Aubrey Beardsley in the Russian “World of Art”

Abstract

Examining the afterlife of Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, this article focuses on the coterie of his primary admirers, the St Petersburg aesthetes of the World of Art group led by Sergei Diaghilev, and the circulation of Beardsley’s images through the World of Art’s journal Mir iskusstva. After tracing how this network acquired their initial knowledge of Beardsley, the article unpacks selective strategies and ideological choices which underpinned his representation to Russian audiences. Entrenched in the topical debates of Russian fin de siècle about national identity and cosmopolitanism, Beardsley’s circulation was fashioned into a signifier of the latter. The article finds that it was the neo-rococo phase of Beardsley’s work that tapped into the World of Art’s vision of modernity and the group’s promotion of the international Rococo Revival, which was, in its turn, tied to their reinvention of the eighteenth-century Russian cultural tradition. By examining how the group’s designers, in particular, Leon Bakst, adopted Beardsley’s technique, the article also shows that his stylised graphic language was uniquely suited to facilitate the traversal of boundaries between art forms.

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