BEARDSLEY, JAPONISME, AND THE PERVERSION OF THE VICTORIAN IDEAL

This is the first book to explore the influence of Japanese art on Aubrey Beardsley's work. Placing Japanese woodblock prints in the English and French cultural milieu of the last third of the Victorian era, Professor Zatlin examines Beardsley's technical and thematic adaptions of Japanese art. She shows how Japanese art enabled Beardsley to create his striking and personal style - one which permanently changed book illustration on three continents. This study is simultaneously a history of the British and French reception of Japanese art, and an examination of the ways Beardsley subverted both Victorian notions of the grotesque and male habits of viewing women. Establishing many of his sources, this book traces Beardsley's revelation of the tensions between the concepts of vice and virtue in a combination of opposites which disconcerted and threatened many viewers of the 1890s.