Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre- painter & illustrator of Pierre Louys

The Secret

Louis Berthommé Saint-André was born in Barbary in Brittany on February 4th, 1905,  but spent his early childhood in Saintes, a commune near Angouleme in the southwest of France. Initially a student of architecture, Berthommé Saint-André changed to studying fine art when he entered the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris in 1921.

Self Portrait, 1925

Fillette republicaine

The artist is particularly known for his portraits, boudoir scenes, nudes, studies of ballet dancers and landscapes, which are painted in a vibrant, expressive style. His work shows the influence of both Cezanne and Eugène Delacroix, and, like many French painters of the period, he was influenced by his travels in North Africa, where he stayed for some time, developing his ‘Orientalist‘ interests. He exhibited widely from 1924 and received considerable professional acknowledgment in terms of awards, prizes and distinctions. He also designed attractive modernist ceramics later in his career.

Villa Abd-el-tif, 1926

Danseuse au maillot

As well as being prolific painter, Berthommé Saint-André created erotic illustrations for works by Baudelaire, Diderot and Voltaire and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Oeuvres Erotiques completes (1934), he illustrated the notorious Gamiani (or Two Nights of Excess), which published anonymously by Alfred de Musset in 1833, the lesbian heroine being a portrait of his lover Georges Sand. These may be seen as a natural progression from his voluptuous female nudes, which often show women lying on beds, dressing and undressing, arranging their hair or make up before mirrors, or posing, partially dressed, in their underwear. One critic has summarised this aspect of his work in these terms: “His lively and colourful paintings in their sparkling sensuality, in a deliberately old-fashioned style, are essentially centred on the theme of seductive young girls- pleasantly provocative, half-naked in their boudoir.” The artist’s personal preferences are manifest: he pretty evidently had a preference for buxom, well-built young women.

Dans la loge

Marie

Given the outrageously obscene material provided by Pierre Louys, any accompanying book plates needed to be daring.  Berthommé Saint-André, in his illustrations, was notably explicit.  He was faithful to the texts- and didn’t hold back in his illustrations to a 1931 edition of Trois filles de leur mere; for Pibrac: Quatrains Erotiques (1933), Berthommé drew further lesbian and group sex scenes.  His plates for Louys’ Poesies Erotiques (1946) are comparably faithful to the text; they include brothel scenes and orgies. His quite regular pictures of dancers, and images such as 1937’s ‘Two Girls on a Sofa,’ suggest that the painter may, in any case, have been rather familiar with the seamier or more Bohemian sections of Parisian society. The pose of the two girls, underwear exposed, is certainly highly reminiscent of images of sex workers relaxing painted by Pascin, Toulouse-Lautrec and other artists of the previous generation.

Two Girls on a Sofa

Needless to say, Berthommé’s illustrations to Marcel Seheur’s 1932 edition in French of ‘My Secret Life’ (Ma Vie Secrete) by the English writer calling himself ‘Walter‘ are just as unbridled as those just described. The book is a detailed account of the writer’s numerous sexual exploits from early adulthood and, like Saint-Andre’s responses to Louys, the illustrations are marked by their frank eroticism. Some very similar scenes were illustrated by Berthommé Saint-Andre for an edition of Apollinaire’s Oeuvres erotiques complètes of 1934. Once again, we see sex in a variety of age and gender combinations- plus many macabre and bizarre scenarios as well.  Because he worked in loose pen work and water colour, though, Saint-Andre’s book plates often managed to mitigate the potential obscenity of the material he was illustrating.

The various books illustrated by Louis Berthommé Saint-Andre are now highly collectable. They are regularly advertised through specialist art booksellers and auction houses, commanding high prices for volumes, whilst there is an active market for his bright and attractive landscapes and nudes.

For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page. More information on all the poetry and prose written by Pierre Louys can be found on the bibliography page for the author.

Collected poems, 1949