Feb 18, 2021 - Sale 2558

Sale 2558 - Lot 4

Unsold
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800

AUBREY BEARDSLEY (1872-1898)

KEYNOTE SERIES. 1896.


19x13 1/2 inches, 48 1/4x34 1/4 cm. Forbes Co., [Boston].
Condition B: staining, foxing and rippling in upper margin and image; time-staining and creases in margins; hinged on verso to mat. Paper.

Various characters populate this poster promoting a series of books published in England and Boston. Beardsley, "with his erotic grotesquery, his tuberculous capacity for a fine, punctilious decadence . . . ushered out the century in a sensuous shiver" (Rickards p. 36). "He so far despised the society that suffered him that he allowed his mockery to invade his work; more often than not his assignments in illustration and decoration carried him off in flights of irrelevant rudery; he was compulsive, abstruse, and rapturously sick" (ibid). DFP-I 11, Maitres 1900 p. 105, Weill 103, Metzl p. 58, Affichomanie 133.