Page 51 - Studio International - June 1966

Salome on Settle
(Mâitresse d'Orchestre) 1893

fancy waistcoat. One gathers from the astonishing beauty public, after all, has had little opportunity of seeing the
of this drawing a sense of what the inventive linear genius privately-printed drawings, and in his own time it was
of Picasso might have made of the male genitalia, so the style itself with its 'infernal and disturbing grace',
much more visually effective than the female's, if he had and its marvellously radical simplifications conceived for
felt free to be as celebratory as when contemplating the mechanical reproduction, that shocked and subverted.
female breast. His drawings are acts of ironical purification, unerring in
But when all is said and done, Beardsley's fame is not their distinction and wit, and it is surprising that we ever
dependent upon his scandalous subject-matter. The lost the taste for them. q
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