Transgression or breaking with tradition : reading Millais, Rossetti, and Beardsley

Abstract

From their initiation as an art movement in the mid-1840s, the Pre-Raphaelites rooted themselves within the notion of rebelling against Victorian art traditions by drawing upon the stylistic tools of pre-Renaissance art. Similarly, Aubrey Beardsley’s short career in the fin de siècle was oriented within a departure from Victorian accepted artistic norms, framing his work within a Japanese as well as a Gothic-inspired style. This being an apparent similarity between rebellious art in mid-Victorian era and its counterpart in the Victorian fin de siècle makes it the more surprising that it has not been the subject of a thorough analysis, if discussed previously at all. In the proposed paper I argue that in spite of their different styles, Aubrey Beardsley on one hand, as well as Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the other, were similar in their rebelliousness by attempting to break away from Victorian art traditions. Furthermore, by drawing on Carol Jacobi’s ‘Salt, Sugar and Curdled Milk’, I argue that there is an added element to the comparison which goes beyond the apparent rebellious transgression and further assimilates two stylistically different but similarly rebellious modes of art.