This edition of Aubrey Beardsley’s writings was published in November 2021. It aims to establish Beardsley’s reputation as a key figure in Decadent literature on a par with his iconic status in the visual arts. It publishes for the first time the text of Beardsley’s unfinished erotic novel Under the Hill (written between 1894 and 1896) in its original form alongside Beardsley’s manuscript.
Category: research post
Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley
L’Eau Savante: Aspects of Erotic Writing in Aubrey Beardsley
Part II
This paper by Annette Lavers, a pioneering scholar of Beardsley’s literary work, is published here for the first time from the author’s typescript which she shared with Simon Wilson in 1998. This is Part II of the piece.
L’Eau Savante: Aspects of Erotic Writing in Aubrey Beardsley
Part I
This paper by Annette Lavers, a pioneering scholar of Beardsley’s literary output, is published here for the first time from the author’s typescript which she shared with Simon Wilson in 1998. This is Part I of the piece.
Beardsley Men in Early Twentieth-Century Russia: Modernising Decadent Masculinity
A new peer-reviewed article on Beardsley-inspired forms of urban Russian masculinity has been published in Modernist Cultures, 16:2 (2021). The early-twentieth-century homophile men were captivated by Beardsley’s image and did their best to emulate it. Can we blame them?
Ballet with Beardsley
Sasha Dovzhyk writes for the Rimbaud & Verlaine Foundation about Beardsley’s depictions of Bathyllus and the reception of the images by the modernist writer Mikhail Kuzmin in the context of Russian queer histories.
The Carnival is Over? Beardsley’s Pierrots, The Savoy, and the Moral Battle for Modern Art
This essay is the winner of the 2020 Emerging Beardsley Scholar Prize. Samuel Love’s piece fascinatingly addresses the important subject of the image of Pierrot in Beardsley’s work. It particularly illuminates Beardsley’s use of it in the Savoy in a way that contributes both to our understanding of the specific works discussed and the history of the periodical. The essay offers what appear to be highly original and most welcome readings of the iconography of such designs as the Savoy frontispiece, The Death of Pierrot, and Don Juan.
Beardsley at Menton
Caroline de Westenholz traces the details of Aubrey Beardsley’s stay in the picturesque town of Menton on the French Riviera, where the artist and writer died on 16 March 1898. This piece was originally published in The Death of Pierrot: A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. by Steven Halliwell and Matthew Sturgis (London, 1898).
‘Something corrupt’: The Queer Sensibility of Aubrey Beardsley and Konstantin Somov
Natalia Maslianinova’s essay is a runner-up of the 2020 Emerging Beardsley Scholar Prize competition. Rooting her analysis in queer historicism and transnational perspectives, Maslianinova foregrounds ‘queer codes’ in the Rococo designs of Aubrey Beardsley and his Russian admirer, artist Konstantin Somov. Maslianinova also points out how clandestine queer communities in the twentieth-century USSR and Poland were guided in their reception of Somov and Beardsley by the subtle queer subtext of the Rococo imagery.
‘Donald! Susan! Ronald! Brigid!’: The Camp Afterlives of Aubrey Beardsley
This essay by Dickon Edwards is a runner-up of the 2020 Emerging Beardsley Scholar Prize competition. It brings to life the most enchanting string of characters, from Mabel Beardsley to Ronald Firbank and Brigid Brophy, in a triumph of ‘artifice and exaggeration’. Governed by the same stylistic principle, the author’s short biography deserves a special mention among the enthusiasts of camp.
Unique Beardsley find in Amsterdam theatre collection
The fact that Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson has a gorgeous art-nouveau exhibition waiting to open is owed in part to Beardsley. The museum owns an original Beardsley drawing ‘One of the Spirits’ (1893) which has recently reemerged from the storeroom to be presented to the public for the first time.
A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley
The AB Library has received the digitised copy of an indispensable resource for any Beardsley scholar, A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley by Mark Samuels Lasner,
Sharing a Sofa: Aubrey Beardsley and William Rothenstein
Dr Samuel Shaw writes about friendship and artistic connections between Beardsley and William Rothenstein, discussing specific visual examples as well as the tendency of their images to ‘speak to, but never exactly illustrate, the texts from which they draw’.
Aubrey Beardsley’s Messalina: Going, or Coming?
In this previously unpublished paper, Simon Wilson clarifies a long-standing confusion regarding the titles of the two drawings of the notorious Roman empress Messalina created by Beardsley in 1895 and 1896. Wilson also establishes the designs’ close correspondence to the text of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire thus busting the myth of the irrelevance of Beardsley’s drawings to the literary works he illustrated.
The Queer Little Grove: The Adoption of Aubrey Beardsley by Mikhail Kuzmin
This article explores one of the many aspects of Aubrey Beardsley’s transnational legacy, focusing on his appropriation by Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936), a key modernist writer and a seminal voice of the emerging homosexual subculture in Russia. While Kuzmin often used Beardsley as a signifier of homoeroticism in his literary works and life-writing, it is in his play Little Grove (1922) that the queering of Beardsley is crystallised. My intermedial analysis of the piece will show how allusions to Beardsley shape Kuzmin’s representation of gender and sexuality and how the formal construction of Kuzmin’s publication echoes the formal features of Beardsley’s graphic designs.
Staging Artifice: Aubrey Beardsley and 114 Cambridge Street
Ruth Smith explores Beardsley’s self-fashioning through his home in Pimlico, London, and the new resonance of the artist’s practices during the 2020 worldwide lockdown. Domestic interiors are often performative extensions of the self, and are perhaps even more so in this time of coronavirus. Like Beardsley’s, our homes have become a space where the personal, the public, and the realms of leisure and work have come to reside.
Beardsley, A Cover Boy for Sexual Revolution
The image of Aubrey Beardsley has been long enveloped in an aura of notoriety with distinctly erotic overtones. He has been seen as a rebel figure in the era of militant Victorian prudery. Sasha Dovzhyk argues that the myth of Beardsley as a Victorian sexual liberator was forged in 1966 when the V&A dedicated a major exhibition to the artist and displayed his most explicit works for the first time.
The Afterlives of Beardsley’s Morte Darthur Illustrations
Beardsley’s illustrations for J. M. Dent’s edition of the Morte Darthur (1893–4) have often been deemed to bear an unusually tenuous relation to the Arthurian narrative. Out of approximately 500 illustrations, only the 20 full-page illustrations address identifiable moments in the narrative. Despite their supposed inaptness to Malory’s text, Dent and his successors have continued to reuse the illustrations in subsequent editions of the Morte Darthur.
The Missing Keyhole: An Aubrey Beardsley Minor Mystery
How La Beale Isoud Wrote to Sir Tristram (1893) is one of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Le Morte Darthur, published by JM Dent in 1894. It shows Isoud seated writing at a desk in an interior. Beyond her is a wall with twin windows and underneath these is a pair of identical, or almost identical, floor-standing chests or coffers. In the original drawing, which is extant in a private collection in London, the one on the right has a keyhole, but the other has not.