4. Beardsley Images and the “Europe of Reviews”

Chapter 4, Beardsley Images and the “Europe of Reviews,” stresses the exceptional amount of press articles devoted to Beardsley and how he worked them into shaping his image, having early grasped the importance of media in an artist’s career. The chapter shows the weight of the first Studio article on his art and fame to then take his images beyond the London scene and discuss his media performance in the Italian magazine Emporium, replaced within the framework of a “Europe of Reviews.” It places the Emporium articles in their generic category, the fine and applied arts journals aimed at the educated reader, and shows how self-modelling of images, borrowed from the Sketch, an English magazine of general circulation, echoes far-away journals transiting via French ones. Recourse to a yet different periodical type, the French avant-garde reviews, exemplifies how a poignant portrait of Beardsley comes to the fore, related to the artist’s early passing. The chapter concludes stressing the benefits of considering periodicals as a network.