Aubrey Beardsley by Brian Reade - 1966-01-01

Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1966-01-01. Paperback. Good. Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1966. Paper covers, 50 pp. Large Picture Book No. 32. First published on the occasion of the Aubrey Beardsley Exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In good condition. Grey paper covers with orange illustration and lettering. Covers have a few small nicks and tears and creasing along edges. 1/2" oval stain in the middle of the front cover and Light overall scuffing and soiling to covers as well. Binding tight, with some glue residue along the spine between the front cover and half-title page. Interior pages are clean and unmarked. Includes 50 black and white plates. [Excerpt from 1st page] 'The Fra Angelica of Satanism" was what Roger Fry called AubreyBeardsley. With more relevance we might call him The Master of the Line Block. For that was a role he can always be said to have filled; whereas the approach to subjects like Satanism and Evil has changed beyond recall from a point at which Beardsley's name was uttered with misgiving. The photo-mechanical method of reproducing prints or drawings by line blocks was started in the 1870s, and by the 1880s it was established as the cheapest and the easiest method of facsimile reproduction.Though not all of Beardsley's work was reproduced by this method his drawings, in the majority of cases, were done with the method in mind, and his style of black-and-white art was evolved by making the most of the limitations put upon any draughtsman who wished to get the best effects, that is to say the clearest, the most telling, the most dramatic effects, from the process as it was used then. Briefly it was, and still is, a process which excludes intermediate tones: it reproduces lines and areas of the same tone value, but nothing in between, no other "colours". The intermediate tones can be suggested only by dots of some sort, or by thinner lines laid close together.