Morning:
14°c
Some fares could fall by more than a third when Oyster is extended to every national rail station in London, it has emerged
More...
New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Brian Sewell's rating
Reader rating
Description: A retrospective compilation of late 19th and early 20th-century book illustrations, including work from Aubrey Beardsley, Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen.
Phone: 0208693 5254
Website: www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
Email: info@dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
Trains: BR: West Dulwich 
Extra info: Food, Taxi, Air Conditioning, Parking
Evil enchantress: Edmund Dulac's Circe, a sorceress who turned the companions of Odysseus into a herd of pigs. His shop can be seen on the right. The exhibition's lighting is particularly hard on Dulac's crepuscular blues
Knowing smiles: Aubrey Beardsley's Peacock Cape (in the catalogue wrongly described as a skirt
Detailed: A design for Oscar Wilde's Salome
Menacing mannikin: Willy Pogany's illustration for the Grimm fairytale Rumpelstiltskin, a very Twenties, stylish, thing
Oh, the solemnity of parents who read The Guardian. How, asks NP on the talkboard (what the hell is that?) of the Family supplement, can I explain to my little one (ugh) that Santa cannot provide toys that are out of our price range? And in flood the replies: "... explain that Santa has a budget ... tell the little one that he has not been good enough ... tell him not to be greedy ... tell him that the elves are on strike and Santa's production lines have stopped until new pay rates are agreed ..." and most solemnly Guardian of all, no doubt from Disgusted of Upper Islington, "Belief in Father Christmas marks both the child and the parent as Enemies of Reason."
If Dulwich Picture Gallery mounts a Christmas Exhibition next year, it should print a special invitation card for children, impressively large, on which little Philomena's name can be inscribed in copperplate, a special offer to Guardian parents who can then wrap and bind it as they will, the perfect present, for to little ones unlimited admission is free and the Christmas Exhibition is designed specifically for them. Or so it has been in the past few years - parents recall with particular gratitude the drawings and illustrations of the unctuous Quentin Blake in 2004 and those of Arthur Rackham the year before - and I can see the point, the toe in the waters of art, so to speak: get the brats accustomed to these and they will easily move on to Raphael, Rembrandt and the other Blakes (William much to be preferred to Peter).
But this year Dulwich offers less easily digested fare and the toe-in-the-water argument by no means readily applies.
The new exhibition is called The Age of Enchantment. Do not be misled, for here enchantments for the little one, the pretty things of pantomime and fairytale, of Sugar Plum, Cinderella and wedding to the handsome prince are outnumbered by the more capricious and sinister enchantments of fin-de-siècle Decadence and Art Nouveau, of sorcery and spell, of lure and apprehension, of evil that is exquisite, and, above all, of style and mannerism. It identifies between the years 1890 and 1930, a period in which an essentially adult and English phenomenon flourished in the world of children - the all-too-common arrest in childhood of the adult man, his fear of the alarms and excursions of his own imagination, and his sentimental longing for the safety of a happy ending. It is, alas, too earnest an exhibition mounted by an expert, Rodney Engen, and addressed only to those who may be interested in his expertise as he orchestrates material that ranges too widely between Aubrey Beardsley and his Yellow Book and Leon Bakst working for the Ballets Russes, identifying what he sees as aspects of this English malaise in artists from Hungary, Germany, Denmark, France and Glasgow, all with the sedulous seriousness of a graduate whose poor degree hardly justifies his working on a doctoral thesis.
If this was indeed, as I suppose, an exhibition intended to enchant children during the Christmas holiday, to extend their perceptions of Santa Claus, the Advent calendar, the Christmas crib, the pantomime and Midnight Mass, the ancient pagan elements jostling the Christian, then those in charge at the Dulwich Gallery should have strangled the curator at an early stage in his preparations. His plodding employment of creaking scholarship, the sense of dull didacticism rather than delight, may well be suitable for such a show later in the year, but not now. This is an entirely personal response on my part believing, as I do, that there are many children in whom the fires of connoisseurship can be lit through fine illustrations in books addressed to them - but Beardsley's Yellow Book is adult stuff, and so too are the Ballets Russes (parents should go straight to John Richardson's biography of Picasso, volume three, out now, if they want their little ones to know the ins and outs of Diaghilev and co); and many of the subjects verge on mysticism and symbolism manipulated to express ambiguous states of mind, of fear and longing, and of dreams and ecstasies beyond the experience of children.
There is, too, a lurking eroticism, a sense of sensual passion uncomfortably misdirected; women reflect the morbid ideal of the femme fatale, the evil enchantress, the Medea and the Morgan le Fay, young males are erotically androgynous and the old grotesque, flowers, trees and animals take on meanings far beyond their simple images, and we are often aware that artists, in provoking states of intellectual queasiness, awaken in us imaginings of which our formerly unstimulated minds were quite incapable. With Annie French and Jessie King we get the Glasgow School of Hornel, Henry and Melville reduced to the fuss and fret of embroidered prettiness, but with Beardsley and his many imitators we venture into lubricious minds of such sheer nastiness that most of us never grasp the implications at first glance.
And first glance is never enough. No one on his hind legs can comfortably see and absorb these illustrations; one needs to sit with them on one's lap, magnifying glass in hand, for their intricacies are meticulously detailed. They are the final versions after hours of planning, practice and refinement, the evidence of revision and correction almost impossible to identify. This is drawing and engraving far beyond the capabilities of artists now - and that in itself makes the exhibits difficult for children who have been instructed to adopt the pleasures of wild self-expressionism rather than learn the techniques with which the self may reasonably be expressed.
Let us set the little ones aside and consider this as an exhibition addressed to adults. As such it is, at its best, a patchily instructive survey of the English response to the decadence of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the French writer, critic and author of A Rebours (1884). This was the widely read autobiographical novel of an aesthete whose pathological disdain for the conventions of his class led him to develop an alternative world that replaced reality with a neurotic regime of drugs, perfumes, art, music and other sensory experiences, but all to no avail; his neurasthenia and pessimism were eventually complicated by the acute biliousness that some of us may feel is the proper response to this exhibition. This Esprit Décadent was one of overwhelming languor, of a search for any novelty or sensation to relieve it, however unnatural, with only the banal forbidden - hence, in England, Wilde, hence Beardsley and his imitators, hence Charles Ricketts and Laurence Housman, all unhappy homosexuals, all subverting the complacent orthodoxies of late Victorian and Edwardian society.
The period covered by the exhibition, 1890-1930, reaches far beyond this contrivedand deliberate decadence and becomes another exhibition, one that reflects many mannerisms of contemporary design between the two world wars, though the later the year the more haphazard the choice of artists, the curator seeming desperate to demonstrate how much he knows. It is odd to see the influence of Beardsley, dead in 1898, still so strong a full three decades later in the work of Hans Henning von Voight, a German described in the catalogue, sans explanation, as outrageous; on the other hand, Edmund Dulac, an anglophile Frenchman who was Voight's near contemporary, threw off the shackles of Arthur Rackham, at first very much his model and still to be his rival for a quarter of a century, as early as c1912, then developing a wholly characteristic manner of his own.
The choice of work by the forgotten Detmold twins, Maurice and Edward, both melancholy suicides (they were born in Putney), could have been much more dramatic, weird and wonderful - indeed they deserve an exhibition to themselves and Edward has some claim to be the greatest English illustrator of his day. One must question too the wisdom of including the ghastly pots of Daisy Makeig-Jones, a ghastlier dish by the execrable Clarice Cliff (mid-Thirties rubbish), and a well-constructed but glutinously hideous print cabinet designed by Frank Brangwyn. Why too a hideously disproportionate mirror frame in beaten lead by no one in particular, why an empty clothes-horse screen, why the kitchen table at which Beardsley sat to work, why a pair of curtains wonderfully embroidered by nobody, and why a faded photograph of British sailors, two of them dressed in kimonos specifically made for geishas, camping under a Japanese sunshade? What have these to do with anything? And surely the subject of Dulac's cover for American Weekly on 4 April 1937 is not Nymphs and Satyrs, but The Education of Achilles by Chiron the Centaur? Clearly the curator completely lost his grip on his commission.
The catalogue too seems more than a shade haphazard and undisciplined, its illustrations too often deceitfully enlarged; much of the introductory material would have been better (at least for subsequent reference) in chronological note form rather than strung in a tedious continuous text, and an editor should have ensured that every one of the exhibits had been given a date. There is material enough here for the core of two exhibitions, both of which would have been much better for the division and expansion, one dealing with pan-European Decadence (oh for the robust obscenities of Rops, the creepier sensuality of Klinger), the other the decline and fall of illustration by the end of the Thirties. Both would amuse children more than this appallingly ill-lit selection sinking into the institutional greens of the interior decoration - very bad for Dulac's crepuscular blues. The Age of Enchantment has turned into The Myopic Bookworm Show and is not for little ones at all.
• The Age of Enchantment is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21 (020 8693 5254) until 17 February. Open Tues-Fri 10am-5pm; Sat-Sun 11am-5pm; closed Mondays except bank holidays. Admission to the gallery and the exhibition: adults £8; unlimited free entry for children. www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
