That's right, Alan Moore, the author of the graphic novels Watchmen and From Hell, a writer more famous for his weird comic-book imagination than his expertise in art history. But anyone who reads Moore's comics (I was also given the latest installment of his brilliant series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) knows how erudite he is when it comes to the arcane details of late Victorian fiction. It turns out he is just as knowledgable about the history of pornographic art.
Like a tremendously witty history lecture – a sort of Horrible Histories for grownups, with lovely images such as the Vikings carrying out raids "ripped on fly agaric" – Moore's defence of porn brings in a wide range of art, starting in the Paleolithic, and is illustrated with such masterpieces as Michelangelo's lost Leda and the Swan. But it's when he talks about late 19th-century art that his knowledge and understanding are most impressive.
He gives a very moving account of the tragic life of Aubrey Beardsley, the luxuriantly fecund illustrator of The Yellow Book, magazine of Oscar Wilde and the decadents. As Moore points out, even the decorative borders of art nouveau publications are ripe with erotic suggestion; he makes the brilliant suggestion that both Beardsley and Antoni Gaudí were virgins channelling their sexuality into art. To look at Gaudí's architecture through the erotic lens of Beardsley's engravings is inspired.
All of this serves as a key to Moore's most challenging graphic novel, Lost Girls, a compendium of Beardsley and other erotic artists that he created with his wife, the artist Melinda Gebbie. Reading 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom made me want to go back to it and explore its perverse reinvention of fin-de-siècle art with this guidebook at my side.
The wit and intelligence of this essay on art reminds me of Angela Carter as well as evoking Alasdair Gray in his prime. It's a delight.
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