Aubrey Beardsley: The Complete Story
Stark black shapes against white, with sinuous lines, hidden faces and a whiff of scandal. In just a few years before he died at twenty five, Aubrey Beardsley created some of the most distinctive drawings ever made, and shocked Victorian England while doing it.
He was an English illustrator of the 1890s, the leading artist of Art Nouveau and the Decadent movement, famous for daring black ink drawings full of elegance and provocation.
Black and white as a weapon
Beardsley worked almost entirely in black ink on white paper, balancing large flat blacks against delicate, twisting lines.
The flat patterning owes a clear debt to Japanese prints, part of the wave of japonisme that swept Europe, and his crisp line was made to be reproduced in print.
Salome and the scandal
His illustrations for Oscar Wilde play Salome made his name and his reputation, full of strange, erotic and grotesque detail.
They were considered shocking, and he sometimes hid rude jokes and figures in the designs, daring his Victorian publishers to notice.
The Yellow Book
Beardsley became art editor of The Yellow Book, a daring journal that became the symbol of the decadent 1890s.
When Wilde was arrested and disgraced, the scandal splashed onto Beardsley too, and he was forced out, a sign of how tightly his fortunes were tied to the era mood. His designs were printed by line block, a cousin of woodcut made for the new age of magazines.
A short, bright life
Beardsley had tuberculosis from childhood and knew his time was short, which drove the furious pace of his work.
He died in the south of France in 1898, only twenty five years old, having converted to Catholicism and begged, in vain, for his most explicit drawings to be destroyed.
Things people ask about Aubrey Beardsley
What is he known for?
Daring black and white illustrations, especially for Wilde Salome.
What style is he?
Art Nouveau and the Decadent movement of the 1890s.
Why so controversial?
His erotic, grotesque detail shocked Victorian taste.
How old was he when he died?
Twenty five, in 1898.
Why the black and white still startles
Beardsley packed a whole career into a handful of years and made line itself feel dangerous, proof that an artist with only ink and paper could scandalise a nation. His designs shaped poster art, fashion and graphic design for over a century, an outsized shadow cast by a man who died younger than most artists begin.
His deathbed plea to burn his obscene drawings was ignored by his publisher, so the very works he repented survive today as some of his most studied. A revival of his art in the 1960s made him a hero to a new generation, his sinuous lines turning up on psychedelic posters and album covers seventy years after his death. His influence reached far beyond his own short life, shaping the look of posters, book design and fashion illustration for generations. The dense black and white drama he invented can be traced through the graphic design of the entire twentieth century, an astonishing legacy for an artist who never reached thirty. His drawings were so widely copied that the term Beardsleyesque entered the language, describing any sinuous, decadent black and white design. Museums from London to New York now hold the very works that once scandalised his publishers, treating the boy who died at twenty five as a defining artist of his age.