The Climax (1893) – Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley’s “The Climax” is one of sixteen illustrations commissioned for the first English publication of Oscar Wilde’s provocative play, “Salome”, released in 1893. In his 6 year-long career– short-lived, due to complications from a childhood tuberculosis infection– Aubrey Beardsley took the art world by storm, entwining his legacy with the likes of Wilde and Swinburne to become one of the foremost artists of the Decadent and Aesthetic movements, and one of the principal influences of Art Nouveau. The advocates of the Decadent movement created “art for art’s sake”. Reacting against the ideals of the Enlightenment and the rigid conventions of Victorian society, they believed that art should not be beholden to the world outside of it. Abandoning utility, propriety or political ends, art’s purpose was to serve fantasy and pleasure, leading to an aesthetics that revelled in eroticism, transgression and materialistic excess. “The Climax” depicts the most chilling scene in Wilde’s play, in which Salome kisses the severed head of John the Baptist. In Beardsley’s illustration, Salome floats, as if born aloft in ecstasy, as blood from the cradled head drips into a pool that blooms into a lily, a symbol of both purity and the phallus, beneath her. Accentuated by the stark black and white palette and sinuous lines, the obscene series of illustrations that accompanied Wilde’s play revolted mainstream critics at the time, but is now considered one of Beardsley’s best works.