Aubrey Beardsley

This 240-page book, Aubrey Beardsley: The Decadent Magician of the Light and the Darkness, reveals the core of the artist Aubrey Beardsley through more than 180 of his art works, compiled under the supervision of Hiroshi Unno, a critic and a writer who has contributed to many books on the fin-de-siècle

Like a meteor flashing across the night sky, Beardsley briefly illuminated the end of the nineteenth century, the era of fin-de-siècle decadence, and then faded away, his tragically short life ending after just twenty five years. He was active for less than ten years but his art was forever emblazoned on people's mind.

The Victorian era, the age that Beardsley lived was gripped by strict, rigid, conservative morality. The society was male dominated and forced women to be modest. Anything related to sex was hidden from the public as if it didn't even exist. Beardsley's genius grasped the oddness of the society of this era. A woman with a fearless smile, extremely exaggerated genital...seductive motifs that he drew for Oscar Wilde's Salome, the French magazine Yellow Book, and the play Lysistrata were far from the ideals of beauty and morality of that time.

How did the rebellious, yet refined, monochrome artworks drawn by Beardsley, who was called the Devil's younger brother, come about? Was his life simply the art itself? This book is a gem that approaches the artwork that is "Beardsley" himself, the artist and the idea, by introducing Beardsley's 

About the Author

Born in Tokyo, 1939. Hiroshi Unno is a critic writer who has contributed to many books on Fin de siècle arts. He wrote his first book on art nouveau in the 1960's focusing on the subject when nobody was paying attention to the genre at that time. After working as a publisher he became a freelance writer and a critic contributing to wide range of fields from reassessment of Art Deco, City Theory to Music, Cinema and Fashion. He is one of the most popular contributors in PIE International. His western art collection series which was first published in 2011 now has 23 titles in the series and many of the titles are distributed worldwide.