Oscar Wilde, for Art’s Sake!

We paid our last respects at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery to Oscar Wilde, the famed writer, poet, and decadent.

His memorial was as unique as his scandalous life in Victorian England, designed by the American Jacob Epstein, from inspiration via Wilde’s poem, “Sphinx.”  Had the stone not been carved about 1910, I would have sworn it came straight out of the American Art Deco craze in the roaring 20s.  Geometrically Egyptian and bravely sexual, it was a speakeasy dream.

As we approached, Jake was much less curious about the missing phallus, which has been twice stolen, than he was about the pink and red lipstick marks adorning the writer’s tomb.  Like the smoke butts that keep the late Jim Morrison company after the gates of the cemetery close each night, Oscar’s final resting place is covered in kisses.

“Why don’t you leave one Momma?”  He asked as I finished my photo taking.

“Because I am not Gay,” I replied.

This seemed to be enough of an answer, but as we turned to leave he remarked, “Gay people don’t wear lipstick.”

The meaning of my reply to the boy had nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not Gay people wear lipstick, but due to the fact that while I believe Mr. Wilde’s grandest legacy is his written work, he has become an idolized member of the Gay community, and marked as their first activist.  As a friend to this community I support their plight, but as an outsider I did not find it my place to commemorate Oscar for his unintended bequest.

His life’s work, in my world, has everything to do with his approach to art, and nothing to do with him coming out of the closet.

As a leader in the late Victorian Aesthetic Movement, he believed in “Art for Art’s Sake,” and separated morality from design.  As a reaction to the moral implications that his peers placed on the Arts and Crafts, Oscar and his fellow Decadents believe that art need to have nothing but beauty…pure and simple.

A quote from his work…

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.  The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.”

In other words…appreciate art for its simple beauty, and stop taking things so damn seriously.  Essentially half of  William Morris’s insistence to “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

Mr. Wilde was quite the egotist, and while he married a dutiful wife who raised his two children, he spent years seeking the company of young men, feeling high above the laws of man, and society.  He lived rather openly for the current social climate, eventually leading to his demise and the end of the Aesthetic Movement he had worked to promote.

Homosexuality was a criminal offence in Victorian England, and after Oscar’s own writings were used against him during his “indecency” trial, he was sentenced to two years prison and hard labor.

Hard labor meant walking a treadmill for six hours a day, being stripped of paper and pen, and left to dine on porridge and rest on a mattress made from wood.  Two years later, Wilde found himself physically beaten, financially ruined,  and a rather unfavorable member of the community.

Fleeing to Paris upon release, he managed to eek out a couple more works before succumbing to what some believe was syphilis, but could have perhaps been an ear infection, in a seedy Paris hotel…just three years later.  At 46, Wilde died in 1900, but was moved from his unremarkable grave to his final resting place in Pere Lachaise in 1909.

At the time of his death he was penniless, but his grand tomb was made possible nine years later by a private donor.  Perhaps “she” was moved by one of my favorite Wilde quips:

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”

His tomb robbed of its manhood, covered in lipstick, and sprinkled with lilies more than one hundred years after his death…while he had hoped to leave a legacy…

…I wonder if Wilde had imagined this.

Love Rach

Notice something missing?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 6:25 am and is filed under France and tagged with oscar wilde, oscar wilde grave, Paris, pere lachaise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.