Aubrey Beardsley

There was little that fin-de-siècle artist Aubrey Beardsley's famous gold-nibbed pen could not illustrate--drawings, posters, bookbindings. Though he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25, he left an enormous body of work behind that found a willing audience during his lifetime in the more outré circles of the "naughty '90s" and now symbolizes the decadence of the 1890s. Beardsley possessed an astonishing range of expression, but he is perhaps most famous for his outrageous erotic drawings--many of which adorned such artistic magazines as the Savoy and the Yellow Book. He pushed public opinion to the limit with his sequence of graphic illustrations for Aristophanes's Lysistrata, which, deemed obscene, remained unpublished until 1966.

Biographer Stephen Calloway curated the centenary exhibition of Beardsley's work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London during autumn of 1998. He closely scrutinizes Beardsley's life in the light of his subversive drawings in this in-depth, superbly illustrated biography that coincides with the exhibition.