Aubrey Beardsley, Emblem of the Victorian Decadence

Abstract AUBREY Beardsley’s work was first published ill the spring of 1893. He died ill March 1898 at the age of twenty-five. Despite the extreme brevity of his career, probably no other artist or writer prior to the electronic age achieved more notoriety or exercised a more pervasive influence on his era in such a short time. Contemporary critic D. S. MacColl wrote that “the wild-fire speed with which his reputation spread” outran every previous example of rapid fame (“AB” 17).1 Less than two years after Beardsley’s work first appeared, Max Beerbohm could proclaim that he belonged to the “Beardsley Period” (Works160), a designation Osbert Burdett would adopt as the title for his famous study of the age. A shaping force of the Art Nouveau movement, a profound influence on countless artists and designers, cited as the “real king” and “dominating artistic personality” of his time, “the one ‘genius’ of the ‘Eighteen-Nineties’” (S. Wilson, Beardsley5; Muddiman 6; Huneker 17), Beardsley was thought by numerous observers to have set the standard for the art of the period.2 Arthur Symons summarized the case: “No artist of our time, none certainly whose work has been in black and white, has reached a more universal ... fame; none has formed for himself, out of such alien elements, a more personal originality of manner; none has had so wide an influence on contemporary art” (“AB” 90-91).3 As Holbrook Jackson put it in his classic book The Eighteen Nineties,“The appearance of Aubrey Beardsley in 1893 was the most extraordinary event in English art since the appearance of William Blake” (91).