Aug 05, 2015 - Sale 2389

Sale 2389 - Lot 1

Unsold
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
AUBREY BEARDSLEY (1872-1898) KEYNOTE SERIES. 1896.
19x13 1/2 inches, 48 1/2x34 1/2 cm. Forbes Co., [Boston].
Condition B+: repaired tears, creases and overpainting in margins; repaired pin holes in corners.
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.