Poster for the Keynotes Series

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52198055213_9a41ffd5a4_z.jpg

Creator

Aubrey Beardsley

Title

Poster for the Keynotes Series

Coverage

[London:

Publisher

John Lane,

Date

1895].

Subject

Color lithograph.

Description

Like a late-twentieth-century colorizer of old Hollywood films, Beardsley took his black-and-white design for the cover and title-page of “George Egerton’s” Keynotes (1893) and turned it into a vibrant, eye-catching advertising poster for the “Keynotes Series” with surprising contrasts of scarlet and green against yellow. Making the female marionette’s parasol a bright red, however, merely highlighted its placement and risqué status as an erect phallic object. The poster was notable, too, for shuffling the titles in the series, for which Beardsley continued to provide binding designs and title-pages, and for ignoring their chronological order of publication. By no accident, at the top of the list was the current bestseller, The Woman Who Did (1895), a shocking novel by Grant Allen (1848–1899) about a “New Woman” who refused to marry her lover, and who paid the price for standing by her feminist principles and raising her child as a single mother.

Source

From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press