Volume 8, Number 12 · June 29, 1967
Odd Man In
By Francis Haskell
The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley
by Aubrey Beardsley
Da Capo, 344, 174 plates pp., $12.50
The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley
by Aubrey Beardsley
Da Capo, 360, 157 plates pp., $12.50
The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley
by Aubrey Beardsley
Dover, 175, 159 plates pp., $2.50
The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley
by Aubrey Beardsley
Dover, 174, 174 plates pp., $2.50
Aubrey Beardsley Drawings
by Aubrey Beardsley
United Book Guild, 160 pp., $10.00
The Story of Venus and Tannhauser
by Aubrey Beardsley
Award Books, 160 pp., $.95
Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography
by Stanley Weintraub
Braziller, 320 pp., $6.00
Aubrey Beardsley
by Brian Reade
His Majesty's Stationers, 50 pp., $1.70
The Art Nouveau Book in Britain
by John Russell Taylor
M.I.T., 196 pp., $12.95
The Flowering of Art Nouveau
by Maurice Rheims
Abrams, 430 pp., $22.50
'I wonder if you ever see any illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley's and what do you think of them? I would like to know. A great many people are now what they call modern. When I state my likes and dislikes they tell me I am not modern, so I suppose I am not—advanced.' Thus Kate Greenaway to Ruskin in February 1896. Even without Ruskin's answer (though its tone is surely not too hard to imagine) this must be one of the more bizarre confrontations of the nineteenth century; on the one hand, the popular illustrator of Mother Goose and The 'Little Folks' ' Painting Book, on the other, the 'Fra Angelico of Satanism,' soon to embark on the Lysistrata drawings. If it was the 'modernity' that worried her more than anything else (and the quotation helps to substantiate Professor Gordon's fascinating article in Encounter of October 1966 on this aspect of the reaction to Beardsley), the reason may be that Miss Greenaway appreciated, even more readily than we are able to do, that innocence and depravity were not all that easy to distinguish: had not Max Nordau, the self-professed expert in such matters, accused her—of all people—of creating 'a false and degenerate race of children in art'?
Review, 2770 words
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