Matthew sturgis aubrey beardsley a biography
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Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography
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 cir
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Aubrey Beardsley : A Biography - Softcover
From Kirkus Reviews
A portrait of the artist as a young decadent. Though tuberculosis killed Beardsley at the age of 25 in 1898, by then he had already attained success as an eye-catching illustrator and celebrity as the definitive graphic artist of decadence. As Stu rgis (Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s, not reviewed) shows, Beardsley's accomplishments resulted from an intense dedication to his work and the sedulous cultivation of a doomed dandy's (ultimately well-justified) pose. For all his affectations, his family was thoroughly middle-class, though his mother had an unconventional streak. Before he began studying drawing, their straitened finances forced him to take a position in London as a clerk. Although Beardsley served an apprentices hip with the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Edward Burne-Jones (William Morris thought he had talent only for drapery), Sturgis also notes Whistler's influence, not only thro
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Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography
Now in paperback, the acclaimeddefinitive modern biography of one of the founding figures of modern artWhen Aubrey Beardsley died in 1898, he was aged only 25. This informative biography traces how in his short but crowded career he became one of the defining figures of the "fin-de-siecle"a precocious draughtsman who redefined the limits of black-and-white art. His erotic, decadent illustrations for Oscar Wilde's "Salome" set the tone for his style: by turns shocking, facetious and cruel. Beloved bygd Burne-Jones, cursed by William Morris, he was the intimate of Wilde, the rival of Whistler, and the friend of Beerbohm, Sickert, Ada Leverson, and William Rothenstein. This book fully covers these relationships as well as the cultural conditions that shaped him as an artist, and explores how his deliberate manipulation of press and public, and his awareness of both art and the marketplace, made him one of the first truly modern artists."