‘The fact of the matter is I’m interested in a truth. I cannot put a filter on life. It’s about not blinking.’
Steve McQueen

I recently visited the excellent Steve McQueen exhibition at Tate Modern (until 6 September 2020).

We’re greeted by the Statue of Liberty. She is filmed from a circling helicopter, and beyond her there are factories, warehouses and skyscrapers; bridges, barges and cruise ships - arrayed across New York Harbor, glistening in the sunlight. And yet she looks grim-faced, tired perhaps from holding her golden torch aloft for so long. Her garments of oxidised copper, in places caked in guano, seem somewhat tatty. The Dream she represents has achieved so much for so many. But now it is frayed around the edges.

We enter a room with a screen scrolling through old FBI files. They detail the surveillance carried out in the ‘40s and ‘50s on the singer, actor and Civil Rights campaigner Paul Robeson. Trivial observations and banal insights. Heavy type and crude redaction. A voiceover reads from another set of similar documents. We are immersed in a world of paranoia and anxiety; of secrecy and bureaucracy. The wary speculation of suspicious minds. The film runs for over 5 hours.

McQueen asks us to stay a little longer, to reflect on what’s going on around us - the mysteries, curiosities and injustices; the political intrigues and personal tragedies; the unvarnished truth. Stop, look and listen.

‘7th November’ - Single 35mm slide, sound, 23 minutes. Steve McQueen

'As far as I’m concerned, it’s all about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. End of. To get to that, you have to go in close, uncover what’s been hidden or covered over. Obviously, the easy thing is not to go there, but I have a need to go there.’

McQueen takes us by the hand through the world’s deepest goldmine, the Tau Tona in South Africa. We encounter Tricky immersed in a recording studio. We reflect on the images NASA selected in 1977 to represent the human condition to possible alien life forms. We pause to examine McQueen’s nipple, Charlotte Rampling’s eye.

Here’s a young man named Ashes, sitting on the prow of a boat in Grenada, where McQueen’s father was raised. Ashes looks fit, handsome, self-assured - completely at ease with the blissful, open-skied world around him. We pause for a while and take in the azure beauty of it all. There’s a curious scraping sound - metal on stone perhaps? - coming from the other side of the room. We realise the large screen we’ve been watching is double-sided. On the reverse there are two workmen preparing a grave. It is Ashes’ tomb. The seemingly carefree young man got caught up in a drugs incident. Memento mori.

Born in 1969, McQueen grew up in Shepherd’s Bush and Ealing, West London. He was an undiagnosed dyslexic, relegated to the lower stream at school, and he had to wear a patch to cover a ‘lazy eye.’ He felt isolated.

'What I do as an artist is, I think, to do with my own life experience. I came of age in a school which was a microcosm of the world around me. One day, you’re together as a group, the next, you are split up by people who think certain people are better than you.’

McQueen studied art and design at Chelsea College of Arts and then fine art at Goldsmiths College. Increasingly he specialised in short films, and in 1999 he won the Turner Prize. In 2006, commissioned to visit Iraq as an official war artist, he commemorated the deaths of British soldiers by presenting their portraits as sheets of stamps.

Since 2008 McQueen has created feature films. ‘Hunger’, ‘Shame’, and ‘12 Years a Slave’ considered an Irish hunger strike, sex addiction and slavery. With ‘12 Years a Slave’ he became the first black director to win a Best Picture Oscar.

For McQueen close scrutiny of the world frees us from the indifference and detachment of our comfortably numb, accelerated modern lives.

‘You want to cause a bit of trouble, stir things up a bit. We’re all a bit numb right now, so that’s even more important. It’s like, ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ Let’s make some noise.'

McQueen makes the point that the better we see - the more we bear witness - the more we are seen.

'It’s not just about anger. It’s about seeing, contemplating, serious consideration. It’s about being seen, and heard and recognised, so as the years pass they can’t make you invisible.'

We encounter Marcus, McQueen’s cousin, lying with his close-cropped scalp facing towards us. A scar runs from one end of his head to the other. Marcus relates the chilling story of how he shot his younger brother. A small mistake leads to another bigger mistake. And so, in an instant, one life is ended and another changes forever.

'Easy, Natty, easy.
Nah take it so rough.
Easy, Natty, easy.
Babylon too tough.
Them a walk, them a shoot, them a loot.
Babylon them a brute.
Them a walk, them a loot, them a shoot.
But we know evil by the root.’

Gregory Isaacs, ‘Babylon Too Rough’ (G Isaacs / W G Holness)

No. 295

Aubrey Beardsley The Climax 1893 (published 1907) — Aubrey Beardsley *The Climax* 1893 (published 1907)

‘Last summer I struck for myself an entirely new method of drawing and composition… The subjects were quite mad and a little indecent. Strange hermaphroditic creatures wandering about in Pierrot costumes or modern dress; quite a new world of my own creation.’
Aubrey Beardsley, letter to an old school friend, 1893

Like its subject, the recent exhibition of the work of illustrator Aubrey Beardsley at the Tate Britain was cut short. However, you can still buy the splendid accompanying catalogue, and there was a fine documentary on BBC4 (‘Scandal and Beauty: Mark Gatiss on Aubrey Beardsley’).

Working almost exclusively in pen and ink, Beardsley created a magical world of biblical and mythical figures; of chivalrous knights and damsels in distress; of fauns and satyrs, Pierrots and Harlequins. It was a world inhabited by masked women with cruel smiles and demonic stares; by fat ladies and femmes fatales; by cheeky cherubs and angry foetuses. There were flamboyant dresses, flowing locks and fashionable hats; malevolent serpents, exotic flowers and phallic candles. It was a world of fantasy and nightmare, both sinister and sensual.

Beardsley helped define his times - an age of romance, style and decadence.

Beardsley was born into an impoverished middle class family in Brighton in 1872. When he was 7 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, or consumption as it was then commonly called. There was no known cure and he was condemned to a short life of coughing, weight loss and periodic haemorrhages.

The Black Cape, 1893, ink on paper. The British Museum — *The Black Cape*, 1893, ink on paper. The British Museum

Too frail for sport, Beardsley immersed himself in art and literature, and his first poems and drawings appeared in his school magazine. He left education at 16 and took a job as a clerk at Guardian Life Assurance in London.

When he was 18 Beardsley met the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, an artist he greatly admired. Beardsley had a portfolio of his sketches with him, and Burne-Jones was impressed.

‘Nature has given you every gift which is necessary to become a great artist. I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.’

Beardsley’s early work was clearly inspired by Burne-Jones’ Pre-Raphaelite style. But he was also influenced by the Japanese woodblock prints that were popular all over Europe at the time: delicately drawn figures set against abstract backgrounds; fine lines and intricate details contrasted with flat blocks of negative space.

On Burne-Jones' recommendation, Beardsley attended classes at Westminster School of Art. And in 1892 he received his first commission: to illustrate Malory’s ‘Le Morte Darthur.’ This required him to produce some 350 drawings when he got home from work in the evening. It was a massive undertaking. Despite the medieval subject matter, he introduced mermaids, satyrs and Pan figures to his work. He was naturally subversive.

The £250 Beardsley received for ‘Le Morte Darthur’ enabled him to leave his job. Ever aware of the illness hanging over him, he was a man in a hurry. In 1893 he supplied illustrations for the first issue of the new art magazine, The Studio, and he was himself the subject of the leading article.

‘The drawings here printed show decisively the presence among us of an artist, of an artist whose work is quite as remarkable in its execution as in its invention: a very rare combination.'

Next Beardsley caught the eye of the great dramatist Oscar Wilde. He was commissioned to illustrate the English translation of Wilde’s play ‘Salome’. Again Beardsley delighted in hiding provocative images in his illustrations. This time he even included teasing satirical caricatures of Wilde himself. His publisher had to be alert to Beardsley’s mischief.

‘One had, so to speak, to place his drawings under a microscope, and look at them upside down.’

In 1894 Beardsley was appointed art editor of a new magazine, The Yellow Book. Yellow was a fashionable and somewhat risqué colour since it suggested the yellow covers of erotic French novels. In a radical move, text and image were independent of each other. The first edition of The Yellow Book was an instant and controversial success, and an elated Beardsley wrote to Henry James:

‘Have you heard of the storm that raged over No. 1? Most of the thunderbolts fell on my head. However I enjoyed the excitement immensely.’

Beardsley was now famous and fashionable. And he revelled in his transgressive reputation.

'Of course, I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.’

Beardsley cut a dash on the London literary scene. He was long limbed and thin boned, with an aquiline nose and a bold centre parting. And he dressed like a dandy, in dove-grey suits, with bow tie, hat, gloves and cane.

Ever the modern man, Beardsley was alert to new outlets for his work. On a visit to Paris he was impressed at the creative use made of commercial posters, and back in London he became an enthusiastic exponent of the medium. In an essay in The New Review he wrote:

'Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash…The poster first of all justified its existence on the grounds of utility, and should it further aspire to beauty of line and colour, may not our hoardings claim kinship with the galleries?... London will soon be resplendent with advertisements… Beauty has laid siege to the city.'

But everything was about to change.

In 1895, Wilde was prosecuted for ‘gross indecency.’ At his arrest he was seen carrying a yellow book, and the public assumed it was a copy of the infamous magazine. (In fact it was a French novel.) A mob pelted the windows of Beardsley’s publishing house and his spooked employer sacked the young artist.

Beardsley sold his home and retreated to Dieppe. There he embarked on a new magazine, The Savoy, for Leonard Smithers, an entrepreneur who published ‘what all the others are afraid to touch.’ Beardsley proposed that the cover of the first issue should feature a putto urinating on The Yellow Book. This was too much even for Smithers. Beardsley was now so notorious that some booksellers, including WH Smith, refused to display his work in their windows. After only eight issues, and within a year of its launch, The Savoy folded.

Portrait of Beardsley by Frederick Evans

Beardsley’s health was failing fast, and yet he pressed on. While recuperating in Epsom in 1896, he created a set of designs for Aristophanes’ ‘Lysistrata’: a comedy about a sex strike by women frustrated with their warring husbands. Inspired by the huge phalluses he had seen on Ancient Greek vases, these were his most provocative images yet.

Later that same year Beardsley suffered a severe haemorrhage of the lung. He moved to the French Riviera in search of healthier air, and it was here that he died, in Menton in 1898. He was 25 years old.

Beardsley’s artistic career barely spanned seven years. Conscious of his illness, he was in a race to make the most of his life - an urgent, precipitous sprint to experience the world, to express himself, to make an impression. It was a race against time.

Beardsley teaches us to treat time as a precious commodity; to make every hour of every day count. He urges us to be ambitious for our talents despite the cards life has dealt us; to be vigorous in our quest for achievement, honest in our self-expression, unafraid of transgression or censure. He courted scandal because it accelerated his progress and because he didn’t have time for courtesies. Sometimes it’s best just not to care what other people think.

Beardsley’s friend the poet Arthur Symons summed him up thus:

‘He had the fatal speed of those who are to die young; that disquieting completeness and extent of knowledge, that absorption of a lifetime in an hour, which we find in those who hasten to have done their work before, knowing that they will not see the evening.’

''Cause we were never being boring.
We had too much time to find for ourselves,
and we were never being boring.
We dressed up and fought, then thought "make amends."
And we were never holding back or worried that
time would come to an end.
We were always hoping that, looking back
you could always rely on a friend.’

The Pet Shop Boys, ‘Being Boring’ (Lowe C, Tennant N)

No. 280

‘It’s About Not Blinking’: The Unfiltered Truth of Steve McQueen

Aubrey Beardsley: A Race Against Time