Enjoy an Exclusive Curator-Led Tour of Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity

Wachenheim Gallery, New York Public Library

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

476 Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

New York, NY 10018

Tickets ($25/$20 for Members) Here!

Today we live in a world of celebrity culture, but celebrity became an international industry in the late 19th century, and the English artist and author 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 England and the United States. 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 at first, but later shrank from. In essays and fiction, he explored the price of achieving and maintaining celebrity status in human terms in ways that still resonate with us.

This exhibition, the first on Beerbohm in New York for half a century and featuring rarely seen items from the New York Public Library’s own collection as well as loans from private and institutional collections, maps the career of Beerbohm in relationship to the idea of celebrity, following him from his early days in the decadent circles of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley through his late career as a radio performer on BBC broadcasts during World War II. Along the way, he knew, drew, and wrote about many other celebrities, from Henry James to Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and members of the British royal family.

📷 Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden, illustration from The Poet’s Corner, 1904
📷 Self-caricature by Max Beerbohm, c. 1893