Aubrey Beardsley 150: The Artist Resurgent
Anniversary conference
21 August 2022, St Bride, London
Organised by the Aubrey Beardsley Society
in association with the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, the British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS), and Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies
The Beardsley ‘craze’, indeed – if ‘craze’ there be – is really just beginning.
H. C. Marillier (1899)
Aubrey Beardsley entered the last Victorian decade a precocious 18-year-old with a passion for music, art, literature, and theatre, obliged to earn a living as a clerk at an insurance firm. He died of tuberculosis two years before the decade’s end, having lent his name to the period, an author of a thousand radical designs which achieved ‘publicity without a frame, and beauty without modelling’, and of a decadent erotic novel that is yet to be fully appreciated. The year 2022 will mark the 150th anniversary of Beardsley’s birth – which the Aubrey Beardsley Society will celebrate in style.
Organised in association with the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, the British Assocation of Decadence Studies, and Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, the one-day conference Aubrey Beardsley 150: The Artist Resurgent aimed to reclaim Beardsley for the twenty-first century by employing interdisciplinary approaches as interventions to the established modes of Beardsley scholarship. While highlighting new archival work, it sought to reassess Beardsley in relation to the urgent debates around intermediality, queerness, transnationalism, and camp aesthetics.
We would like to thank all our speakers and attendees for making this such a collegial and interesting event.
