
INDECENT PROPOSALS
FOR A FIGURE SO SEEMINGLY OBVIOUS, so received into art history and its more populist banlieues, Aubrey Beardsley is fucking hard to write about. My friend and I sit on the bed as I page through Linda Gertner Zatlin’s 2016 catalogue raisonné, and I ask him what appeals, what’s fun. We never say Beardsley. “Aubrey,” my friend always says: just Aubrey.
So, Aubrey . . .
Aubrey was born in Brighton, England, in 1872. He died just twenty-five years later, and this premature burial is one of the first things you learn about when you learn about Aubrey. Within the achingly worked-out taxonomies of the