Erections, buttocks and beheadings: it's an Aubrey Beardsley blockbuster

He created a sensational amount of art, illustrating every sexual possibility and orientation. Aubrey Beardsley is the big surprise of Tate’s newly announced plans for 2020

Aubrey Beardsley is one of Britain’s greatest artists, but museums have never quite known what to do with his dangerously depraved images. So it is delicious news that his perverse and often obscene art is to get the Tate Britain blockbuster treatment next year.

The fact that Beardsley worked in ink on paper, rather than paint on canvas, means his pictures are easy to hide in study rooms. Even in Queer British Art, the 2017 show at Tate Britain, Beardsley’s presence was surprisingly subdued. But the announcement that Tate will put 200 of his naughty little masterpieces on display next March, in a show that will tour to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, suggests we may finally be ready for one of the classiest purveyors of filth.

Related: Warhol's soup cans and psychedelic dancing stars of Tate exhibition

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