The works could be seen from a passing tram and taken in at a glance.īut extraordinary refinement was also offered by the new technologies, and the luxurious illustrations for an 1896 edition of Alexander Pope’s The Rape Of The Lock, for me his greatest work, pile intricate filigree textures one on top of another.īeardsley pushed at the boundaries of taste from the start, and the illustrations to Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé are still shocking. His ‘block construction’ – as in The Toilette Of Salome or The Fat Woman of 1894 – came in very useful when designing posters. Much of his impact was contained in the arrival of the magazine The Yellow Book, something that could not have been produced even ten years earlier. His work wouldn’t have been possible without very new printing techniques, and was enabled by very rapid changes in the publishing environment.
He ripped up all decorum, and artists as different as Edward Burne-Jones and Picasso responded with enthusiasm.īeardsley was an intensely modern artist.
Look wherever you like in the years after Beardsley died, and you find echoes of his sinuous lines, his great blocks of black or white, his love of flatness and clashing textures. Aubrey Beardsley pushed at the boundaries of taste from the start, and the illustrations to Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé, like the one with the head of John the Baptist, are still shocking
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