Too filthy to print – Aubrey Beardsley and his explosions of obscenity

His erotic ink drawings, full of nudity and sex, influenced everyone from Klimt to Picasso. But, ahead of a Tate Britain show, we look at the pictures that were deemed just too outrageous. WARNING: explicit content

A woman who is naked except for fancy stockings touches what the artist calls her “coynte” while a winged cupid teases her bottom with a powder puff. A wizened man admires a young man’s elephantine erection, the glans as big as his bald head – all delineated in sharp black outlines and shadowed with inky pools against expanses of white. These are a few of the many explosions of obscenity that a slender, pale young man created in the room he checked into at the Spread Eagle hotel in Epsom, Surrey, in June 1896.

The drawings Aubrey Beardsley completed in this suburban hideaway were to illustrate the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes. The works, that can be perused at your leisure in Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition, had an incalculable effect on the birth of modern art. Beardsley’s eroticism would soon be emulated all over Europe by revolutionaries such as Klimt, Schiele and Picasso, while James Joyce summed up his impact on modernism in a double entendre: “Kunstfull”.

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