Aubrey Beardsley & Oscar Wilde
“The Climax”
Salome: a tragedy in one act, translated from the French of Oscar Wilde: Pictured by Aubrey BeardsleyLondon: Elkin Mathews & John Lane; Boston: Copeland & Day, 1894, p. 64
This last of Beardsley’s ten illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play captures the wild sexual abandon of Salome, the heroine, as she voraciously kisses the severed head of St John the Baptist, whom Wilde calls Iokanaan. Fantasies of feminine evil were a key theme in Aesthetic art and literature, and Salome, in Beardsley’s vision, is vengeful and lustful by turns. “I will kiss thy mouth Iokanaan…I am hungry athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire.” Wilde’s play was stopped in rehearsal by the censors, but it was published in 1893, and the illustrated edition followed in 1894. The play was adapted to become the libretto of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, first performed in 1905. The opera, like Wilde’s text, shocked respectable opinion, not least because it revealed a vein of eroticism at the heart of the biblical narrative. Strauss’s hedonistic chromaticism, frankly sexual in its implications, pushed tonality to its limits, and his use of the orchestra’s coloristic resources exceeded even Wagner in opulence. Beardsley’s illustrations, by contrast, achieve dramatic and sensuous results by employing swooping, serpentine lines and areas of intense black and white.
LENT BY THE BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSIY