Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. It is night prowling done in black blocks and driving lines, Art Nouveau for the independent New Woman. In this image, a stylish lady has seized an ink-soaked evening to wander unchaperoned she browses for books, not boys, and pointedly disregards the vendor before her. His prospectus illustration for The Yellow Book, one of the two magazines he co-founded and edited, captures his art work’s effect, as well as its marketability. Beardsley’s pen-and-ink drawings synthesized the two. This twilight of the Victorian era witnessed one revolution in gender and sexual politics and another in visual aesthetics. But his short and dazzling career in fact suggests one way to master the art of dying: work fast, expire early, and define a decade’s aesthetics.īeardsley’s birth and death aligned with a distinct period in British and art history. In a sense, his entire œuvre could be classed as juvenalia, fit only for dismissal or could-have-been counterfactual. The artist and aspiring writer was just twenty-five when tuberculosis ended his life on March 16, 1898. Aubrey Beardsley nearly fell prey to the second fate. Pass too soon, and your best years may be presumed to lie ahead. Live too long, and your reputation may be marred by retrograde politics or senescent late work. The art of dying is hard to master, especially if you bequeath an artistic legacy.
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