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Who? Aubrey Beardsley, one of the most celebrated and controversial book illustrators of the Art Nouveau era and a leading figure in the Aesthetic Movement. His drawings, executed in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese shunga,
Who? Aubrey Beardsley, one of the most celebrated and controversial book illustrators of the Art Nouveau era and a leading figure in the Aesthetic Movement. His drawings, executed in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese shunga, emphasised the grotesque, the decadent and the erotic. Tragically, Beardsley died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five in 1898.
What? Fancy and Imagination presents a vast selection of Beardsley's monochrome works, most of which are taken from a collection that belonged to pornographer Leonard Smithers, including illustration proofs for Oscar Wilde's 1891 play Salome and the gloriously grotesque Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Highlighting Beardsley's influence and celebrating the richness and variety of the medium of book illustration in Britain between 1890 and the 1920s, the exhibition also showcases works by other major illustrators of the era, including Arthur Rackham, Harry Clarke, Edmund Dulac, Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, Kay Nielsen and Jessie M. King.
Why? A rare opportunity to see one of Beardsley's early sketches in a letter sent to a school friend in 1892 — a stick-man representing himself, striding up the dark side of a mountain, on the other side of which is the sunny destination 'Art'. Despite the few years he had ahead of him as an artist, he made it to the other side: at the peak of his short career, he was the art editor of the iconic 1890s magazine, The Yellow Book where he worked with well-established writers and artists like Henry James, Sir Frederick Leighton, W.B. Yeats, and Max Beerbohm. This side of the mountain, however, proved to be less idyllic than he had imagined as a young aspiring artist. Beardsley's portrait of the Lady of the Camellias (the heroine in Alexandre Dumas' novel) rendered in pencil rather than black ink, is on public display for the first time.
When? Fancy and Imagination: Beardsley and the Book Illustrators runs until 12 February 2011 at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds.
Text Laura Bradley
