WHEN Aubrey Beardsley died at Menton, only months after his 25th birthday, Oscar Wilde wrote: ‘There is something macabre and tragic in the fact that one who added another terror to life should have died at the age of a flower.’
Diagnosed with tuberculosis when still a child, Beardsley knew that his time was circumscribed. The knowledge, however, seems to have powered and focused his artistic development. He was, as this compelling show makes clear, both wonderfully precocious and impressively prolific.
But what is really astounding is not the volume of drawings that he created in a working life that spanned only six years, or even their exquisite quality, but the great variety and the sense of development. Working almost exclusively in pen and ink, he absorbed and mastered the influences of Pre-Raphaelitism, Japanese woodblock-prints, contemporary Impressionism, Greek vase painting, Rococo engraving, Renaissance decoration, Baroque draughtsmanship and French poster-making. Nothing, it seems, escaped his voracious cultural appetite.
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