{"id":18723,"date":"2018-05-18T01:12:09","date_gmt":"2018-05-18T00:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=18723"},"modified":"2023-12-17T13:43:17","modified_gmt":"2023-12-17T13:43:17","slug":"aubrey-beardsley-and-his-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2018\/05\/18\/aubrey-beardsley-and-his-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Aubrey Beardsley and His World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=c5Zk033J6T0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/beardsley.jpg\" alt=\"beardsley.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This US TV programme isn&#8217;t the greatest quality, and it&#8217;s blighted throughout with a large watermark, but it&#8217;s a revelatory piece both for Aubrey Beardsley enthusiasts and Oscar Wilde aficionados. <em>Camera Three<\/em> was a CBS arts show which presented <em>Aubrey Beardsley and His World<\/em> on 12th March, 1967, as a preview for the Beardsley exhibition which had just opened in New York. This was the same landmark exhibition that made such a splash the year before at the V&amp;A in London, and V&amp;A curator Brian Reade appears in the programme to discuss Beardsley&#8217;s importance with host James Macandrew. It&#8217;s good to see Reade again (he was also in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2012\/09\/18\/beardsley-and-his-work\/\">a later BBC documentary<\/a>) since his Beardsley monograph is a great favourite of mine; as is typical of the period, he looks and sounds very upper class but his scholarship is always authoritative.<\/p>\n<p>Ordinarily this would be enough to satisfy me, even though the programme only runs for 27 minutes and doesn&#8217;t tell me anything about Aubrey that I didn&#8217;t know already. The great revelation comes near the end with the appearance of Vyvyan Holland, the younger son of Oscar Wilde. Holland not only admired Beardsley&#8217;s work but actually met him in 1895 shortly before the artist&#8217;s untimely death. Holland was 9 years old at the time, and was taken to visit Aubrey by his mother; he was 81 in 1967, and died himself later that year so we&#8217;re very fortunate that he was captured on tape at all. The programme also includes a short extract from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2007\/04\/20\/alla-nazimovas-salome\/\">Alla Nazimova&#8217;s 1923 film of <em>Salom\u00e9<\/em><\/a>, with costumes and decor all based on Beardsley&#8217;s drawings. Watch it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=c5Zk033J6T0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere on { feuilleton }<br \/>\n\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/the-aubrey-beardsley-archive\/\">The Aubrey Beardsley archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This US TV programme isn&#8217;t the greatest quality, and it&#8217;s blighted throughout with a large watermark, but it&#8217;s a revelatory piece both for Aubrey Beardsley enthusiasts and Oscar Wilde aficionados. Camera Three was a CBS arts show which presented Aubrey Beardsley and His World on 12th March, 1967, as a preview for the Beardsley exhibition &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2018\/05\/18\/aubrey-beardsley-and-his-world\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Aubrey Beardsley and His World&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,50,30,7,19],"tags":[785,94,798,9508,116,123,493,1379],"class_list":["post-18723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-beardsley","category-black-white","category-film","category-television","tag-alla-nazimova","tag-aubrey-beardsley","tag-brian-reade","tag-james-macandrew","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-salome","tag-the-savoy","tag-vyvyan-holland"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-4RZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}