Dead at the age of 25 from TB, Aubrey Beardsley produced an astounding body of work. In his last months, when he believed that he still had plenty of time to live, he wrote to his publisher Leonard Smithers about plans to start yet another journal along the lines of The Yellow Book and The Savoy. He planed to call it The Peacock, and one of his stipulations was that Oscar Wilde would have nothing to do with it. But more to the point of our seminar was this comment: "On the art side I suggest that [the magazine] should attack untiringly and unflinchingly the Burne-Jones and Morrisian mediaeval business and set up a wholesome seventeenth and eighteenth-century standard of what picture making should be." (emphasis his).
Today in class I'm going to give a lecture presentation on Beardsley. It will not include any of the erotic images in the following slideshow, which was tellingly compiled by a clinical sexologist. You can click on this link or not. The choice is yours. This might prove to be the most inappropriate use of Comic Sans in existence: Beardsley's Erotica
Victorian Avant-Garde // A Seminar at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design at the George Washington University // Spring 2016 // Professor Casey Smith // kcs@gwu.edu // The painting above is by Sir John Everett Millais, 1829–1896, British, L'Enfant du Regiment, 1854 to 1855, Oil on paper, laid on canvas, mounted on board, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
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