From the Spring 2020 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA. Simon Wilson is a columnist for RA Magazine, a former Tate curator and has published extensively on the artist.

Tate Britain has pulled off a fascinating coup. It has scheduled back to back major exhibitions of two of the greatest but oddest artists in the canon of British art, William Blake (1757–1827) and Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898). The significance of this conjunction is that these artists share many similarities, to the point that one can be seen as an ancestor of the other. One difference is that Blake was largely greeted with incomprehension, while Beardsley achieved huge fame and notoriety for a brief moment. But both then suffered the same posthumous fate of being largely forgotten, except by a faithful few followers, until both underwent revival, most dramatically in the 1960s. So what had been the problem?

For both Blake and Beardsley, the human figure and the issues of human existence, love, death and religion, took centre stage. On the face of it, this places them in the tradition of what was known as History painting, or ‘high art’, which until the rise of modernism was universally considered to be what artists should aspire to. But both were essentially graphic artists, working in media that were at the time automatically seen as inferior to oil painting. Both drew subjects from literature, from the Greek myths and the Bible onwards. Again, absolutely fine – these were the approved sources of high art. But their work primarily took the form of illustrated books, regarded not as art, but as design. It was the genius of both Blake and Beardsley to overcome these conventions and, as we now see, raise graphic illustration to the very highest levels of art.

Tate Britain’s William Blake show is now closed but Aubrey Beardsley is open. It’s an event of some significance in the history of our understanding of this artist. Beardsley’s revival in the 1960s was marked by a huge exhibition in London in 1966, at the national museum of design, the V&A. The only other major Beardsley exhibition in Britain since then, in 1998, was also at the V&A. It consisted overwhelmingly of books and other printed objects. Out of 207 items in the show, only 34 were original drawings.

The new Tate Britain exhibition now places Beardsley firmly in context in the national gallery of British art and consists almost entirely of original drawings. The way to this long-awaited art museum apotheosis of Beardsley was paved by the publication in 2016 of a monumental two-volume catalogue raisonné of Beardsley’s work, a 20-year labour of love by the American scholar Linda Zatlin. Such catalogues both cement the place of an artist in the canon and are an indispensable tool for any exhibition.