Black and White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley

Description

'[Beardsley's] vision is permanently that of a child lying in bed watching his mother dress for a dinner-party... He is allured, yet afraid to touch: driven back on a cold minuteness of detailed attention, and yet passionately curious, with the emotional and involved curiosity children give to sex.' Brigid Brophy first published her study of 'the most intensely and electrically erotic artist in the world' in 1968, at the height of her own powers and in the moment of a notable revival of interest - both scholarly and pop-cultural (amid 'the dandified realm of Carnavy Street') - in Beardsley's work. An infant prodigy, Beardsley retained through the brief years of his adult life the peculiar genius of a precocious child, and Brophy, well-versed in Freudian analyses, adroitly points out the polymorphous perversity of his pictures - that perversity, coupled with his inimitable graphic/monochromatic signature, accounting for why Beardsley, however 'high-baroque rococo' his style, has remained endlessly modern.

Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) was an acclaimed novelist, essayist, critic and campaigner. Her fiction included Hackenfeller's Ape (1953), The King of a Rainy Country (1956), Flesh (1962), The Finishing Touch (1963), The Snow Ball (1964), In Transit (1969), The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (1971) and Palace without Chairs (1978). Her non-fiction included Black Ship to Hell (1962), Mozart the Dramatist (1964), two books about Aubrey Beardsley - Black and White (1968) and Beardsley and His World (1976), and Prancing Novelist: In Praise Of Ronald Firbank (1973). In 1954 she married the art historian Michael Levey (later the director of the British National Gallery from 1973-1987, knighted in 1981). The couple had one daughter, Kate. Brophy was a noted campaigner on several platforms, in particular her fight to establish an authors' Public Lending Right and her vice-presidency of the National Anti-Vivisection Society.