The Beardsleyan Dandy: Icon of Grotesque Beauty

Abstract DANDYISM-the implicit doctrine of Oscar Wilde, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and much of the Decadence-was the style of life Beardsley most admired, and of all his figures, the dandy most incarnates his paradoxical iconoclastic authoritarianism. Beardsley routinely employed the “madness” of the grotesque as a kind of tongue-in cheek visual repudiation of the smugly “sane” bourgeois world; and certainly his bizarre dandy figures, often depicted as grotesque themselves, reflect that rebuke. But they represent much more, embodying a wide spectrum of the vexing ironies of Beardsley’s art. Indeed, his dandies stand as a plethora of contradictions, combining and orchestrating both the grotesque disorientations of the cultural antihero and the recuperating elegance and control of Art. The dandy becomes for Beardsley not only an emblem for his own split sensibility but an icon for his evolving “dandiacal” artistic styles-styles that, like the dandy, effected a caricature of cultural meaning.