Chapter XIV (Chapter 14)
This is plate number 37 from Rossel and Vidal’s edition of Les yeux ouverts (1970), titled Les Erotiques de Beardsley.
This work is a re-edition of Aubrey Beardsley’s original lithographs created in 1893 to illustrate Le Morte d’Arthur.
The image presents a nude, androgynous youthful figure integrated into a dense network of thorny stems and stylized flowers, notable for its use of the black-blotch technique.
Unlike other pieces in this same 1970 series, this work lacks a colored border or frieze.
The publication of this series in the 1970 Érotiques collection was a direct response to the cultural impact of Beardsley’s major retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1966. That exhibition removed the stigma of obscenity that had weighed on these illustrations and generated a wave of interest that decisively influenced the aesthetics of psychedelia and editorial design in the 1970s.
From a biographical perspective, Beardsley produced these plates in the final stage of his life, marked by tuberculosis that would cause his death at the age of 25. As a central figure of the decadent and aestheticist movement, his style was deeply influenced by Japonisme and ukiyo-e prints.
The historical importance of the Les Érotiques portfolio lies in its ability to act as a bridge between the provocation of the fin de siècle and the modernity of the 20th century.
The folder of which this lithograph was a part is numbered by hand 268 (268/469)
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