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Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s, by Emma Sutton. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, £40.00, $72.00.
Aubrey Beardsley's art has long been recognized as a dramatic example of what Walter Pater termed Anders-streben: the innately transdisciplinary tendency within all artworks to "pass into the condition of some other art, by . . . a partial alienation from [their] own limitations." Regarded with suspicion by professional art historians for much of the twentieth century, Beardsley's oeuvre has frequently been judged for its aspirations towards the "textual" condition of literature and its reliance on the printed book. And with some notable exceptions, much of the finest recent scholarship about Beardsley has been produced by figures associated with literature departments and the rare books room: Linda Gertner Zatlin, Stanley Weintraub, Ian Fletcher, Robert Langenfeld, Chris Snodgrass, Lorraine Kooistra, Margaret Stetz, and Mark Samuels Lasner. To this list must now be added Emma Sutton, of the English department at the University of Edinburgh, whose book is a model of precisely the kind of interdisciplinary criticism Beardsley's imagination demands. Sutton is the first to study the visual implications of Beardsley's fascination with music -in particular, with the work of Richard Wagner, which Beardsley frequently heard and saw performed. Building on the new musicology associated with Phyllis Weliver, Susan McClary, Philip Brett, and others, Sutton has written a groundbreaking book that richly amplifies our view of Beardsley as an artist in black and white.
Beardsley's fascination with music, and Wagner in particular, has been frequently observed but till now never closely studied. He "had a genius for music," Beardsley's mother recalled: "When a baby of less than a year old, . . . he would crawl across the carpet to the piano and sit close beside it waiting for me to play, when he would beat time with his toy." He avidly collected Wagner's essays, scores, and libretti, as well as biographies and criticism on Wagner; and six months prior to his death from tuberculosis in 1898, he specified that Wagner's prose works should, with three exceptions (all spiritual works), be the only books...