Decadence in art, illustration & literature- from Moreau to Louys

Moreau, Salome Dancing (1874)

Two French painters, Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes, are generally regarded as being the originators of the Symbolist style of painting. In fact, this is a myth, a convenient reshaping of history after the events. Symbolism was a literary movement, centred on poets such as Mallarme and Verlaine, and it was only after the core elements of the new poetic movement had become clear that some individuals looked for visual equivalents to what they were writing and (post facto) selected some artists as their champions.

Gustave Moreau (1826-98) was not an unworthy choice, nevertheless, and his influence upon later artists of significance, such as Aubrey Beardsley, is not to be underestimated. Much of what he painted foreshadows themes and ideas that were key to the later Symbolist and Decadent movements. Moreau was fascinated in particular by the figure of Salome and, in general, it has been said that his women “if not active destroyers… are women whom it would be unwise to offend. His fairies, for instance, are never the frail, fluttering creatures of early Romanticism, but personages who are both powerful and, for all their beauty, sinister. They seem… to be part of a powerfully imaginative celebration of male fears of castration and impotence” (Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, 69). The lovely but deadly femme fatale was, in fact, an obsession of numerous late nineteenth century writers and artists.

Moreau, The Execution of Messalina, 1874

Moreau painted dreams and fantasies, those which gave expression to the “sexual roles and identity that characterise his age.” Symbolist dreams, though, were “more enigmatic, more perverse” than those of their Romantic predecessors according to Michael Gibson (Symbolism, 35) and they focused upon a binary opposition of androgynous males and perilous females. Another art historian has detected in Moreau’s work “voluptuousness” coupled with a “feeling that there can be no beauty without sorrow, the feeling of blood beside the most intensely sensual images…” (Jullian, The Symbolists, 37-38). Excitement, sex, violence and tragedy mixed together make for an addictive mix for audiences.

Beardsley, Messalina Returning Home, 1896

A couple of writers perceived these qualities in Moreau’s work. One I have discussed before: Karl Joris Huysmans; his literary Symbolism is inseparable from the concurrent notion of fin-de-siecle Decadence, as epitomised in his two major works, A Rebours (Against Nature) and La-bas (Down There), which explores Satanism. In A Rebours, Huysmans identified Moreau as the quintessentially Symbolist aesthetic painter, the focus of the writer’s attention being upon the artist’s paintings of Salome dancing before Herod. He describes these two images in chapter four of the book; Salome’s dance is “lascivious… lost in a mysterious ecstasy,” through which she becomes “symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of Immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty… the monstrous Beast…” She represents “mortal woman, the soiled vessel, ultimate cause of every sin and crime”- a sentence which encapsulates the period’s combined fear, desire and misogyny. As for the creator of this “true harlot, obedient to her passionate and cruel female temperament,” Moreau himself is said to have had “a morbid perspicuity of an entirely modern sensibility.” He was “haunted by the symbols of superhuman passions and superhuman perversities, of divine debauches perpetrated without enthusiasm and without hope.” The painter himself has become the epitome of Decadence.

Beardsley, Messalina and her Companion, 1895

Emile Zola felt the same: he had his reservations about Moreau’s work, but in L’Oeuvre (1886), he too described the artist’s depiction of Salome; she was “this idol from some unknown religion,” created by “the unwitting artisan of this symbol of insatiable desire, this extra-human image of flesh transformed into gold and diamonds…”

So, at the roots of Symbolism, Decadence and Art Nouveau lay Moreau with his emphasis “on sensual cruelty and suffering” (Lucie-Smith, Eroticism in Western Art, 139-141). Along with subjects such as Messalina and Salome, this perverse eroticism was inherited by Beardsley and, in turn, by Franz von Bayros and others. This decadent sensibility is, as well, the link connecting these visual artists to the work of a writer such as Pierre Louys. He first began to write and publish in the 1890s, but he cannot be termed a Symbolist, I don’t believe- he’s too concrete and fleshly for that. He is resolutely Decadent, though, I’d say- and it appears that von Bayros understood that. Included his portfolio the Erzählungen vom Toilettentisch (Tales from the Dressing Table, 1911) there is a plate titled Der Tempel der Cotys, in which a naked woman is depicted near a Greek temple embracing a female herm statue rather too enthusiastically. The goddess Cotys/ Kotys was the ancient Thracian goddess of wild places, who was worshipped with Bacchic-like orgies. She was also known as Cottyto and, under this name, appeared in Louys’ second novel Aphrodite as the subject of frenzied rites: she was the goddess “in whose name fearful, unknown debauches were accomplished” by the temple courtesans. “Once a month, at full moon, they gathered in the close of the temple, maddened by aphrodisiac beverages and girdled by canonical phalli.” One of the women would take a fatal dose of poison and then “Her body, everywhere foaming, became the centre and the model of the whirling orgy…” Von Bayros, like any educated person, knew his classical myths; in the same Toilettentisch collection he illustrated his vision of the encounter of Jupiter und Europa and, in 1914, he published a portfolio entitled Götterliebschaften (The Loves of the Gods) in which he depicted such stories as that of Leda, Circe and (again) Europa. Nevertheless, Cotys is an obscure figure from the ancient pagan pantheon, and I can’t help suspecting that he found her (and the associated female orgies) in Louys’ famous novel, for the perspective of the French writer would have been deeply appealing to the Austrian illustrator.

von Bayros, Der Tempel der Cotys, 1911

Pierre Louys brought together in his written work many of the strands of feeling highlighted in my summary of Gustave Moreau: a consistent eroticism coupled with an innate perversity, the inherent misogyny, the often ambivalent attitude towards female sexuality as something intriguing but threatening, the fascination with the ancient past and its stories and deities. For Louys, as for von Bayros, Beardsley, Moreau and many others, the distant past provided a safe vehicle by which difficult contemporary issues and concerns could be examined.

For more discussion of von Bayros and the conjunctions between art and Louys, see my study In the Garden of Eros.

From Lysistrata to Cydalise- Beardsley, von Bayros & Traynier

Beardsley, engraving of Lysistrata for Lysistrata

In 1975, the artist, lecturer and art historian Peter Webb wrote about the work of the Austrian illustrator Franz von Bayros, describing his illustrations of erotic literature and his “skilful drawings that reflected fin-de-siecle extravagance and showed a great debt to Aubrey Beardsley. He conjured up a world of guiltless sex, a carefree world of sexual pleasure only occasionally marred by harsher realities.” Von Bayros’ inspiration by Beardsley (as well- to a lesser extent- by Felicien Rops) is clear, but it struck me recently, when working on my study In the Garden of Eros, how their influences might also be traced to Jean Traynier, illustrator of Cydalise by Pierre Louys.

Beardsley, engraving for Lysistrata

Aubrey Beardsley was a self-taught artist who had learned his craft from studying illustrated books and ancient Greek painted vases. He was inspired and encouraged by Edward Burne-Jones, but (as Edward Lucie-Smith wrote in Symbolist Art) the young man emphasised what was perverse in the older painter’s work. Beardsley is known for his sharp penwork, his “linear arabesque,” which he balanced against bold contrasts of black and white. Lucie Smith described how Beardsley was a natural illustrator, able to “think of the design as something written on a surface, whose essential flatness must be preserved in order to balance the type which appear either on the same page or on a facing page.” He was a founder of the Art Nouveau style, hugely influential across Europe, and, through his work, book illustration came to be dominated by the new Symbolist and Art Nouveau ideas: “Partly art and partly craft, illustration rapidly assimilated itself” to the new decorative movement- as we have seen, for example, with Henri Caruchet.

Beardsley is renowned for the highly erotic nature of much of his illustration. His work on Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata (1905) is characterised, in particular, by men caricatured with enormous phalluses and, quite commonly, large, mature women with big bosoms and bottoms. He depicted sexuality and bodily functions with a startling honesty that offended many at the time. Webb was perfectly correct to spot the lineal influence, for the work of von Bayros bears many close parallels with that of Beardsley: not only is his sharp graphic work comparable (both artists depicted fabrics in a masterly fashion), but there are the exaggerated phalli (which may also be found in Rops), the obese and lascivious women, the preternatural and precocious children, and (even) in one plate, from his collection Im Garten der Aphrodite, a scene in which woman ecstatically rubs herself along a taut rope (something which instantly reminded me of the engraving of ‘Two Athenian women in distress’ from Lysistrata reproduced above). Odd forms of excitement like this are typical of the illustrator’s images: compare as well ‘Le Collier‘ (The Necklace) from von Bayros’ portfolio of 16 prints produced under the pseudonym of Chevalier de Bouval in about 1925.

Beardsley, The Climax, 1893

Both Beardsley and von Bayros illustrated Salome and John the Baptist- in the case of Beardsley, for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1896). Each artist also detected and portrayed something unwholesomely sexual in the relationship between the princess and the executed prophet- in one plate by von Bayros he showed Salome breast-feeding the severed head of the Baptist, which lies on a plate. Decapitated heads and skulls were, in fact, common in the Austrian’s’ work, another part of the cloying atmosphere of macabre perversity that he constructed.

print by von Bayros

These two earlier artists seem to have provided clear models for Jean Traynier when he came to taking on erotic works such as Louys’ Cydalise in 1949 and a 1957 edition of Point de Lendemain, ou la nuit merveilleuse (No Tomorrow, or the Wonderful Night) by Dominique-Vivant Denon (1747-1825). In the case of the latter, the eighteenth century setting reminds me of many works by von Bayros, such as his 1905 portfolio Fleurettens Purpurschnecke- Erotische Lieder und Gedichte (Fleurette’s Purple Snail- Erotic Songs and Poems from the Eighteenth Century) and John Cleland’s novel, Die Memoiren der Fanny Hill (1906). In part, these images simply mirror the era of the works being illustrated, but their erotic nature (and that of other writers such as Laclos and de Sade) generally imparted an aura of licentiousness to the entire period- so that wigs and beauty spots came to act as visual symbols for a certain liberated sexuality: Beardsley’s plates for The Rape of the Lock, as well as the general mood of his Lysistrata, are cases in point; in addition, see my book, Voyage to the Isle of Venus.

von Bayros, illustration for John Cleland’s Fanny Hill

As for Traynier’s monochrome engravings for Cydalise, two of the plates feature exaggerated, ‘fantasy’ phalli directly comparable to those seen in Lysistrata, and surely inspired by them, possibly by way of either von Bayros or Rops- or just as likely directly. Comparable ‘erotic dream’ images, albeit in very different styles, may be found in the 1932 edition of Pybrac by the Czech surrealist Toyen and in recent work by the British graphic artist Trevor Brown. In addition, the black and white style adopted for both works by Traynier repeats that of von Bayros and Beardsley, suggesting that, for him, it seemed suitable for depicting powerfully erotic scenes. Another small detail which may indicate a derivation from Beardsley’s Lysistrata are the many bows the decorate the hair of Traynier’s female figures- an elaborate and distinctive touch.

The influence of von Bayros might also be traced in similar details. I have discussed previously the pseudonymous erotic illustrator Fameni Leporini. The impact of Claude Bornet’s 1790s illustrations to de Sade seems clear, as both opt for naked bodies stacked up improbably in their renderings of orgies, but the morbid mood of von Bayros may also be detected. Leporini, too, preferred pen and ink for his designs and we may identify in them various traits and details that appear to have been borrowed from the Austrian: the mood of perverse cruelty and of lesbian passion that suffuses a good deal of his work and certain specific scenes which could be derived more directly from examples by von Bayros.

“Meet Me at the Cemetery Gate:” the art of Alfred Kubin

The Graveyard Wall, 1900

Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin (1877-1959) was an Austrian printmaker, illustrator and occasional writer.
In 1898, after a failed apprenticeship with a photographer, a suicide attempt (on his mother’s grave with a rusty, faulty gun) and a nervous breakdown (for which he was hospitalised for a time), Kubin began training as an artist at a private academy. He didn’t complete this course, seemingly impatient to progress his career, for he enrolled at the Munich Academy the next year.

After the Battle, 1902

In Munich, Kubin began to visit art galleries and first encountered the work of Odilon Redon , Edvard Munch, James Ensor, Félicien Rops, Aubrey Beardsley and Max Klinger. The latter’s series of prints, Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove, which I have described before, had a particular impact on the young and impressionable artist. Of this “cascade of visions,” he declared “Here an absolutely new art was thrown open to me, which offered free play for the imaginative expression of every conceivable world of feeling… I swore that I would dedicate my life to the creation of similar works”.

Haushamerlind, 1907

Inspired by Klinger and Goya- and by a visit to Redon in Paris in 1905- Kubin began to produce fantastical, macabre drawings in pen and ink, with some watercolour washes. Although initially associated with the Blaue Reiter group of expressionists, from 1906 he gradually became ever more withdrawn and isolated and lost contact with the artistic avant-garde. Despite (or perhaps because) of his solitary life, Kubin was prodigiously productive and inventive, especially during the first decade of the new century. In total he produced between six and seven thousand drawings- of which just a few are selected here. Kubin’s art, stylistically, looked back to Symbolism with its morbid and supernatural elements. Like Goya, he often created thematic series of drawings, regularly dealing with issues such as sexual violence, human suffering and magical, malevolent female power. After Germany absorbed Austria in 1938, Kubin’s output was condemned as ‘degenerate’- perhaps this isn’t surprising given that he had termed himself “the artistic gravedigger of the Austrian empire.”

Epidemic (1901)

Kubin also worked as an illustrator, designing plates for editions of works by Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Dostoevsky, amongst others. He was also an author in his own right, albeit of just one book, Die andere Seite (‘The Other Side’) in 1908, a fantasy novel set in an imaginary land. In the story’s epilogue, Kubin revealingly declared “I loved Death, loved her ecstatically, as if she were a woman; I was transported with rapture… I surrendered completely to her… I was the lover of that glamorous mistress, that glorious princess of the world who is indescribably beautiful in the eyes of those she touches.”

Ins unbekannte (Into the unknown), 1901

It seems pretty clear that Kubin’s unhappy youth and his troubled mental state contributed directly to the art he created. He may have officially have been cured of his mental illness, but his work suggests an imagination still disturbed- and it can’t have helped that, from the age of nineteen, he was steeped in the rather pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, who saw “misfortune as the general rule.” Kubin recorded how important dreams were for him as a source of artistic inspiration and that when he sat down to create art he was seized by “unspeakable psychic tremors.” From the artists he admired and closely studied, he seems to have retained only the most morbid elements. In his images, women and sex represent danger and power and death is ever present.

Our Universal Mother, the Earth, 1902

A Return of Aphrodite- on the Venusberg

In his short story, An Ascent of the Venusberg, written in 1903, the author Pierre Louys explored the possibility of encountering the goddess of love in the contemporary world.

The Venusberg, as I have previously described, is a mountain in Germany near Eisenach in Thuringia, now called the Hörselberg. The peak is the focus of folklore and myth, being immortalised in the story of Tannhäuser by Wagner, Aubrey Beardsley, William Morris, Swinburne and- even- Aleister Crowley. 

In Louys’ version of the story, a Frenchman is visiting Eisenach after attending performances of Wagner at Bayreuth. From his hotel room, he can see the Venusberg, which- due to his “sinful disposition”- looks to him “exactly like the swelling breast of a woman… It quivered; positively seemed to be alive at certain hours of the evening… [giving the impression] that Thuringia, like a goddess reclining… was letting the blood rise, in her passion, to the summit of her bare breast.”

He decides to climb the mountain one day. There is a small hostelry at the summit, where he has a meal; one of the two sisters running the place has an “obliging disposition” and makes it clear that sex is available too on top of the peak. The tourist settles instead for directions to the Venushöhle, the Grotto of Venus. It is only a short walk away, but she warns him of the madman to be found there.

The grotto of the goddess looks exactly as one might anticipate: “it was small, in the form of a vertical ellipse crowned with slender brown brambles.” The madman is also present, warning the visitor not to enter because “Venus dwells there herself in the flesh with her millions of nymphs about her.” This scarcely discourages the Frenchman, so the madman begins to rant. It seems he was once a godly and pure young man; even though he married, he renounced the temptations of the world and he and his wife lived together in a “state of grace” (or so they thought). He has learned, though, that this attempt at austere self-denial was utterly wrongheaded: it was “a lie, each day, to the law of life.” Now it is too late- he is old and still a virgin: “Woe to all virgins! For the love they have rejected all their short lives will justly torture them in the infinity of the wrath to come!”

The man sits on the mountain peak daily to commune with Aphrodite, because every evening “the Goddess sings a sweet song… she calls to me from afar, she draws me to her.” Eventually, he will perish by falling down into the Venushöhle and thence into the furnace in which the chaste are punished.

The pair wait and then “a breath of perfumes bore to our ears the languishing echo of a Voice…”- and the story ends abruptly. We can only assume that, as this is told as a reminiscence, this “sinful” young man met with no punishment from the goddess.

There are many aspects of this little account typical of Louys. He treats the ancient pagan deities as still alive and actively present in the modern world. Secondly, sex and sexuality are to the fore- though for very obvious reasons, given the subject matter. Thirdly, the author took pleasure (as he often did) in inverting and reversing the tenets of Christianity. The Venusberg is the gateway to hell, but punishment here is for the “niggards of the flesh” those who have lived “solitary lives in revolt against the great divine law.” Hell is a place full of “thousands of millions of naked women dancing,” placed there to torment those who denied themselves the pleasures of their bodies during their lives. In the philosophy of Venus (and Louys) carnal delight is good and virtuous and abstinence is unnatural. The writer had said the same six years previously in Aphrodite, when he described how “virginity displeases [the goddess].” Here he expanded on the idea, stating more clearly the principle that underlay so much of his work.

See my Louys bibliography and details of my various publications on the poet, as well as details of my book on the goddess herself.

Viennese Decadence- the art of Franz von Bayros

Dante’s Inferno, canto 19

Vienna at the turn of the last century still retains for us an aura of decadence and bohemianism. This is derived from a number of sources- the famous paintings of Gustav Klimt (and a little later, those of Egon Schiele); the researches of Sigmund Freud into the unconscious and the nature of sexuality; the writing of Felix Salten and his outrageous pretend biography of prostitute Josefine Mutzenbacher.

Another, less well known strand in this aura of fin-de-siecle debauchery must be the art of Franz von Bayros, although his collections of prints are far less well known than the paintings of Klimt and Schiele.

The artist in 1898

Some artists dare to be as explicit and as provocative as possible. Unquestionably, Franz von Bayros (1866-1924) was one of these. He was a commercial artist, illustrator and painter who is usually classed as part of the Decadent movement and who regularly utilised erotic themes and fantastic imagery. The explicit content of his phantasmagoric erotic illustrations mean that von Bayros is often compared to Félicien Rops and Aubrey Beardsley, yet he is probably more scandalous than either of them. He was often called ‘Marquis Bayros’ in reference to the Marquis de Sade.

Bayros was born into a Spanish noble family in Zagreb, which was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and, aged seventeen, he entered the Vienna Academy, where his friends included Johann Strauss. After the breakdown of a marriage, Bayros moved to Munich to continue his art studies. He subsequently travelled and exhibited widely in Europe, staging his first exhibition of work in 1904. Thereafter, he embarked upon a career illustrating books, particularly those with an erotic content, such as Fanny Hill which was published in 1906. He also designed portfolios of his own erotic fantasy art. In 1911 Bayros published his most famous and controversial work, the portfolio Erzählungen am Toilettentische (Tales from the Dressing Table). This collection featured extensive scenes of lesbian bondage, group sex, and sado-masochism- themes that dominate his entire output. It was possibly unsurprising that he was later arrested and prosecuted by the state censor, leading to his exile from Germany. He returned to Vienna, but felt increasingly depressed and alienated.

Von Bayros produced a stream of erotic prints (albeit in quite limited editions) during the first decades of the twentieth century. These began with the 1905 collection Fleurettens Purpurschnecke (‘Fleurette’s Purple Snail- Songs and Poems from the Eighteenth Century’), a limited-edition portfolio of black and white drawings illustrating eighteenth century ‘Erotische Lieder und Gedichte’ (Erotic Poems and Stories).

In 1907 he issued four collections- the Geschichten aus Aretino (Stories from Aretino) of fifteen engravings; Die hübsche Andalusierin (The Pretty Andalucian Girl), which follows the sexual life of a woman called Aldonza; Die Grenouillère, the French title of which refers to a one-piece pyjama suit but has the sense of the English colloquial ‘birthday suit’- in other words, nudity; and Die Bonbonnière (The Box of Sweets), comprising two portfolios of six prints each, the etchings being accompanied by short poems.

The White Peacock

Erzählungen am Toilettentische was published under the name of ‘Choisy le Conin’, which von Bayros had adopted for the French market- partly to appeal to a Francophone public and partly to conceal his true identity. However, the cover of the collection stated his true name, leading to the censorship action in Munich over the sexual content. The Geschichte der Zairette, also released in 1911, likewise includes a high degree of adult lesbian erotica.

Bilder aus dem Boudoir der Madame CC (Pictures from the Boudoir of Madame CC), was privately published in 1912 and was a collection of thirty existing etchings, brought together under a suggestive title. The images include a mix of heterosexual and lesbian activity with a good deal of fetish bondage. Im Garten der Aphrodite (In Aphrodite’s Garden) was a portfolio from 1910 comprising eighteen etchings which was published at the same time as Bilder aus dem Boudoir and shared nine images with it. It largely depicts adult women seducing younger girls. Finally, Lesbischer Reigen (Lesbian Roundelay) was published in 1920. It was von Bayros’ last erotic portfolio, comprising just six etchings, and shows adult female couples. Von Bayros’ work for private clients is also highly enlightening. He was commissioned to design numerous ex libris book plates, and these were uniformly erotic in content. Inevitably, his clients shared his strange erotic tastes: for example, Stephan Kellner’s 1910 library plate pictures a girl crouching naked in front of a large snake.

A 1911 bookplate

Another late work by von Bayros is the three volume Bayros Mappe set, published in about 1920. It returns to book illustration, with one volume focused upon the legend of Isolde and another comprising six coloured drawings on the subject of Salome, a Decadent favourite. He then illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1921, not a surprising choice perhaps. Sinnlicher Reigen– ‘Sensual Dance (Pan)’- is another colour image of the same date as the Bayros Mappe. It is a more typically bizarre von Bayros scene, which is taking place in the porch of an elegant house. The focus is Pan, a huge hooved figure, who is dancing arms linked with two women. One is fully clothed in black, including a hat and coat, and is rather calm and static; the other is naked except for her white high heels and is cavorting excitedly. In the foreground, with her back to us, is a young plump fauness, naked and with her golden hair in a bun. The juxtapositions of clothed and naked, young and old, human and mythical, coupled with an ambiguous atmosphere of sensuality, are typical of the artist. You are often unsure whether we are witnessing scenes in the real world or in some sort of febrile dream.

While von Bayros had risen to the highest cultural and artistic circles in Munich, it was difficult for him to re-establish himself in Vienna. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 prevented a long-planned for emigration to Rome. The defeat and collapse of Germany and Austria in 1918 led to severe depressions in the last years of his life. Although he enjoyed considerable success with his beautiful watercolour illustrations for the Divine Comedy, the work on the drawings exhausted him both physically and mentally. Devaluation of the Austrian currency added to his problems and von Bayros died in poverty in Vienna in 1924. One of his very last publications, a portfolio of sixteen prints issued in 1925 under the name of the Chevalier de Bouval, is typical of von Bayros’ entire output: it features solely women, seen occasionally alone but usually in pairs in bedrooms, where they engage in a range of more or less unusual practices together. The engravings are all completed in the artist’s typical style of very fine penwork, attention to detail and rich depiction of fabrics- whether voluminous lacy dresses or the cushions upon which the figures recline.

The reputation of Von Bayros has risen in recent decades as there has been a rediscovery of his weird and decadent art. He has been praised for “the bizarre sexual anarchy that he created in the sedate and decorous boudoirs of the early 1900s. Powerful females populate his exquisite, beautifully detailed drawings where sexual perversity is rife, and the byword is luxurious decadence.” The world that von Bayros imagined was radically at odds with the bourgeois society he knew and whose members purchased his works. His women seem to be part of that world, yet they actually inhabit a parallel existence where men are largely absent and strange fetishes and practices dominate. I think that, alongside the clear eroticism of von Bayros’ work, there is also a strand of bizarre humour, an element which must be considered when assessing the overall tone of his work.

The work of von Bayros may profitably be compared to that of the closely contemporary Martin van Maële. The latter’s collection of forty drawings, La Grande Danse macabre des vifs, was published in Brussels in 1905 by erotic specialist Charles Carrington. This ‘dance macabre’ examined in frank, if blackly comedic, detail a wide range of sexual preferences, including juvenile explorations, rape, oral sex, lesbian encounters and age-discrepant desire. In very many respects, van Maële’s baroque and uninhibited fantasies parallel the contemporary erotic visions of von Bayros. Both reveal something of the psyche of the age, crystallising or laying bare attitudes and appetites which were generally hidden but which, in visual form, were far less mediated or disguised.

I have refrained from reproducing illustrations from the portfolios such as Erzählungen am Toilettentische and Im Garten der Aphrodite, but von Bayros’ work is readily available online, from art and antique dealers and book sellers, and from Amazon and the like in the form of collections of his pictures. For more discussion of the works of von Bayros in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

Girls in Masks- Mystery & Power

Pierre-Amedee Marcel-Beronneau, Masked Woman,

What is it about masks that makes them a symbol of a perverse eroticism? Simply putting on a black mask covering half the face, as is so often seen at masked balls in costume dramas, immediately bespeaks seduction, mystery and illicit love. The mere wearing of the mask, without anything else, signals this to us- along with a range of other subtexts.

We saw these messages being deployed most recently by Ariana Grande to promote her 2016 album, Dangerous Woman. The implication of the mask is clear: those playful bunny ears belie the fetish, sensual undercurrent. The pvc bra, leather skirt (pulled up to reveal more thigh) and fur stole all suggest sexuality to us, however innocent the expression. There’s a hint of dominatrix, power and control, but somehow, although the outfit is quite revealing, the concealment of the mask preserves the independence of the wearer.

Ariana Grande

Aubrey Beardsley’s use of masks on the cover of the Yellow Book underlines their connection with a sort of decadent sensuality. For both wearer and observer, the partial anonymity gives a sense of liberation- the individual is free to do what s/he wouldn’t dare to do in normal life. It’s a sanctioned act of losing oneself in the crowd, of abandonment to the erotic impulse, as we see with Pierre-Amedee Marcel-Beronneau’s Masked Woman at the top of the page. The woman caresses her own breast and surrenders herself to pleasure, safe in the feeling that she isn’t constrained by the usual social rules that govern her behaviour; she is released from her known, recognisable social persona.

Aubrey Beardsley, cover design for the Yellow Book, 1894

Charles-Antoine Coypel, Young Girl Holding a Mask, 1745

Given the mask’s rather adult and risque associations, perhaps we are right to detect a certain daring attitude in the expression of the adolescent who’s the subject of Charles-Antoine Coypel’s painting, shown above. She knows she is playing with a slightly illicit aspect of adult life and that she’s sending a bold message, the response to which she might yet not fully be able to handle.

Italian painter Romualdo Locatelli took the erotic suggestiveness of the mask a step further in his 1927 painting La Mascherina. Here, I think, the mask only partly conceals the fact that his model is a rather young woman, meaning that he creates a complex of emotions for viewers. Like Coypel’s, the image is slightly illicit; she is revealing her body, yet she’s disguised; it’s playful yet serious. As she bares her breast, it’s jokey, but provocative- a gesture that’s somehow kept in check by the concealment of the mask.

Romualdo Locatelli, La Mascherina, 1927

The American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin (born 1939)- whose use of classical imagery, such as centaurs, I’ve described before- has pursued these ideas to even more challenging conclusions. He is known for working with models whom most would hesitate to depict- the obese, the disabled, amputees, and (even) the dead. Witkin very frequently deploys masks, sometimes in more conventional images, such as Fictional Storefront: Camera Store Window, New Mexico, 2004 (below)- a nude adult woman reclined on a bed, but he has also featured them in much more provocative images.

These include Carrot Cake no.1 (1980), a large corpulent woman apparently masturbating with a root vegetable; Portrait of a Vanite, New Mexico, 1994– a one-armed male nude; Melvin Burkhart- Human Oddity, Florida, 1985, an elderly freak show performer who’s hammering a nail into his nostril; Botticelli’s Venus, NYC, 1982 and The Graces- LA, 1988- both featuring naked she-males; The Whine Maker, NM, 1983– a BDSM mistress with gloves, whip and chains (and a baby) and, lastly, Nude with Mask, LA, 1988. This shows a naked girl of perhaps ten or eleven who is reclined languorously across a large armchair, one leg partly raised. Her face and blonde curly hair are half covered by a black mash with pointed cat ears. The disguise the hood provides goes some way to making the child’s nudity less troubling; even so, her lips are slightly parted and the fingers of one hand rest lightly on her upper chest in a vaguely suggestive way. The mask echoes the tone Grande’s playful yet adult headgear but with a far younger wearer, the image, overall, is both striking and disturbing.

Fictional Storefront: Camera Store Window, New Mexico, 2004

Masks are obviously about anonymity, but the purpose of that concealment seems to be to allow things to which we would not consent if our identities, or those of others, were fully revealed. Hiding behind the mask, or permitting others to hide, we can pretend not to know anything about them except what we would both like to imagine. The mystery is as much in the mind as in the garment. Repeatedly, Joel-Peter Witkin has challenged us with just this moral dilemma.

Lorenzo Lippi, Allegory of Simulation (Woman with mask and pomegranate)

Symbolist Venus

The Renaissance of Venus (1877) Walter Crane Tate Gallery

The painters of the Symbolist movement were particularly keen upon classical mythological scenes and made good use of the many gods, goddesses and other beings. Aphrodite and her sisters appear quite frequently in pictures. The Birth of Venus is a common scene, sometimes presented in slavish imitation of Botticelli, as is the case with Walter Crane’s canvas of 1877, The Renaissance of Venus. Doves flutter past, myrtle (a plant sacred to Aphrodite) sprouts on the shore and the naked goddess tries to control her billowing hair, whilst looking down demurely to one side. Venus is an attractive young woman, but with quite a muscular frame. We might suppose that Crane wished to represent the intersex aspect of the goddess, but in fact the story goes that his wife objected to him working from naked female models, so he painted instead from an Italian called Alessandro di Marco, a young man popular with many London artists. Allegedly Lord Leighton spotted Alessandro’s physique adapted to become Aphrodite when the picture was first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. Far less inspired is the image of Venus’ Mirror included below, in which Crane’s goddess seems no more than a Victorian lady admiring herself- though admittedly she may be suffering something of a wardrobe malfunction.

Crane, The Mirror of Venus (or, Art and Life)

French painter Gustave Moreau created some comparably conventional pictures: in his Birth of Venus (Venus Appearing to Fishermen) a similar long-haired, slender and youthful blonde emerges from the waves to receive the fishermen’s obeisance, whilst The Birth of Venus/ Naissance de Venus is an even more slavish copy of Botticelli and others. More original is his Venus Rising from the Sea (1866), in which the goddess appears, arms outstretched to support her voluminous locks, whilst attendants offer her pearls and coral. Moreau’s vision of the goddess is always rather pallid and insipid, though, lacking Aphrodite’s energy and power.

Moreau

In contrast, Odilon Redon offers several sensually glowing visions of the same divine birth. The bright pink body of the goddess is revealed within a rosy heart of a shell, as if emerging from a womb (1866 and two from 1912). In a third canvas, dating from 1910, she sits at ease in a deep red shell, watching the breaking waves. In a fourth scene, also from 1912, she floats ashore in a giant nautilus shell. Redon’s images, with their flesh pink tones and the emphasis upon the oyster-like shell, are expressly sensual. One of the ancient symbols of the goddess was the scallop shell, a reference to her birth from the shell as we see in Botticelli and in Moreau’s Naissance, but it also signified the female genitalia and emphasised the goddess’ sexual nature. Indeed, in the play Rudens by Roman author Plautus, two girls who are devoted to the goddess are described as conchas, shells: this term seems to have a double meaning.

Redon, Birth of Venus, 1912

Redon, Birth of Venus, 1912

Swiss Arnold Böcklin is known for his classical scenes, in which he regularly portrayed mythical beings such as sirens, nymphs, centaurs and fauns. He also tackled Venus’ birth several times. His Venus Anadyomene (born of the waves), painted in 1872, is carried across the sea by a monstrous dolphin (another animal closely linked to the goddess in her marine aspects), whilst little cupids with butterfly wings flutter above her head, holding gauzy draperies around her. A Birth of Venus from 1869 rehearses the same scene, but with only a couple of cupids and the goddess’ robes merging into what resembles a waterspout arising from the waves. Another such picture, also called the Green Venus, portrays the goddess walking on water.

Böcklin, Venus Anadyomene

Nearly all of Böcklin’s goddesses seem to be the same staid-looking Germanic matron, who is largely devoid of sexual frisson. This is especially the case with his triptych Venus Genitrix (the mother of the (Roman) people ) of 1895. This version of the goddess attracted official worship under the Caesars in Rome in order to promote maternal qualities and, in addition, to underline Julian family claims to descent from her. Böcklin’s Venus is a respectable wife- who plays a triangle (?)- and is seen with her husband and her children (although the bare bottomed Eros/ Cupid is- admittedly- somewhat at odds with this overall tone. I assume he’s there to bring the two young lovers together). If so, Böcklin’s Venus Dispatching Love of 1901 depicts a slightly earlier episode from this love story. In this image, a rather more voluptuous and wanton Venus is seen reclining beneath a myrtle, sending her son to bring trouble in mortals’ lives.

Venus Dispatching Love, 1901

Sexuality was never far from the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98). His Venus Between Two Terminal Gods (1895) depicts the goddess wearing a long, off-the-shoulder dress, with dark, tousled hair. She faces the viewer impassively, sternly even, as a dove glides in front of her. The statues on either side hold pan-pipes and carry baskets overflowing with fruit on their heads. This is a respectable, slightly intimidating deity, whereas in Eros and Aphrodite, she is blatantly the harlot queen of physical love. We see her from behind, wearing only knee length stockings and reaching between her legs. Eros powders between her buttocks and thighs with a large soft brush, at the same time sporting a large erection; it appears as though they are both getting rather excited by the titivations. The indications of incest- and of a prostitute preparing herself for a client- are typical of Beardsley’s taste. Nonetheless, they are very much in the tradition of Bronzino and the mythology as well.

Symbolist style was adopted by society portraitist John Singer Sargent when he was asked to provide murals for Boston public library. His cycle, titled The Triumph of Religion, covers Egyptian and Assyrian religion as well Bible scenes portraying Judaism and Christianity. The work on the cylce, which is still to be found on the hallway of the third floor of the McKim Building, occupied Sargent between 1890 and 1919.

Astarte, John Singer Sargent

Amongst the pagan gods the artist portrayed is a striking Astarte, painted in 1895, who wears a blue robe and stands upon a crescent moon. She is encrusted with beads and gold ornamentation highly reminiscent of Gustav Klimt. Naked attendants surround her, their hands raised in worship. Her eyes are closed and her lips bear a beatific smile. She is serene and powerful, sparkling with light, and is arguably a great deal more attractive a figure than the rather worthy ‘Mysteries of the Rosary,’ ‘Dogma of Redemption,’ ‘Israelites Oppressed’ or ‘Prophets.’

On First Looking Into Pierre Louys’ ‘Pybrac’

Toyen, A Girl Sleeping Under the Stars, 1944

“Much have I revelled in the realms below/ And many goodly parts of maidens seen…”

with profuse apologies to John Keats

I recently been reading Pierre Louys’ collection of erotic verses, Pybrac. I have mentioned Louys previously, discussing his faux classical Greek paean to lesbian love, Bilitis. That book, and another classical pastiche, Aphrodite, were his main published works during his lifetime. However, when he died in 1925, it was discovered that Louys had written vast quantities of unpublished material, both poetry and prose. The main reason that all of this output was unknown was because of its scurrilous content. Much of this writing has since been published, but it has changed somewhat our view of the author. No longer is Louys so much seen as a promoter of diversity; rather, he must be regarded as a outrageously erotic fantasist.

Pybrac is a series of just over three hundred four line poems, almost all beginning “Je n’aime pas a voir” (I don’t like to see). What Louys didn’t like to see was a vast array of more or less unusual sexual practices, from dykes with dildos to buggery and bestiality. Of course, he’s writing about them precisely because he does want to see them- and to describe them in detail to us. Very little is left to our imaginations at the end of this. If you ever felt any curiosity about what shepherdesses might conceivably get up to with goats, cart drivers with their horses or (comparatively conventionally) brothers with their sisters, this is the book for you.

The copy of Pybrac I read was the edition published by Wakefield Press, with illustrations by the Czech Surrealist Toyen. It’s a gorgeous little volume with decorative endpapers and selling at about £10/ $12. It’s not very long, but you might say it’s good value: so much shock value for so little expense!

I think the most important observation is that we ought not to try to judge late nineteenth or early twentieth century French society on the basis of Louys’ overheated and fantastical obscenities. None of it is meant literally or seriously and it is certainly not (I’m pretty sure) a genuine document reflecting the sexual mores of fin de siecle society. If it is, well, what it tells us is (as a notable example) that sex with girls under sixteen or so was pretty common (about a third of the verses describe it) and that, of these cases, about a quarter were incestuous, just under a fifth were lesbian (whether with girlfriends, sisters or even mothers) and anal sex was enjoyed in about a third of the cases. In Louys’ parody of manuals instructing young women in etiquette , The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners, the content is entirely sexual: about half is heterosexual, but about a quarter deals with masturbation and another quarter with lesbian relationships. Buggery and masturbation of partners is quite popular, but most of Louys’ advice is on good manners in oral sex with lovers of both genders (including siblings and parents).

The impression, created by Bilitis and Aphrodite, that Louys was pretty fascinated by lesbian relationships is strongly reinforced by his later output. However, whilst Louys’ earlier books were as interested in same gender love, partnerships and marriage as in sex, his unpublished manuscripts are, in the main, obsessed with the carnal affairs alone. A case in point is the novella Trois filles de leur mere (Three daughters of their mother) which was also published after the author’s death. This is a very short story, set over barely a week, and very little happens in it except a great deal of intercourse. The mother, and her three daughters, who are aged from about nine to twenty, work as prostitutes, mainly offering clients their bottoms. When they’re not being paid to have sex, the family are very busy with each other. Then a young student enters their lives and they all to go to bed with him in turn. The story is scandalous, preposterous and (if you’re not in the right mood) highly disgusting and offensive; it’s pure and utter fantasy that can have very little (if any) basis in the reality of young French females at the start of the last century (but then, perhaps, that’s exactly what porn or erotica is meant to be).

Toyen, Two Girls with Flowers, 1932

Whatever the literary merits of Louys’ work, and despite his extravagantly kinky content, his works have been through numerous editions and have been illustrated by a range of notable artists. I reproduced some of these pictures in my last posting on Pierre Louys. The images produced to accompany his collections of erotic poems, Pybrac, Cydalise and the Poesies Erotiques, are as every bit as explicit as the text they accompany. Again, I’d advise not searching for these if you feel you might be shocked or offended: most of the illustrators left very little to the imagination. Toyen (Marie Čermínová) was something of an exception in this. Her delicate line drawings are relatively restrained, but the powerful fascination with sex and sexuality is evident nonetheless. This interest was strong amongst the Surrealists anyway, in addition to which her husband, the artist Jindřich Štyrský, issued the journal Erotická Revue between 1930 and 1933 and much of his own work comprised collages made from hardcore pornography (which I too was surprised to discover existed in the 1930s). Toyen illustrated several other books: these included Felix Salten’s Josefine Mutzenbacher, Aubrey Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhauser (both 1930) and de Sade’s Justine (1932), so it’s clear that she had no objection to working with challenging and provocative material.

Rather like Gerda Wegener, whom I discussed a little while ago, Toyen’s gender and sexuality seem to have been quite fluid, so perhaps she found some of Louys’ work appealing for its courageous challenges to contemporary norms. As I suggested in my posting on the work of Jules Pascin, alternative sexualities existed (obviously) but very few writers or painters acknowledged this inevitable fact at the time. For all his smut and provocation, Louys’ attitude was very much that this was part of human nature and, to a considerable extent, unremarkable.

Toyen did not work on the first edition of Pybrac. That appeared in 1927, just two years after the author’s death; it featured a woodcut on the titlepage by Leonard Foujita and internal full page plates by (it seems) Rojan. These were close illustrations of the activities described in the quatrains and not really suitable for posting on WordPress; the same (largely) was the case with the thirty illustrations provided by Marcel Vertes for a further edition in 1928 (reprinted in 1930)- although I include the titles pages here. There was another explicit edition, illustrated by another woman, the little known but prolific German graphic artist Erika Plehn (1904-88), which was published in 1927.

Toyen’s 1932 edition was closely followed in 1933 by a further one (titled this time Pibrac) with head and tail pieces provided by Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre and 32 vignettes by Andre Collot (apparently). In the very same year, the Belgian painter and printmaker Marcel Stobbaerts (1899-1979) was commissioned to work on another edition of Pibrac (which was reissued in 1934, ’35 and ’39). His twenty illustrations are brightly coloured and cartoonish- but still rather explicitly obscene. There was another edition post-war in 1946, the illustrator of which I’ve not so far been able to establish.

The 1928 edition illustrated by Marcel Vertes (and not an unknown artist as stated here)

I’ve just started to read his collected works, so I expect there’ll be more to say on Pierre Louys… See, for example, my discussion of his first novel, Aphrodite, and also about the central role it plays in my book on the cult of Aphrodite, Goddess of Modern Love. See too my consideration of the artwork created to illustrate Louys’ novel, Les Aventures du Roi Pausole.

Another of Toyen’s illustrations: a French slang word for lesbian is gousse, literally, a pea-pod (I don’t know why)

For more detail of the writing of Pierre Louys, see my Bibliography for him. A longer, fully annotated essay on Pybrac and its sources can be downloaded from my Academia page. For more discussion of the illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider artistic context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

The Great God Pan in Art

Edward Burne-Jones, Pan & Psyche

As a complement to my recently released book, The Great God Pan, this posting offers a selection of some of the key representations of the god by artists over the last five or six hundred years. There are various ways of classifying these images- by nationality, by artistic style or by time period (which I chose in the book).

However, what emerges from a review of the pictures is that there are certain regular themes you see repeatedly on the canvases: these are drink (Pan is known for his association with Dionysus and their love of a good debauch); following from this, sex with nymphs is a major interest of Pan and his accompanying satyrs and fauns. Chasing nymphs, drinking with nymphs and copulating with nymphs take up a lot of the time of the god and his entourage. In the moments left over from drink and nympholepsy, Pan (as creator of the pan pipes) enjoys music and dance. Lastly, but rather rarely, he can be glimpsed in rather less self-indulgent scenes, such as giving advice to needy nymphs. For the gallery here, I have chosen to organise the images on the basis of theme.

Pan the Tipsy

Wine is a natural product that fuels Pan’s passions. Artists have known for centuries that scenes of drinking are popular, amusing and readily understandable. There’s no need for complex mythology; everyone can appreciate when a “party got out of bounds” (to quote the B52s).

The Drunken Satyr, Rubens

Venus Inebriated by a Satyr, Annibale Carracci

Poussin, The Triumph of Pan

Pan the Sex Pest

As we can see in the Poussin canvas above, once the wine has loosened inhibitions, affairs can easily degenerate into a Bacchic orgy (although Pan scarcely needed much excuse to have sex with a pretty young girl). His retinue was composed of nymphs and of human women who were ecstatic devotees of the Dionysian cult. Love was, quite literally, all around. It wasn’t all wild rutting, though: the image by Gerard von Honthorst shows a delightfully tender and affectionate pair. It’s also worth noting the tendency of artists to emphasise the youth of the nymphs, often in contrast to a hoary and gnarled old Pan. In the picture by Romako, we definitely seem to have something of a ‘trophy girlfriend’ for a balding, mature satyr.

Annibale Caracci, The Cult of Priapus

Gerard von Honthorst, 1623

Mason Satyr, Carracci

von Stuck, Faun & Nymph

Faun & Nymph, Anton Romako

Pan with Nymph, Fritz Schuckmuller

Faun playing harp; Paul Paede

Very rarely, we get a glimpse of a more diverse Arcady, in which female satyrs and infants exist. We have seen saw plenty of rutting, but homelier scenes are harder to discover. One of the very earliest paintings of satyrs, Pietro di Cosimo’s The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus (1499) features children and a mother satyr breast-feeding her baby faun and Arthur Brown Davies’ On the Banks of the Arethusa, dating from 1910 (below), shows a young brother and sister faun, reassuring us that the species will not die out.

Pan, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn

The last couple of images lead us into Pan’s musical associations. When Syrinx, a nymph he was chasing, was changed into reeds to protect her from potential rape, the god was devastated and dismayed. The only way of keeping her close was to make pipes from the reeds and, ever since, Pan has been the god of poets and inspiration.

Bocklin, Faun und Amsel zu pfifend

Franz von Stuck, Blasender Faun

von Stuck, Dissonance

von Stuck, Pan

Bocklin, Pan im Kinderreigen

Aubrey Beardsley, Pan in the Woods

Book plate by Austin Spare

Rupert Bunny, Pastoral

Other Visions of Pan

A few artists, from time to time, have imagined Pan performing other roles or, more and more commonly from the late nineteenth century onwards, they have miniaturised him and made him less threatening.

Pan Consulted by Psyche, Alex Rothaug

Ernst Klimt, Pan counsels Psyche

Beardsley Pan reading to a woman by a Brook, 1898. Plate taken from The Studio magazine, volume 13, no 62 (London, 14th May 1898).

Makart, Pan & Flora

Karl Pluckebaum, Faun & Fairy

Charles Sims, The Little Faun; Royal Institution of Cornwall

Further Reading

I have created a gallery of some of the more adult and explicitly sexual images of Pan on a separate page, which can be visited by clicking here– the content can verge on the pornographic, so be warned. These works of art, and many more, alongside a very rich heritage of poetry and prose, are examined at length in my book The Great God Pan. I also now have a page dedicated to nymphs: for lots more information, please visit my nymphology blog.