Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young
The Grolier Club in New York City, America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles, will present a special exhibition of the daring and influential work of the British artist Aubrey Beardsley, on the anniversary of his 150th birthday. Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young, on view from September 8 through November 12, 2022, in the Grolier Club’s second floor gallery, will explore the meteoric rise of Beardsley (1872–1898), a monumental figure in book and magazine illustration, graphic arts and poster design, as well as the history of gender and sexuality.
During Beardsley’s brief career from 1892 to 1898, cut short by his death from tuberculosis, he was a brilliant innovator in the British Art Nouveau and Decadent movements, creating daring black-and-white images for periodicals such as the Yellow Book and the Savoy, and for books published by the Bodley Head and Leonard Smithers. He was equally famous as the consummate “bad boy,” using his images to satirize Victorian norms of conduct and push gender and sexual boundaries. The exhibition highlights the rebellious and insouciant quality of his art and writing, celebrating the eternally young Beardsley.
Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young features approximately seventy works, including unpublished letters and original drawings, rarely seen posters, periodicals, books, photographs, and ephemera. Highlights include original drawings for the Yellow Book and Savoy, illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and a recently discovered drawing of the “key” for the back cover and spine of Keynotes, the bestselling 1893 volume of bold feminist stories by “George Egerton.”
Curated by Mark Samuels Lasner (Senior Research Fellow, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, and Grolier Club member) and Margaret D. Stetz (Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware), the exhibition is drawn from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press.
“On April 20, 1894, an anonymous critic for the conservative Times of London newspaper wrote, ‘If the New Art is represented by [Beardsley’s work] . . . it may be intended to attract by its very repulsiveness and insolence . . . [as] a combination of English rowdyism with French lubricity.’ This review of the Yellow Book dismissed Beardsley’s style as too ‘advanced and riotous.’ Today, we would call it breathtakingly modern and fearless,” said co-curators Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner.
Exhibition Highlights
Works on view in Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young give glimpses of the artist’s personality, such as his impish sense of humor in the heavily illustrated letter to a former schoolmate from August 1891, featuring a self-portrait of the artist in the pose of Whistler’s mother.
Beardsley’s work often challenged social conventions, as in his 1894 advertising poster in bold blue and green for the Avenue Theatre depicting an improperly dressed woman, which caused controversy when it was displayed all over London. Also in 1894, Beardsley illustrated Oscar Wilde’s Salome: A Tragedy in One Act, and his frontispiece for it caricatured Wilde in The Woman in the Moon.
Beardsley served as art editor for the famous avant-garde periodical the Yellow Book, and an 1894 copy of volume 1 on view has a cover design that shocked the public and offended reviewers. Later, his unused 1895 proof for the cover of the first number of the Savoy, another illustrated magazine, cheekily shows a child urinating on a copy of the Yellow Book.
Also on view is an illustrated edition of The Lysistrata of Aristophanes: Now First Wholly Translated into English and Illustrated with Eight Full-page Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley (1896), which contains some of the artist’s most erotic and satirical drawings. Privately printed in an edition of 100 copies, this copy includes an autograph letter from Beardsley to the book’s publisher, Leonard Smithers, regarding the illustrations. The Slippers of Cinderella (1894), an original ink and watercolor drawing on view, was intended for an unhappy version of the fairy tale, in which the glass slippers would be ground up and surreptitiously fed to Cinderella, killing her. In the colorful image, the doomed heroine’s hand subtly suggests genitalia. More overtly, Beardsley’s black-and-white drawing, The Artist’s Bookplate (1897), in A Book of Fifty Drawings with an Iconography by Aymer Vallance, depicts a naked woman reaching not for clothes, but for a book.
Public Programs
The Grolier Club will host related public programs, including the curator talks “In Bed with Beardsley” by Margaret D. Stetz and “Beardsleyophily” by Mark Samuels Lasner on Friday, October 7, 2022 at 6-7:30 pm; and public lunchtime exhibition tours on Wednesday, October 12, 2022 and Wednesday, November 9, 2022, both from 1-2 pm.
A review of this event written by Olivia Loksing Moy is scheduled to appear in The Book Collector Winter Issue for 2022.