Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley - cover image

Copyright

Evanghelia Stead

Published On

2024-10-11

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-345-4
Hardback978-1-80511-346-1
PDF978-1-80511-347-8
HTML978-1-80511-349-2
EPUB978-1-80511-348-5

Language

  • English

Print Length

292 pages (xii+280)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 21 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.83" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 24 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.94" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback559g (19.72oz)
Hardback736g (25.96oz)

Media

Illustrations134

THEMA

  • ABA
  • AFH
  • AF
  • AFF

BISAC

  • ART015100
  • ART015030
  • ART024000
  • ART009000

Keywords

  • Aubrey Beardsley
  • grotesque
  • media and print culture
  • media performance
  • fin-de-siècle
  • British and comparative art

Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley

“If I am not grotesque, I am nothing.”

This insightful study illuminates previously unexplored aspects of Aubrey Beardsley’s relationship to the grotesque and his use of media, particularly his manipulation of the periodical press. For the first time and with keen intelligence, Evanghelia Stead fully reveals the aesthetic importance of Beardsley’s Bon-Mots vignettes, as well as the relationship between Darwinism, his innovative foetus motif, and Decadence itself.

Beautifully illustrated throughout, the book calls on histories of culture and aesthetics to show how the artist reworked traditional imagery and manipulated it beyond recognition—revealing for instance the influence of cathedral grotesques on Beardsley’s own grotesque performances. Stead also demonstrates his major impact on Italian, French, American and German creative minds through the periodical press.

Rich in original thought and detailed, comparative analysis, this book is an invigorating and enlightening read for scholars of Aubrey Beardsley, as well as for anyone interested in nineteenth-century visual culture, art history, art criticism, print culture, illustration, grotesque iconography, and cultural history.

Endorsements

Haunted by illness, Beardsley put all his energy into his art. Nothing that he did was "minor" to him, including his Bon-Mots caricatures and other grotesques. This is the first study to give proper due to works that have often been dismissed as mere jokes or trivia, while demonstrating their connections to better-known examples of his very modern sense of visual performance and self-presentation. At the same time, this book makes clear how influential the aesthetic practices he pioneered were, especially in France and Germany. It is a lively and exuberantly written study that Beardsley himself surely would have enjoyed and from which scholars today have much to learn.

Margaret D. Stetz

Professor of Women's Studies, University of Delaware

Contents

Introduction: Breaking the Mould of Victorianism

(pp. 1–12)
  • Evanghelia Stead

1. Grotesque Vignettes and the “All Margin” Book

(pp. 13–56)
  • Evanghelia Stead

2. A Foetal Laboratory and Its Influence

(pp. 57–106)
  • Evanghelia Stead

3. A Dandy’s Portico of Portraits

(pp. 107–140)
  • Evanghelia Stead

4. Beardsley Images and the “Europe of Reviews”

(pp. 141–166)
  • Evanghelia Stead

5. Paris Performance Alive and Dead

(pp. 167–202)
  • Evanghelia Stead

Conclusion and Aftermath

(pp. 203–216)
  • Evanghelia Stead

Contributors

Evanghelia Stead

(author)
Professor of Comparative Literature and Print Culture at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5737-7947

Linguist, literary translator and honorary Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France, Evanghelia Stead is Professor of Comparative Literature and Print Culture at the Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin (UVSQ Paris-Saclay). In 2023 she brought the TIGRE seminar on literature, visual and print culture to UVSQ, which she had been running in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure (Department of the Arts) since 2004. She has been honoured internationally with visiting professorships at Marburg and Verona Universities, and won numerous sponsored research fellowships (CNRS, EURIAS/FRIAS, IUF, Beinecke). She has published extensively on fin-de-siècle culture, periodicals, history of the book, literature and iconography, Greek and Latin myths in modern literature, and the literary tradition of ‘the Thousand and Second Night.’ A well-known specialist on fin-de-siècle art and culture, she has also developed methodologies for periodical studies, expertise on reading books as cultural objects, reading with images, and through literature-related visual art.