Art Nouveau Erotica

The Works of Five Artists--England's Aubrey Beardsley, Australia's Norman Lindsay, Austria's Gustav Klimt and Germany's Franz von Bayros and Franz Christophe--comprise this Playboy portfolio of vintage erotic art. Like the turned-on art of today's hippies, art nouveau began as a reaction to the up-tight moral and aesthetic values of "square society." Lindsay's rococo creations--drawn during the Twenties in Australia, where the antisexual vestiges of Victorianism outlived its influence in Europe--are among the most outstanding and erotic examples of this hothouse genre. But the baroque and whimsical devisings of Beardsley, which are enjoying a psychedelically inspired renaissance in popularity, perhaps most extravagantly epitomize the sensuous fever-dreamworld created by these underground artists of their day. Aware from adolescence that he would die young of tuberculosis (he did, at 26), Beardsley determined to be a succés de scandale and carried dandyism to such parodic lengths that Oscar Wilde called him "the most monstrous of orchids." Yet he was a masterful, revolutionary decorative illustrator. For all of Beardsley's archness and grotesquerie, and that of his colleagues, art nouveau's erotic masterpieces possess a frenzied beauty that belittles--and yet humanizes--the repressive society that spawned and then banned them.