CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/4/2018

Grotesque, sensual and erotic: The Art of Aubrey Beardsley

"Anima naturaliter pagana, Aubrey Beardsley ended a long career, at the age of twenty-six, in the arms of the Church," noted British poet, critic and magazine editor Arthur Symons wrote in the original 1918 edition of The Art of Aubrey Beardsley. "No artist of our time, none certainly whose work has been in black and white, has reached a more universal, or a more contested fame; none has formed himself, out of such alien elements, a more personal originality of manner; none has had so wide an influence on contemporary art. He had the fatal speed of those who are to die young; that disquieting completeness and extent of knowledge, that absorption of a lifetime in an hour, which we find in those who hasten to have done their work before noon, knowing that they will not see the evening." Design for "Salomé" from "The Studio" is reproduced from Art / Books' gorgeous new facsimile edition.