Jan Bowman
posted 20 December 2007

It is no accident that the grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical changes or disorientation.
Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, (1972

With its insistence on ironic reversals, on fluent and fertile opposites, the grotesque also resembles the topos of The World Upside-Down, that topsy-turvy universe where things are no longer in their place, where order is disrupted, where hierarchies tumble, and the Fool is king. Both the Grotesque and The World Upside-Down possess a darkly comic portent, that the fantastic uncovers and explores; both serve the key function of revealing the constructed nature of rationality, of the mandate that everything be in its place. The surface relationships by which daily life is governed are anything but ordained and stable; indeed, they can be understood as absolute only by dint of a sustained illusion.
The Fantastic in Work and Fiction: Cornell University Library

Seeing this show involves a trip to Dulwich Picture Gallery, which is worth a trek. Besides its reputation for innovative exhibitions, this little gem boasts a walled garden, beautiful John Soane architecture, a fine permanent collection and intelligent picture captions, aimed at adults. The current exhibition of work by Beardsley and his contemporaries traces the brief flowering of grotesque art and its decorative descendants in Britain from the end of the 19th century. If you like pictures and beautiful draughtsmanship, go and see this.

There are a few deliciously terrifying drawings in this show, almost worth a trip in themselves. But go and see it just to admire how beautiful a single line can be in the hands of masters. The best draughtsmen – Beardsley himself, Rackham and Dulac – prove that art can make the ugliest thing look beautiful.
In Rackham’s the 'Widow Whitgift and Her Sons', on a windswept shore an anguished mother rails desperately at her hulking, useless offspring as night falls, full of menace exquisitely drawn. Dulac’s 'Madame C’est Pique le Doigt' captures an instant in some fascinating-looking tale of elegant society, a moment of 18th-century high drama.

The ‘age of enchantment’, when artists abandoned the stifling restrictions of high Victorian aesthetics for a new interest in the fantastic, was also one of the most tumultuous in history. Europe discovered the Orient, Freud pioneered the science of the mind and revolutionary workers’ movements sprang up across Europe. The Paris Commune (1871) Russian Revolution (1917) and two World Wars form the background to this exhibition, but you’d barely know it. As society descended into chaos, those wealthy enough to ignore the mayhem escaped reality by experimenting with sex, the supernatural and drugs, and by throwing wilfully extravagant fancy-dress parties. Beardsley enchanted this milieu – and scandalised polite society – for five years with his exquisitely grotesque illustrations, before dying of TB in 1898, at just 26.

Beardsley’s most darkly beautiful drawings, for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, introduced androgynous, mysterious characters with an air of elegant menace to a society where wealthy homosexuals such as Wilde were just beginning, tentatively, to emerge from the closet. Edgar Allan Poe’s horror stories were also a favorite subject for illustrators; two of the best, by Dulac and Harry Clarke, are shown here. Illustrated books for adults were perfectly normal then. (Lucky Edwardians!) But fairy stories such as Peter Pan and Alice were as popular with adults as Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. This was when children’s literature first began to feature children behaving like brats, while their parents commonly believed in fairies.

Beardsley’s work is by far the most original of anything here; knowing he wouldn’t be around long, he seems to have packed a lifetime’s inspiration into his meteoric career. Artists previously shoved out of the limelight by Beardsley rushed to fill the gap left by his death; a real treat of this show is discovering unknown talents such as Sime and Alistair (Hans Henning von Voight), whose gorgeously erotic Manon Lescaut drawing echoes Beardsley (though without his fabulous line). The contemporary fashion for opulence and the far east encouraged a boom in fantastic, exotic illustrations and beautifully bound gift books in which to flaunt them. A new generation of middle-class parents, raised on improving texts and finally free to indulge their own children, enthusiastically adopted the habit of buying expensive fairy stories at Christmas.

It is tempting to view the goblins who darken the pages of Sime and his contemporaries as ciphers for the emerging working class. But two wars and a Depression put people off the grotesque. The exhibition ends with Daisy Makeig-Jones’ kewpie doll vases, which finally ceased production in 1941; but the enjoyably evil element in art petered out far earlier. The exotic, ornamental, thread to this exhibition, though, is a delight itself.

Dulac’s meticulously researched Arabian Nights paintings are an example. They exemplify the best of illustration, when another creative mind playing around with the same theme magically enriches the author’s text. (It’s also nice to learn how he used white gouache over watercolour to get those great light effects.) Elsewhere, works range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Sidney Sime’s deliciously scary goblin drawing 'The sudden discovery of that infamous den' (sadly a one-off, for a nonexistent story somebody ought to write) hangs next door to Annie French’s claustrophobic 'The Queen and the Gypsies'. It’s a shame the Glasgow School is represented by Jessie King and Annie French instead of its real hero, Mackintosh. This section of the exhibition is overloaded with laboriously drawn flowers and twee children. However, the work elsewhere makes up for it. There are gems by Leon Bakst from the Ballets Russes, the best stuff by Kay Nielsen I’ve seen, a malevolent mermaid by Sime and a most atmospheric chromolithograph by the tragic Detmold brothers for Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

Although the fantastic was a rich source of inspiration for artists, years of slaughter finally seem to have made reality impossible to ignore. Bawden and Ravilious’ thoughtful, melancholy drawings of the English countryside were more effective balm for the soul in the years following WWII. Illustration went into relative decline and then a prolonged slump in the late 20th century, when photography ruled, but in the last ten years it has enjoyed a renaissance which shows no sign of fading. Perhaps the publication of The Illustrated Life of Pi this September heralds another boom for the illustrated gift book; hopefully this exhibition will encourage it. Likewise, it would be nice if 'The Age of Enchantment ' not only inspired artists to mine the grotesque for inspiration, but to aim for the very best in draughtsmanship. This show is full of wonderful examples of the power of drawing.

Till 17 February 2008.