Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Plates are bright and clear. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Aubrey Beardsley was a prodigy and his career a phenomenon. Born in 1872; diagnosed only seven years later as tubercular; virtually untrained; famous by his early twenties and dead at twenty-five leaving an immense volume of work and exercising a wider influence abroad than any English illustrator since Hogarth; almost a world figure in fact if a miniature one. Of his work so formidable a critic as Meier-Graefe wrote: “Our utilitarianism was never rebuked in stronger or haughtier terms.” Figures as remote from one another as Picasso and the pioneer Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh were in his debt. The history of art has no stranger episode than the violent impact upon an entire generation of the impeccable art of this young dandy who knew that he was dying and whose working hours were interrupted by choking and haemorrhage. After his death although his influence continued to show itself in the work of countless imitators as well as in that of a number of the masters interest in Beardsley waned. It was not that he was forgotten one could not forget Beardsley but critical opinion inclined to dismiss him a modish over-estimated portrayer of the refinements as a rococo toilet tables powder puffs and hand mirrors’. of boudoir life. The waning of Beardsley’s reputation was due in part to bored reaction to his earlier vast notoriety but to a greater degree to his intimate identification with a tradition that ended before its full potentialities were realized. The English Aesthetic Movement was virtually extinguished by the early deaths of Dowson and Conder as well as of Beardsley himself but most of all by the trial and imprisonment of Wilde. (MP)