Aubrey Beardsley - known for his disturbing but beautiful black ink drawings
There has probably never been an artist quite like Aubrey Beardsley. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and emphasised the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic.
He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 25.
Beardsley was born and raised in Brighton in a middle-class but impoverished family. At 20, he travelled to Paris, where he was much influenced by the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints.
His first commission was Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory (1893), illustrated for the publishing house J.M. Dent and Company.
Beardsley had six years of creative output. Most of his images were done in ink and feature large dark areas contrasted with large blank ones as well as areas of fine detail contrasted with areas with none at all. Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grotesque erotica, which were the main themes of his later work.
Some of Beardsley's best known illustrations were for Oscar Wilde's play Salome, one of which is pictured above.
He also produced extensive illustrations for books and magazines - including The Studio and The Savoy, of which he was also a co-founder and writer. He co-founded The Yellow Book with American writer Henry Harland, and for the first four editions, he served as art editor and produced the cover designs and many illustrations for the magazine.
Though Beardsley enjoyed and played up to his notoriety, he converted to Catholicism in March 1897 upon a sudden deterioration in his health and requested, upon his deathbed the following year, that his "obscene drawings" be destroyed. This request was ignored.
Beardsley's work continued to cause controversy in Britain long after his death. During an exhibition of Beardsley's prints held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1966, a private gallery in London was raided by the police for exhibiting copies of the same prints on display at the museum, and the owner charged under obscenity laws.
Further reading
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