This one-way route guides you from the Manton entrance and through the exhibition. There will be access to toilets, a shop and an opportunity to buy food and drink during your visit.
Aubrey Beardsley shocked and delighted late-Victorian London with his sinuous black and white drawings. He explored the erotic and the elegant, the humorous and grotesque, winning admirers around the world with his distinctive style.
Spanning seven years, this exhibition will cover Beardsley’s intense and prolific career as a draughtsman and illustrator, cut short by his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. Beardsley’s charismatic persona played a part in the phenomenon that he and his art generated, so much so that the 1890s were dubbed the ‘Beardsley Period’.
This will be the first exhibition dedicated to Beardsley at Tate since 1923, and the largest display of his original drawings in Europe since the seminal 1966 exhibition at the V&A, which triggered a Beardsley revival.
The over 200 works include his celebrated illustrations for Le Morte d’Arthur, Lysistrata and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. It will also show artworks that were key inspirations for Beardsley, including a Japanese scroll and watercolours by Edward Burne-Jones and Gustave Moreau.
Aubrey Beardsley Self-Portrait 1892. British Museum
Aubrey Beardsley The Cave of Spleen (Illustration to Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock) 1896. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection.
Aubrey Beardsley Black Coffee 1895. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Scofield Thayer.
Aubrey Beardsley The Black Cape 1893. Princeton University Library.
Aubrey Beardsley The Peacock Skirt 1893 (published 1907). Stephen Calloway.
Aubrey Beardsley Ave Atque Vale 1896. Private Collection.
