Aubrey Beardsley

This is the first book to bring together the surviving works—more than 1,150 in total, including over 50 that have never before been published—of the celebrated and controversial artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898). Despite his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 25, Beardsley’s work shaped Art Nouveau in Britain. His distinctive graphic style outraged critics and led them to overstate his rebellious and eccentric persona. Beardsley’s illustrations, at turns frankly grotesque, delicately beautiful, and hilariously bawdy, influenced art and artists the world over and continue to enthrall today. This comprehensive catalogue is an essential reference and a delight for Beardsley enthusiasts.0 0Alongside superb reproductions, Linda Gertner Zatlin presents Beardsley’s double-sided paintings, watercolors, and drawings in terms of their material history, provenance, themes, motifs, and symbolism, as well as their worldwide reception. She discusses the exhibition and reproduction history of each work, as well as the criticism that greeted Beardsley’s graphic imagery and the gossip it aroused. This study explores the subversive challenge that Beardsley’s work posed to Victorian moral strictures; at the same time it contributes significantly to the history of art as an agent of cultural change.