Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography - Hardcover

Sturgis, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087951910X ISBN 13: 9780879519100

Publisher: Abrams Press, 1999

Synopsis

Like Oscar Wilde, Beardsley was a leading member of the Decadent movement in England during the 1890s. Together they shocked the press and the establishment by cultivating the pose of dandies, coolly removed from prevailing social mores, and took aim at the dominant figures of the late 19th-century art world: moralizing critic John Ruskin and the sentimental pre-Raphaelite painters. That Beardsley met an early death at the age of 25 after a lifelong battle with tuberculosis was especially ironic, as the cult of the doomed youth was central to the Decadent movement. Throughout, Sturgis is in full command of the cultural conditions that led to Beardsley's emergence as an enfant terrible, such as the newly available illustrated picture press that made the artist's deliberately shocking drawings easily available to the masses and turned him into a media-art star avant la lettre. Sturgis never resorts to flimsy psychological conjecture (although his circumspection may in part be due to Beardsley's own efforts to fashion an elaborate mask for public consumption), and the biographer's prose is unexpectedly affecting when the end comes for his subject, as Beardsley rushes from spa to sanitarium, searching for a cure, frantically taking up and abandoning projects all the while. Arriving as it does in the midst of our own surface-obsessed fin de siecle, Sturgis's biography is not only a faithful record of Beardsley and of his world but also a useful study of the birth pangs of modernity. 26 b&w photographs and Beardsley's line drawings throughout.

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Review:

Diagnosed with tuberculosis at age 7, the talk of London before he turned 22, and dead at 25, Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) was a textbook example of the doomed artist he and his fellow decadents admired so much. British journalist and art critic Matthew Sturgis paints an evocative picture of the cultural milieu that shaped Beardsley, with its ferocious rivalry between the idealistic Pre-Raphaelites and the more sardonic English impressionists, who ultimately claimed Beardsley's loyalty (though the ambitious teenager initially gained the patronage of Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones). The author's portrait of Beardsley is equally vivid, limning both his dandified affectations and underlying sweetness, his dedication to art and the distaste for sustained work that made him the despair of his publishers. Beardsley's unique black-and-white drawings--perfect for the new technology of mass reproduction--made a sensation, first with the commissioned artwork for Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur and Wilde's Salome, then in the bold periodical he founded with friends, The Yellow Book. But Wilde's trial for gross indecency tainted Beardsley (though Sturgis's take is that he was more likely a virgin than a homosexual); he was fired from The Yellow Book; and his tuberculosis worsened along with his commercial prospects. The author depicts his subject's agonized final months with the same judicious sympathy he trains on "The Beardsley Boom" of 1894. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Matthew Sturgis read history at Oxford, worked for four years in publishing, and since then has made his living by writing -- art criticism for Harpers & Queen, travel pieces for the Sunday Telegraph, and book reviews for the Independent. His cartoons have been published in the Oldie and the Daily Mail. His previous book, Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s, was published in 1995 by Macmillan.

About this edition

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 087951910X
• ISBN 13: 9780879519100
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 405