San Antonio College Library

Many scholars have considered Aubrey Beardsley's art indispensable to understanding fin-de-siecle Victorian culture. Beardsley depicted various grotesque shapes, caricatures, and mutated figures, including fetus/old man, dwarf, Clown, Harlequin, Pierrot, and dandy - the icon of the Decadent "Religion of Art". These images embodied the fearful contradictions of decadence and served as objective correlatives of some "monstrous" metaphysical contortion....

Colvin combines his particular interest in the history of clandestine publishing with his experience as an art historian to explore the work of the most notorious artist of the fin de siecle. Before he died at age 25, British illustrator and writer Beardsley created erotic drawings for Wilde's Salome, Pope's Rape of the Lock, The Lysistrata of Aristophanes, and Jonson's Valpone and to write his own highly erotic novel originally published as The Story...

"The current popularity of the strange drawings of Aubrey Beardsley (1871-1898) marks the second apex of one of the most unusual careers in art history. Within two years after the publication of his first book illustrations, Beardsley was the best-known artist in England. Just as swiftly, with the national outcry against Oscar Wilde, his career was over. At 26 he was dead." -- Publisher's description.