青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Beardsley was an artist who was made by the times and remade his times—an elegant sorcerer of the coincidence of opposites. A dazzling volume with the ultimate in vulgarity and aesthetic sophistication cohabiting ironically with one another on every page.

——Keiichiro Hirano, novelist

Over the brief twenty-five years of his life, British illustrator Aubrey Beardsley gave birth to an extraordinary oeuvre marked by exquisite lines and bold use of black and white. This definitive survey traces his career through more than 200 major artworks chiefly from the Victoria and Albert Museum, including such works of illustration as Le Morte d’Arthur, his first success; his crowning achievement, Salomé; and the late masterpieces Mademoiselle de Maupin and The Rape of the Lock. The volume also covers his sketches, prints, and color posters.

This book is the official catalogue and companion volume to the exhibition of the same title held at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo, and other venues from February 2025. The cover shown is of the regular edition; an edition with a limited cover is additionally exclusively offered at exhibition venues (inside pages are the same for both).

British artist and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) rose to fame with his illustrations for Salomé by Oscar Wilde but fell into disrepute upon Wilde’s imprisonment for homosexuality in 1895 . Though Beardsley reemerged to forge a new style through his work for the periodical The Savoy and the illustrations for Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, he soon succumbed to his lifelong battle with tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-five. He was a central figure in the Aesthetic and Art Deco movements and was also influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.