Beardsley Collection Displayed at Harvard

The timing couldn’t have been better: talent and technology coincided beautifully at the end of the 19th Century for controversial artist Aubrey Beardsley.

Though little trained in art and only 25 when he died of tuberculosis in 1898, the drawings Beardsley made the last six years of his life are credited with influencing such giants of 20th-Century art as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Edvard Munch.

Beardsley’s black-and-white drawings, usually for book or magazine illustrations, were printed--when not suppressed--through the then-new photo-mechanical reproduction process, said Miriam Stewart, a curatorial associate at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. The reproductions were faithful to the drawings and cost less than those carved into wood blocks by craftsmen rather than the artist.

The Fogg has more than 50 of the drawings, which were donated by two alumni. They constitute the most important collection of the artist’s work outside Great Britain, said Fogg Curator of Drawings William Robinson.

For the first time in six years the drawings are on public display, and for the first time in more than a dozen years, they are together in one exhibit. And since the drawings are on paper, making them delicate and sensitive to light, they can be exhibited only briefly, museum officials said.

They will be shown at Harvard’s Sackler Museum through July 9 together with other material, including books illustrated by Beardsley, loaned by Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Boston Public Library and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Some of the drawings are overtly erotic; others have touches typical of his mischief.

He usually started his drawings with pencil and perfected them with ink, Stewart said. In some, he used graphite.

His acquaintances included the playwright Oscar Wilde, and Beardsley became a sensation with his illustrations for Wilde’s play, “Salome,” published in 1894. The illustraions were “described variously as having nothing to do with the play and everything to do with it,” Stewart said.

Included in the Fogg exhibit are two drawings intended for the book but suppressed from publication.

The show also includes work done for a reprint of Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur,” Ben Johnson’s “Volpone,” Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” and for the periodicals, the Yellow Book and the Savoy.

Drawings for “Bon-Mots,” a collection of witticisms are “sort of elaborate doodles . . . some quite grotesque,” Stewart said.

A voracious reader, Beardsley sometimes exchanged drawings for books, and it was through this that his career was launched when he was chosen to illustrate “Le Morte d’Arthur.” He was 20.

Some drawings resemble posters and advertisements. “He was of his time, and he was not trying to create a lyrical past,” Stewart said.

Beardsley began writing an erotic novel, but never completed it. He became a Roman Catholic the year before he died, and on his death bed asked that some of his drawings be destroyed. The publisher who had them did not heed his request.

The Fogg’s collection came from alumni who had different reasons for collecting Beardsley’s work. Grenville L. Winthrop, who was graduated in 1889 and who descended from the first governor of Massachusetts, bequeathed to Harvard 23 original Beardsley drawings among more than 3,700 art objects.

Scofield Thayer, class of 1913 and one-time editor and part-owner of the literary review the Dial, had more than 30 drawings that became the Fogg’s when he died.

Winthrop liked the lines and design of Beardsley’s work; Thayer liked the daring subject matter, Robinson said.