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Aubrey Beardsley transformed the strange, sensual, and grotesque into some of the most recognizable black-and-white imagery of the 1890s. From his infamous Salome illustrations to The Yellow Book and Le Morte Darthur, his work helped define the visual language of decadence while influencing generations of illustrators, designers, and artists.

Max Klinger understood that some images belong to daylight and others belong somewhere much darker.

The German artist, born in Leipzig in 1857, worked as a painter and sculptor, but it was in printmaking that his imagination became truly strange. Across elaborate cycles of etchings, engravings, aquatints and mezzotints, Klinger constructed private worlds filled with desire, anxiety, erotic obsession, death, myth and dream.

Félicien Rops is one of those artists who seems to have wandered into the nineteenth century carrying news from a much stranger time. Born in Namur, Belgium, in 1833, he began conventionally enough: school, art lessons, university in Brussels, caricatures, marriage, respectable connections. But respectability never really suited the Artist. As a young man he helped found the satirical journal Uylenspiegel, drawing political and social cartoons, and by the 1860s he was spending more and more time in Paris learning printmaking and drifting toward the literary underground. By 1875 he had settled there permanently. Paris gave Rops exactly what he needed: writers, publishers, prostitutes, dandies, skeptics, nightlife, collectors, cafés, bad reputations, and an audience that could still be scandalized.

Hyman Bloom painted death as if there were still something alive inside it. Cadavers split open on autopsy tables, exposed organs, severed limbs and decomposing bodies appear throughout some of his most powerful paintings. But Bloom was not interested in simple horror. His corpses glow with reds, yellows, violets and strange pearly colors. Thick paint turns ruined flesh into something almost jewel-like.

Takato Yamamoto’s figures seem to exist somewhere between the living body and the decorated corpse.

They are impossibly pale and composed, surrounded by lilies, insects, exposed bones, curling plants and ornamental patterns. Nothing in these images is allowed to remain simply beautiful for long. Look closer and a flower becomes part of a wound, a delicate arrangement reveals a skull, or an elegant body begins to merge with something dead, animal or unnatural.