The Fine Line Between Decoration and Decadence
Aubrey Beardsley innovated illustration with an approach that was to influence great painters, graphic designers and comic artists
Aubrey Beardsley was a fine draughtsman, an innovative artist and his most famous works are prints devised for book illustration. Although his career was short, due to his early death of tuberculosis at the age of 25, and marred by controversy, his distinctive style and simplicity of line was a huge influence that can be seen in many illustrators and artists since, including comic artists and graphic designers.
He was an editor of the art-literary journal The Yellow Book and quickly became a prominent figure of the Decadent movement, a pioneer of Art Nouveau and a major proponent of Aestheticism. He intentionally confronted the moral double-standards of Victorian culture and used ‘obscenity’ to question and provoke, particularly in his priapic pastiches.
The art and literature of the Decadents was born of the Romantic belief that passion was closer to the essence of the human experience than rational thought. They generally saw the modern progress around them as a victory of machine over man, of social control systems over individual freedom. The Decadent movement is complex as there was no published…
