Aubrey Beardsley : A Biography

 

When Aubrey Beardsley died in 1898, he was aged only 25. This informative biography traces how in his short but crowded career he became one of the defining figures of the fin-de-siècle?a precocious draughtsman who redefined the limits of black-and-white art. His erotic, decadent illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salome set the tone for his style: by turns shocking, facetious and cruel. Beloved by Burne-Jones, cursed by William Morris, he was the intimate of Wilde, the rival of Whistler, and the friend of Beerbohm, Sickert, Ada Leverson, and William Rothenstein. This book fully covers these relationships as well as the cultural conditions that shaped him as an artist, and explores how his deliberate manipulation of press and public, and his awareness of both art and the marketplace, made him one of the first truly modern artists.