Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque (Hardcover)

This book analyzes a wide range of Beardsley's most characteristic work. It establishes his assumptions about the underlying nature of his world, and clarifies why so many observers have considered Beardsley's art indispensable to understanding fin-de-siecle Victorian culture. Beardsley's pictures present a dialogue between seemingly polarized impulses: a desire to scandalize and destabilize the old order, and, equally strong, a need to affirm traditional authority.
Beardsley depicted various grotesque shapes, caricatures, and mutated figures, including foetus/old man, dwarf, Clown, Harlequin, Pierrot, and dandy (the icon of the Decadent "Religion of Art"). Incarnating the fearful contradictions of decadence, these images served as objective correlatives of some "monstrous" metaphysical contortion. His grotesques suggest the impossibility of resolving these contradictions, even as his elegant designs try formalistically to control and recuperate the disfiguration.
As a canonical style, Beardsley's "dandy" sensibility and grotesque caricatures become his means of realigning canonical meaning. Thus, he effects what might be termed a "caricature" of traditional signification. An aesthete devoted to the "Religion of Art," Beardsley, nonetheless, creates a world inescapably "de-formed." He is a Dandy of the Grotesque."

General

Imprint:	Oxford UniversityPress
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	August 1995
Authors:	Chris Snodgrass (Associate Professor of English)
Dimensions:	249 x 175 x 25mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	358
ISBN-13:	978-0-19-509062-8
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1800 to 1900 > Art Nouveau Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Drawing & drawings > General Books > Arts & Architecture > Industrial / commercial art & design > Illustration & commercial art > General Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > Design styles > Art Deco Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Art treatments & subjects > Individual artists > General
LSN:	0-19-509062-4
Barcode:	9780195090628

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