Aubrey Beardsley by Stephen Calloway

I don't read biographies much because I almost inevitably find the voice of the author to be too intrusive, either fawning and lost in admiring awe, or concentrated on destroying the legend and damning the subject. This was a pretty well-balanced biography, although I did find many of Calloway's opinions intrusive and annoying. However, the style was pretty agreeable overall, and it was certainly informative, covering both the events in Beardsley's life and his styles and influences. I found it very absorbing and amusing reading, and I learned a lot about the 1890s art scene and its atmosphere. I was very diverted by the fact that a common motif throughout Beardsley's working life seems to have been drawings getting sent to the printers, or already distributed, and then someone noticing belatedly that there's an erection hiding somewhere in the pictures and everyone panicking and attempting to withdraw the prints. Still, it gave me very little sense of what Beardsley was like as a person, and I would have liked to know more, especially because he seems to have been such a tragic and delightful combination of witty and morbid. I would have liked to read more about Beardsley's personal image-building, and such events in his life as his trip to Paris with Oscar Wilde, which Calloway alludes to a couple of times, but never goes into detail about. I was also quite annoyed by the way Calloway wrote about Beardsley's sexuality and his 'erotic' prints. Personally, I think that calling those drawings 'erotic' is completely misleading; they are not in any way intended to be sexually arousing, and they're actually completely hilarious and treat sex as a monstrous joke. Calloway writes that 'Beardsley's natural instincts were fairly straightforwardly heterosexual' and claims that the 'erotic' prints were a result of his extreme sexual frustration, due to the fact that his tuberculosis didn't allow him to have an active sexual life. All of this seems to be a very silly Freudian interpretation to me, I don't think the prints look like the work of someone breeding 'twisted' fantasies out of tortured frustration, I think Beardsley's just having a laugh. Seeing as his drawings aren't very interested in 'straightforward heterosexuality', I'm not sure why Calloway makes this assumption (although I can only presume it's from letters and other documents he didn't talk about in the book), but Beardsley's sexuality doesn't really overwhelmingly concern me, and I don't know why Calloway was compelled to deliver his opinion on it at all. I was also irritated by Calloway's tendency to build up a kind of Victorian 'progression' narrative of Beardsley's work, as if the work he did towards the end of his life must have been better than his earlier work, simply because it was later. I don't really know why we should regard Beardsley's later, more baroque work as in any way superior to his Salome illustrations, or even the Le Morte D'Arthur ones, but then I'm not an art critic.