Sexualities in Art 5: Mariette Lydis and the Books of Pierre Louys

Bilitis

Mariette Lydis (1887–1970) was an Austrian-Argentinian painter. She was born Marietta Ronsperger in Vienna, the third child of a Jewish merchant family. She first married Julius Koloman Pachoffer-Karñy in 1910, and, over the next twenty years or so, went through another two husbands, including Jean Lydis, whom she married in 1918 and whose surname she retained for professional purposes. The reason for this chequered marital history is revealed by the fact that, having fled the Nazi invasion of France, from 1940 until her death in 1970, she lived in Argentina with her partner Erica Marx (niece of Karl).

Lydis was a self-taught artist. In 1925, she moved to Paris and got involved in the art scene there, soon developing a reputation as a talented painter and illustrator. She began to exhibit her work in solo shows and illustrated books by many authors including Henry de Montherlant, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine and Pierre Louÿs. Her reputation as an up-and-coming avant-garde artist was established, although the war and her exile to London and then South America inevitably interrupted this.

La petite danseuse, 1956

Portrait of a young girl

In 1948 Lydis returned to France and resumed worked for publishers, illustrating works by Guy de Maupassant, Colette, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Henry James. Lydis eventually returned to Buenos Aires and her later work is notable for its brighter tones and focus on women, adolescents, and young children. as subjects (see for example, her oil paintings Jeune femme de profil (1933), Portrait de jeune fille (1955), and Jovencita (1950)). Over her career, Lydis primarily created lithographs, but she also worked in pencil, watercolour, charcoal, etching and oils, producing prints, drawings, and paintings. Her drawing style is delicate and sparing and she is an accomplished draughtswoman; Lydis could, perhaps, be criticised for the fact that the women in her pictures all look the same, but this could of course be more a matter of celebrating her ideal than any want of skill.

Lydis, Bilitis, 1948

Along with her book illustrations, Lydis is known for her portfolios of lithographs depicting lesbian and bisexual relationships. She tended to show her female couples in active/ passive roles, derived from the stereotype of heterosexual relationships. The illustration to Bilitis, song 53, in which Bilitis and Mnasidika marry in a ceremony invented by Louys for classical Greece (see above) is a good example of this; the older partner is subtly, but discernibly female, a bold statement for its time, perhaps. Lydis was criticised for such representations of dykes and femmes and some of her images were described as “perverse.” However, a review of one of her exhibitions in 1931 perceptively praised her work because it “represents the feminine outlook [and] gives us a facet of truth as seen by feminine eyes…”

from Sappho, ‘Ode to a beloved Woman’

Lydis produced several lesbian collections, almost definitely reflecting her own bisexuality.  These include Lesbiennes (1926) and Sappho (1933), which feature couples and threesomes making love.  She then illustrated a 1934 editions of Pierre Louys’ La Femme et le pantin, Sanguines, Bilitis and Aphrodite, in the second of which she concentrated almost solely on the female and lesbian aspects of the story. She later created a second set of plates for a further edition of Louys’ other lesbian classic, Les Chansons de Bilitis, in 1948. Some artists, in working on Bilitis, have chosen play down certain aspects of the text. One is the powerful same-sex desire of Louys’ songs: their un-abashed celebration of longing and attraction are the reason why Louys has gained a reputation as a sympathetic ‘champion’ of lesbian love. The age-discrepant nature of Bilitis’ taste in lovers is also frequently elided; the illustrations to the 1948 edition by Mariette Lydis are- like those of Almery Lobel Riche in 1937- amongst these (Lobel-Riche turned his Greek women into society flappers in 1930s Paris, for example). A contrast may be made here with plates created by Suzanne Ballivet, who was quite uninhibited in her depictions of young women in passionate love when she was commissioned to work on Louys’ Les Aventures du Roi Pausole. Lydis, by contrast, was far more restrained; her images are often close up studies of her subjects’ heads, or else of their torsos, so whilst their nudity is clear, the context is only suggested rather than explicitly portrayed. The illustration from Sappho above is a good example of this. That’s not to say that Lydis didn’t sometimes go for frank passion: her plates for a 1949 edition of Paul Verlaine’s Parallelement (1867), for instance, tackles the sonnet Les Amies (The Female Lovers) directly, showing the pair entwined during lovemaking. Often, though, the artist’s couples are much more meditative- perhaps post-coital, certainly simply enjoying companionship and simple loving proximity. Verlaine, like Louys, was very positive in his approach to same-sex passion, marking something of a break with poets like Baudelaire, whose Damned Women dealt with the same kind of scenario but in a much more ‘Gothic’ manner.

Overall, the delicacy of Lydis’ drawings perfectly capture the tenderness of love whilst her portraits are delicate and full of charm. For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page. For more details of the works of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography page for him. For more general information, see my recommended reading page.

Lydis, Bilitis

Young Girl with Flowers & Butterfly