Aubrey Beardsley Dead at 25

Very few artists have created a style that is truly unique and inimitable. Aubrey Beardsley is one of them. His style has influenced countless artists, designers, and illustrators, but a Beardsley drawing is impossible to copy (even though countless forgers have tried).

In a 1998 profile of the Beardsley scholar Stephen Calloway in the New York Times, Martin Filler writes:

''Beardsley was one of the first artists to confront sexuality head on,'' Mr. Calloway maintained. ''The closest recent parallel, I suppose, is Robert Mapplethorpe, in the way he uses absolutely explicit imagery in a rather cool manner. They're both masters of black and white and share a similar temperament, that dispassionate way of producing things which are actually extremely outrageous. And the fact that they both died young has a curious new resonance as a result of AIDS and the linking of sex and death. Nobody ever appeared to die of sex in the 1960's, when it was the main aim of life.''

I'm not ready to call Beardsley's illustrations for Lysistrata pornographic, but they are sexually frank in a comic way. 

The BBC aired a strange and fascinating biographical portrait of Beardsley in 1982. 

Many people think of Beardsley as solely a graphic artist, but he had literary aspirations. Cypher Press in London published In Black and White: The Literary Remains of Aubrey Beardsley. Not surprisingly, Stephen Calloway is one of the editors.