Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity
Exhibition at the New York Public Library
Through January 28, 2024
Celebrity became an international industry in the late nineteenth century, and the English artist, author, and dandy Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) was at the center of it.
From the 1890s through the 1920s, to be a celebrity meant the hope—and fear—of turning up in a drawing or a parody by “Max,” as he was known in both Britain and the U.S. His brilliant skewering of famous people in his visual caricatures and of their writing styles in his satirical works made him a celebrity himself. This was an identity he enjoyed, but later shrank from. In essays and fiction, he explored the price in human terms of achieving and maintaining celebrity status in ways that still resonate with us now.
Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity maps Beerbohm’s career in relation to the idea of celebrity, following him from his early days in the social and artistic circles of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley through his late career as a radio performer on BBC broadcasts during World War II.
Drawn from across the Library’s collections, as well as loans from private and institutional collections, the exhibition includes rare original caricature drawings, manuscripts, photographs, books from Beerbohm’s library, and personal items, most on public display for the first time.
Text from the exhibition’s Printed Guide available here.
Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity
The exhibition is organized by The New York Public Library and curated by Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware, and by Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, with the assistance of Julie Carlsen, Assistant Curator, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library.
John Cooper, 2023
