On Art

...In today's market he hardly seems salacious or pornographic enough, only mildly titillating in a refined and decadent way...

...they were tormai necessities for circumventing the deadly evenness of tone the medium inflicted...

...Many of his illustrations reveal a slightly too-routine emphasis on bare female breasts...

...Chronically ill with tuberculosis, he died a few months before reaching the age of 26...

...Shout it at him: 'Don't rake out lights!' " It is an example of the assiduity with which Beardsley cultivated an essentially mean technical medium...

...Dated January 8. 1898, from the Hotel Cosmopolitan in Menton, it reads in part: "An awful thought has just come to me, it is that the blockmaker may be contemplating 'raking out the lights' in the drawings just sent to you...

...Kline's drawings are perhaps another matter...

...For The Rape of the Lock, he seems to have let out all stops: Hatched lines, stippled lines, geometric patterns, solids proliferate until the entire series of illustrations becomes a mass of busy-work...

...Limited to black and white, Beardsley produced a whole repertory of formal devices, playing positive against negative shapes, creating a vigorous tension between figure and ground...

...Beardsley was the turn-of-the-century dandy, the pale, perverse eroticist whose illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salome, for The Yellow Book and The Savoy, shocked his Victorian contemporaries...

...It concludes with a very handsome edition of Ben Jonson's Volpone, for which Beardsley provided the cover design and illustrations shortly before his premature death in 1898...

...We seem to be on the verge of a much broader and more important understanding of Abstract Expressionism than Harold Rosenberg's limited explanation of it as "action" strategies...

...The exhibition is particularly instructive in the way it arranges the original drawings, full of personal inflections, and the hard-bitten results of the mechanical process with which Beardsley had to contend...

...Yet the extravagant patterns one finds in Beardsley's work—flowers, vines, tendrils, shadowy glades, rose-covered bowers—were not simply a matter of the Art Nouveau ambience...

...For the most part, they are constructive images—crosses, squares, trestle forms—which provide the scaffolding for many of his later paintings...

...As Robert Goldwater observes in a very valuable essay for the Kline catalogue, Kline's method of paint-.ing did not result in a free-swinging seismographic recording of his subjective feelings...

...Kline himself remarked in an interview: ""The immediacy can be accomplished in a picture that's been worked on for a long time just as well as if it's been done rapidly...

...Still, the most interesting aspect of this reappraisal is the effort to pry the style loose from the ideological grounds on which it was first promoted...

...Beardsley's oeuvre, as presented in this exhibition, becomes an elaborate exercise in ambiguous formal relationships...

...In a painting like Green Cross a typical Kline structure has been transposed into a seductive green, but it does not carry its weight across the broad horizontal span of the canvas...

...Raking out the lights hardened and impersonalized form, and one had to outwit the tendencies of block-makers...

...It is easy to see why the artist referred to them as embroiderings...

...The truth is that we have not yet been given an opportunity to see any large segment of Kline's work in color in relation to the formidable paintings for which he is best known...

...The exhibition forms part of the apparently unscheduled reappraisal of Abstract Expressionism now in progress, and it takes its place between the recent Hans Hofmann exhibition at the Andre Emmerich Gallery and the forthcoming retrospective of Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art...

...Beardsley was blacklisted and denied commissions when the scandal of the Wilde trials broke upon English society (though there was, in fact, little love lost between the two...

...Selected and arranged by Brian Reade, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where a large Beardsley exhibition was held last year, the current show includes items taken from the London exhibit as well as new material from American private and public collections...

...His paintings were evolved slowly and carefully...

...Kline's random excursions into color do not seem to have been so resolutely successful...

...Occasionally, one or two figures are caught in naughty poses, yet they are scarcely audacious or shocking...

...Kline's fame rests principally upon his vigorous constructions — bold swaths of black paint bridging large areas of white space...

...Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of figurative content, it subscribes to the modern doctrine of forms that must lie flat along the surface yet suggest an illusion of depth...

...Don't let him touch them, but make him leave the screen over initials and white spaces anywhere and everywhere in these and all drawings for Volpone...

...What links these two, aside from the coincidence of important exhibitions this month, is the fact that they both adopted a basically graphic style, limited to black and white...

...But one gets the impression that they were less concerned with gestural freedom than with certain structural problems...

...the whole form resolves itself suddenly into a man in a voluminous white cloak situated against a white ground...

...A line veers off rapidly only to confront the solid shape of a head...

...The Beardsley exhibition now on view at the Gallery of Modern Art is a sizable display including more than 200 items—drawings, prints, books and memorabilia...

...That recently recovered non-book with its graphic images of bi-partisan sex —all interminably served up an jus —seems a much more perfervid rendering of blunt fact and strong-willed fantasy than anything found in Beardsley's drawings...

...Yet the result is a tension between forms that appear to lie flat along the surface while suggesting extension into ambiguous space...

...His career traced a brilliant trajectory to fame and notoriety, then plummeted abruptly back to earth...

...It sets forth the range of Beardsley's talent, from the medieval hardness of his illustrations for Malory's Le Morte cTArthur (his first commission, done when he was 20) to the nervous sensuality of his drawings for Wilde's Salome (with the mischievous Woman in the Moon wearing Wilde's saturnine features...

...Surprisingly, it is the formal accomplishment rather than the eroticism of Beardsley's art that makes him seem viable now...

...Considering Abstract Expressionism's fall from grace with the advent of newer trends among younger artists, the re-evaluation has come not a moment too soon...

...Found guilty-by-association...

...He had a marvelous ability for locking his black and white forms into the flat surface plane...

...The gist of that promotion, one remembers, was that the artist, specifically the American artist, was for the first time confronting his canvas as a kind of arena where he could act out the drama of his own emotions...

...Among the memorabilia there is a touching, heavily underlined letter to his publisher, Leonard Smithers, about the printing of the Volpone illustrations...

...Even compared to the record of a Victorian contemporary like the anonymous author of My Secret Life Beardsley seems tame...

...The Kline exhibition installed at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery consists of works from the Kline estate...

...Beardsley was known for his illustrations, created for the photo-engraving process introduced in the late 19th century, which was mechanically limited to black and white with no intermediate tones...

...An evaluation of that aspect of his career awaits a major retrospective...

...The very stringency of the technique, though, provides its vigor...

...Although the image remaining was brusque and assertive, it was produced in the traditional manner: The spontaneity was the result of artfulness...

...His manner both drew from and nourished the Art Nouveau style —florid, full of curvilinear extravagance and striking asymmetric shapes...

...One also notes that some of his male figures were castrated in the transition from original drawing to published illustration, but these details were more decorative than functional and the designs have not suffered from the surgery...

...Kline, the American painter who died in 1962 at the age of 52, was the gruff hero of Abstract Expressionism, one of the legendary "outsiders" who inspired the movement before and well after it rose to great international prominence and academic success...

...While not a full-scale retrospective, it nonetheless includes 90 drawings and paintings dating from 1950 when Kline first moved into his predominantly graphic, black and white style...

...He was particularly clever at devising methods for extending the possibilities, juggling lines with solid forms, stippling in background details or foreground patterns, so that he could produce contrapuntal arrangements of black on black...

...However much the sexual urge informed his work—and it seems as important as his formal proclivities — Beardsley remained too much the artist to be satisfied with a mere clerical accounting of sexual activity...

...Like Beardsley, Kline drew support from the limitations of his method...

...But he is certainly a master of black and white...

...In his paintings, he shaped the white areas with an insistent carpentry, scribing in the black struts so that they do not open up black holes...