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Reviews the exhibition \"Oscar Wilde : l'impertinent absolu\" (\"Oscar Wilde : absolute impertinence\"), which was on display at the Petit Palais in Paris through 15 January 2017. The curators of this first large-scale show devoted to Wilde in France clearly held in mind the need to balance the documentary and the visually appealing when making their exemplary and sure-footed selection of material. [Revised Publication Abstract]

Reviews \"Aubrey Beardsley : a catalogue raisonné,\" by Linda Gertner Zatlin (Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, 2016). This new full-dress catalogue raisonné of Beardsley's work, 25 years in the making, appears now as a handsome two-volume boxed set. With new photography of the original drawings or reproductions from early line blocks, these volumes constitute the most complete achievable pictorial record of Beardsley's oeuvre. There are 1,086 entries, supplemented by appendices of Beardsley's sketches in letters and books, bringing the tally to over 1,100. From this visual aspect, and for their lavish production values, these volumes deserve high praise. This makes it all the more disappointing that on the scholarly side the enterprise falls short on the levels of judgment and accuracy required of a catalog with pretensions to lasting authority. [Revised Publication Abstract]

Provides an obituary for the art historian John Christian. Christian was a leading authority on 19th-century British art with an unrivalled knowledge of the life and work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. As an independent scholar he moved easily between the worlds of academics and the art trade. OA

Stephen Smith's piece on art nouveau, prompted by the BBC4 series Sex and Sensibility (\"Art nouveau\", March 24), rightly alludes to the periodic revival of interest in the style. Unfortunately, the article itself revives yet again one of the oldest canards: that Aubrey Beardsley's famous drawings for Oscar Wilde's Salome were intended as costume designs for a stage production of the play.

THE POSE OF INTENSITY AND THE CULT OF AESTHETIC RESPONSE IN THE 1880s AND 1890s When Oscar Wilde first rediscovered and began to write in Pen, Pencil and Poison' of the life and opinions of the Regency painter, belletrist, convicted forger and 'subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival', Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, he found revealed in the character of this artistic and intellectual dandy not only an aspect of his own nature and genius, but also, perhaps, the key to an essential quality of the Aesthetic and Decadent sensibility as it developed in England in the 1880s and 90s. That quality we might define as a Dandyism of the Senses - a self-consciously precious and highly fastidious discrimination brought to bear on both art and life. The dandy-aesthetes of the fin-de-siècle period above all honed their senses and cultivated the rarest of sensibilities; they made the perfection of the pose of exquisiteness their greatest aim and they directed all their languid energies towards nurturing a cult of aesthetic response that begins beyond ordinary notions of taste, that lies beyond mere considerations of fashion, and operates quite outside the dictates of all conventional canons of morality. Wilde was perhaps the first to perceive that this very specific sensibility had been intriguingly foreshadowed by the ideas and opinions enshrined in Wainewright's precociously brilliant art-journalism of the early years of the nineteenth century; in particular in those essays in which the mercurial dandy-critic first adumbrated his own idiosyncratic version of a pose of exquisite sensibility and the notion of a cult of aesthetic response.