Beardsley

Stanley Weintraub

At twenty, "the Fra Angelico of Satanism," as Roger Fry was to call Aubrey Beardsley, was working as an obscure clerk in a London life insurance company. Three years later he was the most notorious--and perhaps the most influential--artist in England. His controversial drawings for Oscar Wilde's Salome were so daring and different that someone quipped that Wilde's play illustrated Beardsley's art. His work as art editor of the two most famous magazines of the 1890's, The Yellow Book and The Savoy, consolidated his fame although he was unreasonably dragged into the Wilde scandal and nearly destroyed by it. By the time he produced his strikingly scabrous drawings for a pornographer publisher's Lysistrata he was dying, yet still incredibly productive. But he had already indelibly stamped the age with his name.