21.08.1872 – 16.03.1898

During his short life (only 25 years), Aubrey Beardsley managed to exert a colossal influence on all forms of fine art of his time: advertising posters, pictures of fashion magazines, and works by artists of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Lev Bakst and Konstantin Somov, and architectural masterpieces by Fedor Shekhtel and Antonio Gaudi. Beardsley can truly be called the “father” of the modernist style, he managed to conquer the world with the help of small forms: illustrations, sketches, cartoons and vignettes for books.

Aubrey Beardsley was born in a respectable family, but several generations of his father suffered from tuberculosis. In 1879, the seven-year-old Aubrey made the same terrible diagnosis. However, until the age of seventeen, the disease did not manifest itself, the young man studied languages, drew a lot, engaged in music, and at the age of 11 composed elegant melodies. Aubrey Beardsley always carried away the theater, and he participated in amateur theatrical productions in his native Brighton. The lack of systematic artistic education was more than compensated for by refined taste and versatile education.

Fame came to him in 1892 after creating illustrations for the novel by Thomas Malory “Death of Arthur.” Collaboration with the publisher John Lane was extremely fruitful – in this tandem were born magnificent and extremely scandalous illustrations for “Salome” Oscar Wilde. If in Serte Arthur the landscape played an important compositional and narrative role, then in the Salome the characters seem to float in the air – there is neither a landscape nor an interior. The heroes are dressed up or naked, in the fashion of the nineteenth century, Salome is more like a cabaret dancer, all this is not combined with Christian iconography.

Refined eroticism, harmony of lines and spots are the distinctive features of Aubrey Beardsley’s graphics. Halftones and the texture of objects are transmitted by crosshatching and engraving dotted lines. This mannered and refined style corresponded to Beardsley’s literary predilections.

The artist died on March 16, 1898. Before his death he wrote to his publisher: “I beg you to destroy all copies of” Lysistrata “and indecent drawings.” Fortunately, Smithers did not do this.