Dulwich Picture Gallery

Surely the dignified London suburb of Dulwich is a haven for all that is decent and decorous. Just to walk through the streets is to tap into the elevated tastes. So what is taking place at the Dulwich Picture Gallery? This home of an assortment of distinguished – if occasionally slightly overheated – Old Masters has become the cult headquarters of a gang of decadents. Strange visions are leaking from their lurid imaginations. Disreputable fantasies are taking seductive flight.

It’s enough to lure anyone in to have a look.

The Age of Enchantment, which opens in Dulwich tomorrow, is the latest in a series of shows that the gallery has staged over the past few years to celebrate a “golden age” of book illustration. The book flourished in the wake of the 1870 Education Act and with the development of innovative new technologies that replaced laborious manual production with much easier mechanical printing methods. A prosperous reading public expanded. By the turn of the century, miniature galleries were enclosed inside exquisitely designed dust jackets.

But where the previous Dulwich shows focused on individual talents – on Arthur Rackham, Heath Robinson and Beatrix Potter, for instance – this new exhibition instead follows a train of thought as it ramifies through the imaginations of a succession of artists and designers from 1890 right up until 1930. It looks at the legacy of decadence. So you can forget Beatrix Potter with her ear-cuffing mice and her fascination for mushrooms. She is left behind, along with the staid values of the Victorian society that repressed her. The only mushrooms in this show will most definitely be magic.

The Age of Enchantment begins in the exotic world of Aubrey Beardsley. The spectator peers into the dark and intricate depths of the opulent fantasies inside the head that holds up its haughty profile for the photographer Frederick Evans in the most famous portrait of this cultish fin-de-siècle artist. Feasting on what one wary contemporary critic described as the “poisonous honey of France”, on the sensual doctrines of Gautier, Huysman and Baudelaire, this androgynous aesthete explored a few of the sinful delights that had been kept hidden for so long behind the curtains of Victorian convention.

“The grotesque was the only alternative to the insipid commonplace,” he famously declared.

Beardsley was a consumptive. He knew he had nothing more to lose than his life, and, working feverishly throughout a career that lasted barely six years (he died at the age of 25), he poured out the uncensored visions of a fecund imagination. His black-and-white designs, embracing the minimalist style of a then highly fashionable oriental aesthetic, are strikingly bold and must have looked – at least at the time – shockingly daring.

He set loose a new spirit of hedonism. Exotic fantasies uncurled into the contemporary atmosphere like the fumy vapours released from a bottle of absinthe. They drifted away into the 20th century. It is the progress of this renegade spirit that the show now traces, from its earliest undiluted manifestations among Beardsley’s immediate disciples through its wider dissemination and the gradual watering down through which it became completely palatable to British taste.

As the spectator follows its more or less chronological sequence, he can watch this new aesthetic taking extravagant flight in the fantastical visions of Beardsley devotees, finding a fey incarnation in a whimsical fairyland world, discovering decorative ramifications in the work of artists of the Glasgow School. He can see it finding a safely twee outlet in children’s book illustrations, seeping into the radical approach of Ballet Russes designs or adapting itself to a bestselling line of Wedgwood bone-china.

The Age of Enchantmentis a fascinatingly eclectic, fastidiously curated and often overtly titillating exhibition. Drawing on loans from major galleries as well as some wonderful and rarely seen works from private collections, it brings together book illustrations, prints and poster designs, along with the odd sculpture and ceramic piece, to capture the atmosphere of a rapidly changing era that sought to escape initially from the constraints of a repressive Victorian mindset and then from the all-too-real memories of the First World War.

There are some wonderful discoveries to be made. Look at the drawings of the Irish symbolist Harry Clarke: that “most exotic of all hothouse flowers”, as he was described. His designs have a strangeness and daring and freedom that will probably make you wonder why you have not heard of him before. And if you were a child would you not want that version of The Jungle Book illustrated by the Detmold brothers – the extraordinary twins who, pronounced child geniuses, were allowed to exhibit at the Royal Academy at the age of only 13? Theirs is not the visually bowdlerised Disney version with which today’s child is probably far too familiar. Their illustrations capture instead a lowering sense of the exotic savagery and sinister threat of the tale.

At their strongest, the works in this show draw you ever more deeply into a peculiar imaginative place. You can feel its pull as you step closer and peer into the intricate designs. Some have an almost dizzying force. In works of exquisite craftsmanship, line takes on a life of its own. In pieces that aspire to perfectionism, pattern is possessed of a strange autonomous power. Take a magnifying glass if you want to really look. There may be no barrier between you and the image, but as you lean closer to stare you feel your eyes going blurry. It is a wonder that all these artists did not go blind.

Study the incredible precision of Beardsley’s stippling, for instance, his amazing interlacing patterns of dots that can order themselves into anything from a thick froth of lace to a single beauty spot. Look at the miniaturised exoticism of Dulac’s oriental illustrations, in which every pearl on every headdress in the harem, every frosting of sugar on every delicate pastry, every detail of every pattern on every robe has been painted.

It would have been pleasing if Dulwich Picture Gallery had been able to offer more space to this show. Then this density of detail in the images could have been more richly reflected in the overall display. Though a few furnishings (including a glittering pair of peacock curtains) have been included, a show this restricted cannot capture successfully a sense of the sudden visual overload of the aesthetic that it explores. It can only gesture towards the full range of the designers and artists that it represents.

It would have been interesting, for example, if one of Clarke’s stained-glass windows could have been included, or if more of Beardsley’s Rape of the Lock illustrations had been hung to compare with Clarke’s subsequent versions of the same subject.

This show does not really capture a sense of the intensity of the sudden – if brief – efflorescence of the so-called Beardsley boom. It speaks rather more clearly of its gradual dilution. As we walk through the galleries we watch it losing its unsettling strength. Squirming monsters that stir up the sediments of the imagination lose their power as they turn into the little forest folk of Arthur Rackham, for instance. The balance shifts from the disturbing to the decorative, the perverse to the pretty, the erotic to the merely coquettish. Superlative standards of craftsmanship make way for the shoddy and the mass-produced.

Slowly the effects of the heady drug wear off. And all we can do is look back slightly giddily at that weird world we have just walked through, and wonder.

— The Age of Enchantment – Beardsley, Dulac and their contemporaries, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, London SE21 (www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk, 020-8693 5254), tomorrow until Feb 17

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