The Eve of St Aubrey: Re†Collecting Beardsley (1872-1898)
The Eve of St Aubrey: Re†Collecting Beardsley (1872-1898) took place on 16 March 2018 at the Mary Ward House (Bloomsbury, London). It was organised by Sasha Dovzhyk, PhD candidate at Birkbeck School of Arts, to commemorate 120 years since the death of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley.
The Eve of St Aubrey opened with a conversation with Professor Linda Gertner Zatlin (Morehouse College, Atlanta), the author of the extraordinary Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné (Yale UP, 2016). Unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness, this is the first book to bring together Beardsley’s recorded works. The conversation was introduced by the co-director of the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo.
Listen to the recording of the conversation here.
The first panel, ‘The “Beardsley Period” and Beyond’, was chaired by Madeleine Emerald Thiele (PhD Candidate at Aberystwyth University).
Listen to the presentations:
‘“I Belong to the Beardsley Period”: Beardsley in the British Context’ by Dr Samuel Shaw (University of Birmingham).
‘Social Grotesques: Beardsley, Caricatures and the Decadent Gift Economy’ by Joseph Thorne (PhD candidate at Liverpool John Moores University).
‘“I’d love to turn you on”: Aubrey Beardsley in the Swinging ’60s’ by Dr Kate Hext (University of Exeter).
After the first panel, Simon Wilson gave a short talk introducing three pamphlets he privately published on the occasion of the symposium (Rondel to Aubrey Beardsley When His God Pan Disappeared from the Wrapper of The Studio (1893): With a Note by Simon Wilson; Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley: A Memorial Poem; Wilde, Beardsley, Salomé, and Censorship).
Listen to the recording of the talk here.The second panel, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’s Afterlives’, was chaired by Dr Jane Desmarais (Goldsmiths, University of London).
Listen to the presentations:
‘Beardsley and Faulkner’s Black and White Minstrels’ by Dr Emma Sutton (University of St Andrews).
‘Beardsley’s Russian Afterlives: Repenting Sins and Queering Desire’ by Sasha Dovzhyk (Birkbeck, University of London).
‘Camp Continuities: Ronald Firbank’s Motorising of Beardsley’ by Dickon Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London).
As a perfect endnote to the symposium, Beardsley’s biographer Matthew Sturgis read his duologue Masks and Phases (with Andrew Martin reading the part of Vyvyan). The reading was introduced by Kayleigh Betterton (University of London Society of Bibliophiles).
Listen to the recording of the reading here.
We also have an amateur video recording of the performance here.