BEARDSLEY

There can’t be many artists from the 1890s whose work is still so shocking that a gallery will not, even now, display their work. But Aubrey Beardsley is one. “We have to be careful – we have a family audience,” says Layla Bloom, curator of a fascinating new exhibition of Beardsley’s work being held at Leeds University. “We are only showing one item from his series Lysistrata – the least offensive.”Of course this is an act of unconcious bigotry on the part of the university because how would anyone get offended in this day and age. And if they did, then its their blues.

How Beardsley would have rejoiced. Like Oscar Wilde and other decadents of the fin de siècle, he enjoyed undermining convention. Despite the peacock feathers and pearls, the feather dusters and frilly pantaloons of his works, their subject matter was often far from pretty. “The grotesque is the only alternative to the insipid commonplace,” he declared.

Born in Brighton in 1872 into a family of genteel poverty, at the age of seven Beardsley was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him at 25. His father, Vincent, worked irregularly at London breweries, while his mother, Ellen, provided a slender income by giving piano lessons. Both Beardsley and his sister, Mabel, were considered artistic and musical prodigies.

They were also part of a generation closely allied to the continent (Beardsley spoke fluent French), and this show reveals not only his influence on foreign writers and artists, like Danish and French illustrators Kay Nielsen and Edmund Dulac, but theirs on him. One of the treasures in the exhibition is a portrait he made of the Lady of the Camellias – the courtesan heroine of the novel by Alexandre Dumas. The book made an enormous impact on Beardsley, who travelled half-way across France to meet its author. The drawing, which is on public display for the first time, is untypical of most of Beardsley’s work in that it was finished in pencil rather than Indian ink. The camellias are washed with a delicate smudge of carmine, as if the woman wearing them was literally fading away.

More than 60 works are in this show – including delightful illustrations by his near contemporaries Arthur Rackham and Kate Greenaway, to illustrate just how radical Beardsley was. Where they tried to project a quasi-realistic view, Beardsley was concerned only with creating a black-and-white fantasy where all that mattered were the amazing interlacing patterns of dots on the page.

Many of the works are taken from a collection that belonged to the pornographer Leonard Smithers – one of the only people to support Beardsley in the grim last years of his life. After a glorious early career in which, aged only 20, he was asked by Dent, the publishers, to produce 300 illustrations for their Morte d’Arthur, and then edited the famous magazine, The Yellow Book, Beardsley then formed an alliance with Wilde, who both catapulted him to fame and proved his downfall.
His assignment was to illustrate Wilde’s play, Salome – but the writer was said to be jealous of Beardsley’s precocious talent. When Wilde was convicted of sodomy in 1895, Beardsley was sacked from his job as editor of The Yellow Book, even though there was no proof he was gay and Wilde had never contributed to his magazine.
Smithers collected proofs of as many of Beardsley’s works as he could find from Salome and others – and these form the bulk of the exhibition. It highlights the extraordinary duality of Beardsley’s final months. On one hand he was in almost daily contact with Smithers, who encouraged him to make his most erotic works; and on the other with André Raffalovich, the wealthy son of a banker, who was determined to convert him to Catholicism before he died.
Among the bare torsos and lacy peignoirs in the show are pictures Beardsley drew of cardinals in full regalia. “It might seem hypocritical but in fact it just reveals two different sides to Beardsley’s personality,” says Matthew Sturgis, author of the best book about the artist. “Catholicism brought him peace and calm, while working for Smithers appealed to his love for life and enjoyment in all its peculiarity.”
In a letter written shortly before he died, Beardsley begged Smithers to destroy “all obscene drawings”. Smithers completely ignored him – and if nothing else this exhibition demonstrates betrayal can, just occasionally, be a very good thing.
Beardsley's work is looked at alongside the work of contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm and W.B. Yeats and against the backdrop of the artistic, literary and social life of fin-de-siecle London, Dieppe and Paris. In addition to the drawings, the book includes examples of Beardsley's innovative book binding, prints and posters, revealing a gallery of portraits and photographs from that decadent period, the "Naughty Nineties." It also explores the diverse influences, such as ancient Greek vase painting and Japanese prints, upon which the young artist freely drew in the formation of his own style.There was little that fin-de-siècle artist Aubrey Beardsley's famous gold-nibbed pen could not illustrate--drawings, posters, bookbindings. Though he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25, he left an enormous body of work behind that found a willing audience during his lifetime in the more outré circles of the "naughty '90s" and now symbolizes the decadence of the 1890s. Beardsley possessed an astonishing range of expression, but he is perhaps most famous for his outrageous erotic drawings--many of which adorned such artistic magazines as the Savoy and the Yellow Book. He pushed public opinion to the limit with his sequence of graphic illustrations for Aristophanes's Lysistrata,  which, deemed obscene, remained unpublished until 1966.
Biographer Stephen Calloway curated the centenary exhibition of Beardsley's work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London during autumn of 1998. He closely scrutinizes Beardsley's life in the light of his subversive drawings in this in-depth, superbly illustrated biography that coincides with the exhibition.
Aubrey Beardsley was born in 1872 at Buckingham Road in Brighton. He was a pupil at Brighton Grammar School and while extremely poor at maths he excelled in art subjects.  Beardsley did not receive any formal art training, in fact he was working as a clerk in London when he was 'discovered' by Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
Most of his highly distinctive work in black and white made him one of the best known Art Noveau artists.  His sometimes darkly erotic drawings, notably those illustrating Oscar Wilde's play Salome, earned Beardsley an element of notoriety. While his popularity waned for a time because of his association with Wilde, he eventually recovered his reputation and even produced some beautiful religious drawings.Aubrey was born at number 12 Buckingham road . His parents Vincent and Ellen Beardsley were living with Ellen's family at the time (her parents were William and Susan Pitt).
Beardsley was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of seven, but he determined to live life to the full, and indeed adopted an unconventional and decadent lifestyle.2010)

Although Aubrey Beardsley certainly was a prominent former resident of Buckingham Road, I think visitors to this site would have also enjoyed seeing his former school at 76-80 Buckingham Road. This was originally Brighton Grammar School but became the Sussex Maternity Hospital in 1922 and therefore features on the birth certificates of many Brightonians. the James Gray collection of photos: http://regencysociety-jamesgray.com/volume31/source/jg_31_024.html

  Beardsleys painting style style is highly distinctive in the way he contrasts subtle use of line with bold masses of black and in his blending of grotesque humour with a sense of morbid depravity. His treatment of most subjects was revolutionary; he deliberately ignored proportion and perspective, and the "freedom from convention" which he displayed caused his work to be judged with harshness. In certain phases of technique he especially excelled; and his earlier methods of dealing with the single line in conjunction with masses of black are in their way unsurpassed, except in the art of Japan, the country which probably gave his ideas some assistance. He was always an ornamentist, rather than an illustrator; and his work must be judged from that point of view. His frontispiece to Volpone is held by some to be, from this purely technical standpoint, one of the best pen-drawings of the age. His posters for the Avenue theatre and for Mr. Fisher Unwin were among the first of the modern cult of that art.

  Sadly, he died from tuberculosis at the very young age of 25, at Menton near Monte Carlo.  There is an extensive collection of Beardsley's work in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Beardsley first published work was "The Valiant," a poem in the June 1885 issue of Past and Present, the Brighton Grammar School magazine. Two years later his first reproduced drawings, a series of sketches, "The Jubilee Cricket Analysis," appeared in the same journal, and he provided the program book illustrations for "The Pay of the Pied Piper," his School's 1888 Christmas entertainment. In 1889 his prose piece "The Story of a Confession Album," was published in Tit Bits, a Reader's Digest-type publication of the day. These and other works of juvenilia brought the artist little attention, however; increasingly frustrated by clerking, Beardsley sought entree into the art world. In a famous incident, the artist and his sister went uninvited to see the studio of painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones. They were sent away by a servant, but as they left, Burne-Jones spotted Mabel's red hair and asked them in. Impressed by the Pre-Raphaelite-influenced drawings in Beardsley's portfolio, he recommended that the young artist attend night classes at the Westminister School of Art — the only formal training he ever received.
The years 1893-94 were perhaps the most important in Beardsley's career. He was hard at work producing illustrations and covers for books and periodicals, including his first commission, J. M. Dent's edition of Malory's Morte Darthur (Beardsley had been introduced to the publisher in the summer of 1892). This massive work, issued first in 12 parts and later in volume form, contained over 300 different illustrations, chapter headings, and vignettes. Also in 1893 the artist formed an alliance with the person who was to catapult him to fame and prove his downfall — Oscar Wilde.
In February of that year (1893), Wilde's scandalous play Salome was published in its original French version. An illustration inspired by the drama (reproduced in Joseph Pennell's article, "A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley," in the inaugural issue of The Studio) was admired by Wilde and Beardsley was commissioned 50 guineas to Illustrate the English edition (1894). (Not content with art alone, Beardsley expressed an intense desire to translate the French text after Wilde found the translation by his intimate, Lord Alfred Douglas, to be unsatisfactory.) This assignment was the beginning of celebrity but also of an uneasy, and at times unpleasant, friendship with Wilde, which officially ended when Wilde was tried and convicted of sodomy in 1895.
Beardsley's fame was established for all time when the first volume The Yellow Book appeared in April 1894. This famous quarterly of art and literature, for which Beardsley served as art editor and the American expatriate Henry Harland as literary editor, brought the artist's work to a larger public. It was Beardsley's starling black-and-white drawings, title-pages, and covers which, combined with the writings of the so-called "decadents," a unique format, and publisher John Lane's remarkable marketing strategies, made the journal an overnight sensation. Although well received by much of the public, The Yellow Book was attacked by critics as indecent. So strong was the perceived link between Beardsley, Wilde, and The Yellow Book that Beardsley was dismissed in April 1895 from his post as art editor following Wilde's arrest, even though Wilde had in fact never contributed to the magazine.
Soon after he was let go from The Yellow Book, Beardsley was approached by Leonard Smithers, a publisher intent on creating a rival periodical. Though (or perhaps because) Smithers was known for publishing pornography and erotica, Beardsley jumped at the chance, and so The Savoy was created, with Arthur Symons as editor. Beardsley found in The Savoy an outlet for his writings as well as art. "Under the Hill" (his version of the Tannhauser legend) and "The Ballad of a Barber" both appeared in numbers of The Savoy. When publication ceased in December 1896, Beardsley continued to illustrate other authors' works for Smithers. Among these volumes were editions of Pope's The Rape of the Lock, Ben Jonson's Volpone, and The Lysistrata of Aristophanes). Smithers also issued Beardsley's own A Book of Fifty Drawings, the first collected album of his work. Lived from 1872-1898. Died of tuberculosis, from which he suffered throughout his life. Delicately handsome in a David Bowie mode, his polished manner and lively disposition made him a popular figure in London society, and well-remembered even after his death.
Under the Hill, which was left unfinished, has a curious quality of things not said, and it's been surmised that he incorporated Buddhist ideas into this medieval legend. Died at Menton, in France near the Italian border, clutching a rosary, after writing a letter begging his publisher to burn all his pornographic output.
The publisher forged copies of this letter and sold them at a handsome profit.
In the hope that the climate might improve his deteriorated condition Beardsley followed doctor's advice and traveled to the south of France. Realizing his short time left to live, he converted to Catholicism. During the night of 15-16 March 1898, exiled in the same country as Oscar Wilde, he died at the age of 25.