BEARDSLEY, Aubrey Vincent
English graphic artist, caricaturist and illustrator. After working as a draftsman in an architect’s office and as a clerk for the Guardian Insurance Office (1886-92), Beardsley acted on the advice of Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and started working as a freelance artist in 1892.
Beardsley was largely self-taught but did attend evening classes at the Westminster School of Art for a short time. In 1892 he achieved success with his illustrations for Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and in 1893 designed the first cover for the periodical The Studio. From 1894 he worked for The Yellow Book, a journal for art and literature, where he became the rage with the publication of his illustrations to the English version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and the appearance of the first issue of the periodical of which he was art editor. After his dismissal in 1895 as a result of the Oscar Wilde scandal, he became art editor of The Savoy.
Owing perhaps partly to tuberculosis which carried him off at the age of 25, his work had a morbid suggestion of depravity which made it the most controversial illustration of his day. Some of his work was frankly pornographic. It may be argued that Beardsley was the most significant figure to emerge in English art in the last decade of the 19th century. In his first maturity from 1892 to 1894, he created a modern style that was wholly personal and, as he put it, ‘fresh and original’. The content of Beardsley’s art was as startling as its style. His ostensible subjects were drawn from Classical literature and history, the Bible, and the social world of his own time; but his pictures express eternal human truths, given a grotesque force by the power of Beardsley’s fevered psyche.
In his lifetime and immediately after, his work became widely known and admired abroad and formed an influential part of the current of Art Nouveau and international Symbolism.