Aubrey Beardsley and 'Salomé'

Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Oscar Wilde's play Salomé: a tragedy in one act in 1894, although Wilde hated his illustrations as "too Japanese," whatever that means. They included the one above and the two below.

Beardsley's excelled in erotic illustrations, however, like the hilarious ones below for the privately printed edition of Aristophanes Lysistrata in 1896, which were inspired by Japanese shunga. They included "The Examination of the Herald" and "The Lacedaemonian Ambassadors." You may recall that in the story of Lysistrata, the heroine persuades the women of Greece to withhold sex until the men stop fighting (the Peloponnesian War). The immediate result is that many men are burdened by overlarge erections.

It's a situation ripe for satire and Germaine Greer's 1972 updating of Aristophanes's Lysistrata can claim to keep the spirit of Beardsley alive.

You can see similar approach in the work of French illustrator, Martin van Maële, especially La Grande Danse macabre des vifs (1905).