Aubrey Beardsley

By Patrick Bade

Born in 1872, Aubrey Beardsley was, along with Oscar Wilde, an emblematic figure of the decadence that marked the end of Queen Victoria's reign. Largely self-taught, Beardsley's drawings initially show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, such as Burne-Jones and Rossetti. Later, he adopted a more radical and innovative style, illustrating Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and participating in the creation of The Yellow Book magazine.
But it was through his dark and erotic drawings, notably for Oscar Wilde's Salome, that he best evoked the troubled atmosphere of the time. Stricken with tuberculosis, Beardsley died prematurely at the age of 25. He left behind numerous illustrations, which had a great influence on the artists of Art Nouveau.
The Author: With an original layout, Patrick Bade explores the equivocal universe of Beardsley, the "fin de siècle" artist par excellence. Through illustrations that shocked his contemporaries, the draughtsman boldly defied Victorian morality to become a privileged witness of his time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parkstone International
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781639198504

Book preview

Patrick Bade

Aubrey

Beardsley

Publishing Director: Jean-Paul Manzo

Text: Patrick Bade

Design and layout: Sébastien Ceste

Cover and jacket: Sébastien Ceste

We would like to extend special thanks to Mike Darton for his invaluable cooperation

© 2023, Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© 2023, Parkstone Press USA, New York

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All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-63919-850-4

Contents

Beardsley in Brighton

Prey to consumption

Beardsley and Burne-Jones

Hair and Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Beardsley and Salomé

Japanese influences

Beardsley the cosmopolite

The Oscar Wilde fiasco

Sex and sexual imagery

Lysistrata

Final projects

List of Illustrations

1. Aubrey Beardsley, Hail Mary, 1891. This drawing was among those that he showed to his publisher friend J. M. Dent, when the latter was seeking an illustrator for a projected edition of Le Morte D’Arthur.

The reputation of Aubrey Beardsley has never quite recovered from his brief association with the great Anglo-Irish writer and gay martyr, Oscar Wilde. Wilde claimed to have ‘invented’ Beardsley, but after his initial kindly if slightly patronising interest in the talented boy, their relationship soon settled into a war of barbed witticisms and bitchy put-downs. When Wilde bought a copy of the first issue of The Yellow Book (from which he had been excluded on the insistence of the ungrateful Beardsley) at a railway bookshop, he was so irritated by Beardsley’s illustrations that he threw the book out of the train window. One cannot help wondering what any rural passer-by in Victorian England who picked up the discarded volume, with its striking yellow and black cover, would have made of the exquisite perversities of Beardsley’s illustrations and the mannered elegance of Max Beerbohm’s prose in his essay ‘A Defense of Cosmetics’.

Like Wilde, Beardsley has become an icon of the fin-de-siècle that neither would outlive. More than any other visual artist in the Anglo-Saxon world Beardsley represents everything that the term fin-de-siècle stands for. Fin-de-siècle is a term that means so much more than its literal translation of ‘end of the century’. It has connotations of bejewelled elegance, preciousness, decadence, perversity, sexual deviation and ambiguity, and of rebellion against the materialism, positivist philosophies and moral certitudes of the mid-nineteenth century.

2. Beardsley, Lucian’s Strange