Reviews for The erotic muse

The average rating for The erotic muse based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-06-02 00:00:00 David Renegar Solid and competent biography of an elusive and I think ultimately insubstantial character. Beardsley was influential in the growth of the aesthetic movement and Art Nouveau in the 1890s. His career was brief and cut short by his untimely death from tuberculosis. Beardsley produced some very competent and ground breaking drawings, along with some truly awful poetry. Sturgis sets out to demythologize Bearsdley and succeds well. His sexuality remains unclear but that is not surprising beacuase the backlash against Wilde occured at the height of Beardsley's success. The erotic drawings (especially those for Lysistrata) are striking (and often somewhat juvenile). The obvious talent he had was unfulfilled because of an early death. The Yellow Book still stands out as ground breaking; but he was only a small part of that. However there was much more to that than Beardsley. Sturgis manages to set the decade in context along with Beardsley's contribution and his return to popularity in the 1960s. A good read, almost as good as his biography of Sickert.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-01 00:00:00 Maurizio Vinciguerra What came to be called art nouveau, or art deco, was in part an inspiration of Aubrey Beardsley, whose illustrations came into vogue when I was young, though many of them were not reproduced as being too scandalizing. Little or nothing was written about the artist, except for some suppressive statements equating him with the decadent absinthe-drinking crowd around Oscar Wilde. So I was delighted to find this sympathetic, witty biography that goes into quite a bit of detail about Beardsley's very short life. Sturgis draws on numerous period references, letters, and of course publications, careful to point out the many anecdotes that are probably spurious. The truth is, very little is known about Beardsley's inner life: very early on he developed a persona along with his art, though he consistently referred to himself as asexual, and "a solitaire" in spite of the cynically sexual nature of much of his art. Sturgis takes care to paint word pictures of the amazing fin de siecle art scene, and Beardsley's many friendships. He does an admirable job of extricating the complexities of Beardsley's and Wilde's relationship, and comments on the development of Beardsley's art with a sharp eye. Excellent bibliographic notes wind up a satisfactory read.