Review: Evanghélia Stead, Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley (Open Book Publishers, 2024)

Abstract

In Evelyn Sharp’s story ‘A New Poster’, published in The Yellow Book in July 1895, Mrs Angelo Milton is at her wits’ end.[i] She is in love with ‘the new black and white artist’ Adrian Marks but loving him means giving up her fortune and her good name. Should she choose the bohemian love of this ‘dandy artist’, or the comfortable life promised by a steady man? Sharp’s story seems to dramatize a recognisably fin-de-siècle dilemma: that of the modern woman who must reckon with her own independence and the limitations of marriage. But in its depiction of a disreputable ‘decadent’ poster artist, appearing only months after the shock dismissal of Aubrey Beardsley from The Yellow Book, the story also stages a covert declaration of alliance to the disgraced poster artist. ‘A New Poster’ provides the striking opening to Evanghélia Stead’s study of Beardsley, inviting us to approach ‘Beardsley’ – that strange complex of image, word, and performance that fascinated the late nineteenth century – as a sum of many shifting parts. Nothing, Stead insists, ‘should be taken at face value’ (p. 5).[ii]

[i] Evelyn Sharp, “A New Poster,” The Yellow Book, 6 (June 1895), pp. 123–66.

[ii] Evanghélia Stead, Grotesques and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley (Open Book Publishers, 2024). All references are cited parenthetically in text.