones I admire, and the oddities of
  Japanese draughtsmen I can appreciate, but when a
  man mixes up impotent imitations of Burne Jones
  at his very worst with pseudo-Japanese effects,
  and serves up the whole with a sauce of lilies
  and peacock feathers, I think it is only
  charitable to think that the author of all this
  rococo business has a twist in his intellects.
• D. Tinto, Pictures and Painters, London Figaro
  20 (1893).

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Alla Nazimova, Salome (1923)
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