The name of the English graphic artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) is known to many lovers of fine art. The “Beardsley” type of female beauty he created and his sophisticated drawings with a bizarre play of line and combinations of spots of black and white, bearing the imprint of medieval European miniatures and Japanese engravings, became a symbol of the Art Nouveau style at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was born in Brighton, England on August 21, 1872. His father was from a family of London jewelers, and his mother was respectable doctors. The artist's father, Vincent Paul Beardsley, suffered from tuberculosis. The disease was hereditary, so he could not engage in regular work. In addition, he was frivolous and soon after the wedding squandered all the family money. Beardsley's mother, born Helen Agnus Pitt, had to take a job as a governess: she taught music and French. For Aubrey himself and his sister Mabel, their childhood years were remembered by their mother's constant struggle with numerous financial difficulties.

Beardsley early realized the exceptionality of his position. When he was seven years old, it turned out that his father’s illness had been passed on to his son. Nowadays, tuberculosis does not inspire such fear as it did at the end of the 19th century. For Beardsley, the disease meant that he could die unpredictably early and quickly. He, being still very young, understood this all too well. At school, Beardsley rarely participated in general games; he was exempted from physical exercises and difficult tasks; I could always retire to a book, citing indisposition.

Beardsley's other passion was music. The early lessons his mother gave him showed that he was endowed with extraordinary musical talent. Thanks to the support of several aristocratic families, Beardsley studied intensively with famous pianists, improving his skills, at the age of 11 he was already giving concerts in public, composing music that was distinguished by a peculiar grace rare for that age. Many predicted a good future for Aubrey.

Although Beardsley always valued his reputation as a music lover, bibliophile, and brilliant connoisseur of the collections of the British Museum and the National Gallery, it was drawing that was the true passion that either filled him with frantic energy or threw him into the pool of blues and depression. This change of state is typical for many patients with tuberculosis, and Beardsley understood that this was shortening his days.

In 1892, Beardsley had a rare stroke of luck for a young unknown artist: he received an order to do illustrations for Malory’s “The Death of King Arthur.” His professional career began with this publication and with participation in issues of the art magazine “Savoy”.

As an artist, Beardsley was initially influenced by William Morisse and Burne Jones, whom he subjectively considered “the greatest artist in Europe.” The study of Japanese prints with the harmony of line and spot became much more important. Deep penetration into the traditions of Japanese art allowed him to create an amazing synthesis of West and East in his own drawings.

In his art, this artist always remained himself and never adapted to fashion trends. Rather, Art Nouveau and the movement of English decadents were oriented and reached to his level. It was Beardsley who influenced the formation of the visual language of the Art Nouveau style.

A certain pathology of many of Beardsley's drawings is explained to some extent by the fact that he always stood, as it were, on the edge of an abyss: on the one hand, the light of life, on the other, on the other, the abyss of non-existence. Constantly balancing between them, he felt them well. Beardsley seemed to live in and out of his time. This promoted detached observation.Beardsley's drawings literally made his contemporaries freeze. They inspired fear and awe. It seemed to many that old ideas about art and the world in general were collapsing.

Shortly before his death, Beardsley was overcome by deep religiosity; he bitterly repented of his erotic works. Already bedridden, in a letter to L. Mirtes he asked to destroy all “indecent” drawings and engraving boards for them.
Aubrey Beardsley died in the resort of Menton, France, off the Mediterranean coast in 1898, at the age of twenty-five.

I have posted his most decent works here)) But all of his works are easy to find on Google. The Austrian artist von Bairos also painted in a very similar manner (hard eroticism). It’s already harder to find him, but his work is even better detailed than Beardsley’s (and more vulgar))

Le Morte Darthur. Death of Arthur

Salome

exhibition name:“Aubrey Beardsley. Artist and esthete"
time spending: 14.07.2015-28.03.2016
location: National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place WC2H 0HE, London UK
exhibition website: www.npg.org.uk

The National Portrait Gallery in London is hosting the exhibition “Aubrey Beardsley. Artist and Aesthete,” which focuses on the work of Beardsley the graphic artist and poet. Visitors to the exhibition will get acquainted with original drawings and beautiful illustrations for Malory’s novel “King Arthur” and Wilde’s play “Salome.” The exhibition features photographs and portraits of Aubrey Beardsley.

The famous English graphic artist, poet, and illustrator Aubrey Vincent Beardsley took an active part in the formation of the concept of aestheticism in England. He created a unique artistic language, which not only defined many of the characteristic features of Art Nouveau graphics, but remains modern to this day.

Aubrey Beardsley. Artist and esthete.

The 19th century was “marked” in history as the era of rethinking old philosophical concepts, the emergence of new ones and, which is typical for this period, the coexistence of different philosophical movements - positivism, Marxism, neo-Kantinianism and neo-Hegelianism. In the unstable, rapidly changing world of the 19th century, a revaluation of values ​​also occurred in culture. Unlike previous eras, the 19th century did not develop a single stylistic direction in culture, but the ideas and images that emerged in the second half of the century enriched the culture of the 20th century as classical ones. A feature of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was the division of artistic culture into elite and mass. Moral criticism became a solid foundation on which many new theories were built. One of them was aestheticism, an art movement that expressed the tendencies of European decadence and its offshoot in England in 1880-1890, which arose as a reaction not only to Victorian ideology and morality, but to a large extent to morality in general.

Aubrey Beardsley. Peacock skirt.

The chronological range of aestheticism is extremely wide: it arose in ancient times in the East, but passing through eras and transforming, it did not lose its original dogma-cult of Beauty. Beauty is a historically changeable concept; in different historical periods it was conceptualized through different aesthetic categories. This explains the phenomenon of why different aspects of this philosophical and aesthetic category came to the fore in different historical periods. For many centuries, the intersection of the cultures of East and West determined the direction of the development of art. During the heyday of European aestheticism, traditional Far Eastern art acquired ardent fans among European writers and artists.

Aubrey Beardsley. Black cape.

The roots of aestheticism go back to the romanticism of the early 19th century. This continuity is confirmed by the fact that already in romanticism there was a tendency to deny the social significance of art, which reached its full development in aestheticism and completion in modernism. Aestheticism contrasted Victorian ideology with a hedonistic worldview, which proposed viewing Beauty as the only force capable of improving everyday life and the only means of bringing a person closer to higher spirituality. Refusing to depict reality, which, in their opinion, could not be an aesthetic object, aesthetes entered into polemics with representatives of realism and naturalism, accusing these trends of absolutizing the animal nature of man and reducing him to a being devoid of individuality and spirituality. Rejection of social reality in aestheticism manifested itself in an attempt to escape into the closed sphere of pure art, which led to the creation of the concept of “art for art’s sake.”

Aubrey Beardsley. The sorcerer Virgil.

The concept of aestheticism was brought to England from France in the 1860s by the artist Frederic Leighton and the poets James Whistler and Algernon Swinburne. The ideas of aestheticism received their greatest clarity in the works of John Ruskin (1819-1900), professor of literature at Oxford University Walter Pater (1839-1894) and writer and poet Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). The aesthetic credo of W. Pater, who did not recognize ethical restrictions in the field of art, was to give Beauty the status of the highest value, which placed it above the categories of good and evil. Presented in an infinite variety of forms and manifested in the perfect form of a work of art, Beauty became Truth. Therefore, a person could know the true content of the world only through the comprehension of beauty. The Cult of Beauty not only served to satisfy important spiritual needs. The essence of Pater's concept of life—the desire to assimilate lifestyle to art—ultimately led to the enormous influence of aesthetics on etiquette. The feeling of being chosen (an esthete is a subtle connoisseur of beauty) gave rise to new moral standards that justify extraordinary behavior, and a revival of dandyism, which left its mark on the appearance and behavior of artists. But behind the outward shockingness of dandyism, it is necessary to see, appreciate and pay tribute to their true talent, their ability to have an extraordinary outlook on life, their inimitable elegance and unshakable belief in the highest value of art. Like-minded people of W. Pater united around the magazines “Savoy” and “Yellow Book”, published in 1894-1895. These were the poets Arthur Symons, Ernest Dawson, John Davidson, and the artist and poet Aubrey Beardsley.

Aubrey Beardsley. “Belinda’s Toilet,” illustration for A. Pope’s poem “The Rape of the Lock.”

Within the framework of English aestheticism there is a rich variety of options: if the work of some aesthetes (Wilde, Whistler) turned out to be richer and deeper than the dogmas of aestheticism, then others, such as the theorist of aestheticism W. Pater, were unable to fully realize their ideas. An exception is Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872-1898), whose exquisite work meets almost all the requirements of aestheticism. The creative rise of Aubrey Beardsley has no analogues in the history of European fine art. In just 5 years of active creative activity out of his short 25 years of life, without writing a single painting, without having a single lifetime personal exhibition, Aubrey Beardsley gained world fame for his art of drawing and book graphics.

Aubrey Beardsley. Illustration for his own short story “Venus and Tannhäuser”.

Beardsley's success was in his personal qualities - Aubrey was endowed with many talents. He owed the development of his extraordinary musical and literary abilities to the mother-daughter team of respectable London doctors. The eleven-year-old boy was predicted to have a brilliant future as a pianist: already at such a young age he gave public concerts that attracted up to 3,000 spectators and composed music. But the wide horizon of his possibilities narrowed significantly when, at the age of 7, Aubrey was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Unfortunately, the misfortune was predictable: the boy’s father was also sick with tuberculosis. At the end of the 19th century, this diagnosis sounded like a death sentence: the chances of survival were negligible. The disease determined the boy’s lifestyle: communication with peers in games was replaced by books. Thanks to his mother, who knew English and French literature very well, Aubrey began early to write poetry, and later plays, in which he himself acted. His youthful passion for theater can subsequently be traced in Beardsley’s visual work, where play, the grotesque and masks prevail.

Aubrey Beardsley. Dreams.

But his true vocation was drawing, and Aubrey Beardsley won a strong place in the history of art as a book illustrator. Beardsley is considered a self-taught genius: he has only 3 months of classes under his belt with Professor F. Brown at the Westminster Art School. Beardsley's successful professional start dates back to 1892, when he, commissioned by the publisher John Dent, produced a series of illustrations for the novel “The Death of King Arthur” by Thomas Malory and took part in issues of the Savoy art magazine.

Aubrey Beardsley. "Merlin", illustration for Malory's novel.

In April 1894, Beardsley began collaborating with the Yellow Book magazine, which published his poems and essays, and soon took up the position of art editor of this magazine. The Yellow Book magazine, a symbol of English decadent aestheticism, was designed by Beardsley, and the magazine's bright yellow cover with a black silhouette became the emblem of an entire decade, called the Yellow Nineties in England. The choice of yellow as a color emblem is explained by a persistent prejudice, “deposited” in cultural memory since the Middle Ages, that yellow is the color of treason, sinfulness and scandal. Beardsley's editorial work, artistic talent, and mannered, sophisticated style earned the magazine a cult reputation.

Art magazine "Yellow Book".

16 illustrations for the play “Salome” by Oscar Wilde brought resounding success and European fame in 1896. The joy of success was overshadowed by a sharp deterioration in health, and in the spirit of this mood, Beardsley created gloomy illustrations for the stories of Edgar Poe. During the year of life that fate gave the artist, he created a series of illustrations for the comedy “Volpone” by Ben Jonson, which marked the beginning of a new style. Aubrey Beardsley died on March 16, 1898 in France in Menton on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

The refined art of Aubrey Beardsley had a huge influence on the development of the European avant-garde and determined many of the characteristic features of Art Nouveau graphics.

Today, March 16, marks 143 years since the death of the outstanding English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. Aubrey's style was influenced by Japanese woodcuts. Done in black ink, the artist’s illustrations are always emphatically grotesque, decadent and erotic. Beardsley was one of the leading figures in the late 19th century aesthetic movement, which included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. He made a huge contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau style, even despite his short but very productive career. The artist died at the early age of twenty-seven from tuberculosis.

At the age of twenty, Aubrey went to Paris, where he became acquainted with the poster art of the greatest Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Parisian fashion and Japanese engravings. All this had a great influence on the development of the young illustrator. Young Aubrey's first job was illustrating Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. From this first job until his death, Aubrey worked for only six years.

Aubrey, along with the American writer Henry Harland, became one of the founders of the quarterly English literary magazine The Yellow Book. While working on the magazine, Aubrey acted as an art editor, illustrating all covers and literary articles of the magazine. The artist’s illustrations show a close connection with British aestheticism, an analogue of decadence and symbolism. Most of the artist's illustrations are done in ink, with an emphasis on the contrast between large dark and light areas, with a lot of fine detail.

Beardsley is considered one of the most controversial artists of the Art Nouveau era. The main themes of his works were depravity, grotesque eroticism and death. His most famous erotic works are related to themes of mythology and history. He became an illustrator of the tragedy “Salome” by Oscar Wilde, which was published in 1896 in Paris.

He also tried his hand at political caricature, inspired by the same wit of Wilde.

Aubrey was a very active public figure and eccentric participant in social life. He was very pedantic about how he looked, just as Oscar Wilde was a representative of dandyism. He always wore blue or gray suits, hats, ties and always yellow gloves. According to one version, it is believed that Aubrey was a homosexual, like Oscar Wilde and many English aesthetes of the late 19th century. Rumors about his sex life also include rumors of an incestuous relationship with his older sister. Beardsley was often ill, his lungs often bled, and at the age of twenty-seven, the talented, flamboyant illustrator Aubrey Beardsley died.

Aubrey Beardsley and the graphics of modernism

Beardsley Aubrey (1872-1898) Aubrey Beardsley English graphic artist, illustrator, decorator, poet, one of the most prominent representatives of the English aesthetic movement of the 1890s, Aubrey Beardsley was born on August 21, 1872.

Savoy magazine cover

Beardsley began drawing at the age of four; under the influence of his mother, he early became interested in English and French literature, and also studied music with his mother. With the support of several aristocratic families, he took lessons from famous pianists and, as a result, at the age of 11, he composed music and poetry that was distinguished by rare grace, and from March 1881 (after moving to London), together with his sister Mabel, he gave concerts that attracted up to 3000 people.

Jokanaan and Salome

After returning to his native Brighton, he also finds support for his talents and stages plays on the school stage, some of which attract the attention of theater critics.

Venus and Tannhäuser, 1895

After leaving school, Aubrey first entered the studio of a London architect as a draftsman, and at the age of seventeen he was assigned to serve as a clerk at the London insurance company The Guardian Life and Fire Insurance. However, he had to give up his service and amateur performances: in the fall the young man began to cough up blood (Beardsley knew about his tuberculosis from the age of 7 - he inherited the disease from his father).

Ascension of St. Roses from Lima, 1896

It was at this time that, of all types of art, Beardsley gave preference to fine art. Despite his illness, for some time he attended classes at the Westminster Art School with Professor F. Brown on the advice of Edward Burne-Jones, who, by the way, introduced him to Oscar Wilde. However, he achieved everything in art on his own, and is therefore considered a self-taught genius.

Black Cape

As an artist, Aubrey Beardsley was initially influenced by William Morris and Burne-Jones - the latter he subjectively considered "the greatest artist in Europe." The study of Japanese prints, with their harmony of line and spot, also became very important for him.

Merlin

Deep penetration into the traditions of Japanese art allowed him to create an amazing synthesis of West and East in his own drawings. In one of his letters he reflected: “How little is now understood about the importance of the line! It was this sense of line that distinguished the old masters from the modern ones. It seems that today's artists strive to achieve harmony in color alone." True, Beardsley’s own posters prove that he was a gifted and original colorist, close to Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Initial letter and page design for T. Malory’s book “Le Morte d’Arthur”

Beardsley's masterfully virtuoso line, playing with black and white spots of silhouettes, literally made him a world-famous artist in just a year or two. Beardsley influenced the formation of the visual language of the Art Nouveau style - the movement of the English decadents and Art Nouveau was guided by his work.

Le Morte d'Arthur - How the Fairy Morgana gave the shield to Sir Tristram

In April 1894, Beardsley became art editor of The Yellow Book. His drawings, essays, and poems appeared here in large numbers. But a year later, due to the scandal associated with the arrest of Oscar Wilde, the magazine was closed and Beardsley was left without a livelihood for some time. At one time he worked as the art editor of Savoy magazine, doing odd jobs, until a new acquaintance, Leonard Smithers, convinced Beardsley to illustrate Juvenal and Aristophanes.

Le Morte d'Arthur - How the Four Queens Found Lancelot Sleeping

From 1894 to 1896 (at this time he achieved unprecedented success after the publication of 16 illustrations for Wilde’s “Salome”), his health deteriorated sharply - and then gloomy drawings were created for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1895). First, Aubrey thinks about how to get better, then how to feel a little better, and finally how to live at least one more month.

Le Morte d'Arthur - Merlin and Nimue

On March 31, 1897, Beardsley was received into the Catholic Church. During the last year of his life, he created a series of illustrations for the comedy of manners Volpone by Ben Jonson, which marked the beginning of a new style.

Le Morte d'Arthur - King Arthur and the Strange Robe

Already bedridden, in a letter he implored his friend-publisher Leonard Smithers to “destroy all copies of Lysistrata and indecent drawings and engraving boards for them.” Smithers ignored Beardsley's request and continued to sell both reproductions and forgeries of Beardsley's work. On March 16, 1898, fully conscious, in the presence of his mother and sister, to whom he had instructed to convey his last regards to his many friends, Aubrey Vincent Beardsley died at the age of twenty-five.