Description

Collins & Brown [Published date: 1998]. Hard cover, 120 pp. First UK printing, with full number line. Very good in good+ dust jacket. Black cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and tears and light creasing and fading along edges. Light overall scuffing to jacket as well. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-library. NO remainder marks. Black and white illustrations throughout. [from front jacket flap] Aubrey Beardsley's art epitomizes an age; so much so that the 1890s were even then known as 'the Beardsley period'. He lived the life of a decadent, and some of his illustrations - witty, irreverent and grotesque - were found profoundly shocking at the time. They characterized the spirit of the last decade of the nineteenth century, the fin de siecle. They are also sublimely elegant. He was the master of line and created almost all his mysterious, suggestive and ambiguous images using only black and white. His illustrations to Oscar Wilde's Salome, and for The Studio, The Yellow Book and The Savoy, were known throughout Europe and America. The style, and stylishness, of his art has been admired and imitated ever since his death in 1898. In this book the intriguing facts of Beardsley's childhood, life in London and on the Continent, damaging involvement with Oscar Wilde and death at the age of twenty-six, are set against a background of the theatrical, literary and artistic life of the times. Backed up with over seventy examples of Beardsley's work, Raby creates a fascinating picture of Beardsley and the nineties.