ABSTRACT
As early as 1894 Aubrey Beardsley’s work, especially his poster designs and illustrations for The Yellow Book and Salome, brought him favourable critical attention in France, and particularly from the Symbolists. The description of Beardsley as a ‘deformateur’ was promoted by Symbolist writers after 1897, and reflected the anti-naturalist and conservative tendencies in Symbolist art criticism. In spite of Roques’s assimilation of Beardsley’s style within a continental aesthetic of Symbolism, his ‘Englishness’ was emphasised repeatedly. Second-generation Symbolists in the years preceding the Great War adopted this non-moralistic and visual approach in their art criticism. In an essay of 1905, Robert de Montesquiou attempted to evoke what it was like to leaf through a volume of Beardsley’s drawings and to recreate the immediate impact of seeing his designs. Montesquiou’s writings on art took the new descriptive critical practice to extremes, and his essays on Beardsley contain descriptive passages of the most abstract yet sensual lyricism.
