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.

Jean Traynier- illustrator of Carmen & Pierre Louys

Carmen

Jean Traynier was a French illustrator who flourished during the 1940s and ’50s. Almost nothing is known about him, other than through his surviving published work. He was evidently one of a pool of illustrators working in Paris from the 1930s, drawn there by the employment opportunities offered by the booming luxury book trade, especially- as I’ve described previously- the thriving market for erotica, such as much of the material by Pierre Louys that was discovered and published after his death. As we’ll see shortly, this business continued throughout the Second World War- perhaps surprisingly.

Traynier’s work included illustrations for Albert Samain’s collection of poetry Au Jardin de l’enfant and Prosper Merimee’s Carmen (both 1943), The Song of Songs (1945), Robert Gilsoul’s Quinze Joies de mariage ‘The Fifteen Pleasures of Marriage,’ L’Idylle Venitienne (‘Venetian Idyll) by Gabriel Soulages and Henri de Montherlant’s La vie amoureuse de Monsieur de Guiscart ‘The love Life of Monsieur de Guiscart’ (all three in 1946), Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Beroul’s Romance of Tristan & Isolde (both 1947), Rousseau’s Social Contract (1953) and Point de Lendemain, ou la nuit merveilleuse (No Tomorrow, Or the Wonderful Night) by Dominique-Vivant Denon (1957).

The illustrations for the biblical Song of Songs are as proper as we would anticipate, but as the titles of some of these books may suggest, their content was racy and the plates mirrored the text- from the slightly saucy (Carmen) through images of topless women in silk knickers (Guiscart), to the predictably erotic Fifteen Pleasures of Marriage.

Traynier was especially daring with Denon’s No Tomorrow, which is illustrated with twenty highly explicit plates, showing couples in eighteenth century wigs engaged in some highly acrobatic intercourse, including one passionate couple with a strap-on. In fact, the style of these illustrations is familiar, for Traynier had already employed it eight years earlier when designing the plates for Pierre Louys‘ collection of erotic verse, Cydalise (1949). The title is simply a female name, although Louys’ inspiration may have come from the ballet, Cydalise et le chèvre-pied (‘Cydalise and the goat-foot’ or, preferably, ‘Cydalise and the satyr’). Composed by Léo Staats to a score by Gabriel Pierné, it was written in 1914-15 but, because of the First World War, was not performed until January 1923 at the Paris Opera. Louys is very likely to have been aware of the production and its premier and may have considered the name suitable for his book, given his heroine’s profession and the priapic propensities of satyrs.

from Les Quinzes joies

The manuscript of the poetry collection was (like many) undiscovered until after poet’s death in 1925. Many of these texts were rushed into print over the next couple of years. This was not the case with Cydalise, which may indicate that the original buyer purchased the document out of personal interest alone and that it was only later, perhaps because of changed circumstances or inheritance by an heir, that the decision was made to publish the work. It’s interesting to note that the preface is at pains to stress the authenticity of the text, given the tendency of imitators to cash in upon Louys’ name; at the same time, it compares the book’s rather belated appearance to a forgotten bottle of vintage wine being discovered in a cellar behind a bundle of sticks.

The book has only ever been issued in this one limited edition run of 265 copies, issued in a case and with sixteen plates by the artist. It is therefore very rare: for example, there is no copy in a library in the UK; I would have to go to Bibilotheque nationale de France in Paris to be able to consult the nearest accessible volume. The book is, consequently, the highly collectible, although copies seem to appear often enough on auction house websites.

Cydalise (so far as I can judge from the verses I have seen on page images displayed online by auction rooms and book dealers) concerns the training and work of a young prostitute by an older woman in the business. As Louys described in another of his books, L’Île aux dames (The Island of Women), it was typical for a sex worker to employ a maid, a younger female who was possibly her daughter, to assist her. This gosse (kid) would solicit business, deal with clients and gradually get more involved in the provision of sexual services before setting up on her own. The author seems to have been pretty familiar with these arrangements, but then his own journals and letters reveal that he was a regular visitor to brothels, at least early in his life.

The book is written in a style familiar with Louys, a sort of working class/ street slang, coarse and direct, which certainly appears to be authentic to the subject. Traynier’s plates are the same style of pen and ink design that he was to use again for No Tomorrow, except that in the case of Cydalise he has chosen a fin-de-siecle setting for the pictures, rather than pre-Revolutionary France. The plates are both realistic- depicting sexual activity- and fantastic, for instance showing a woman surrounded by gigantic phalli. Because of this content, I don’t think it’s suitable to feature images from either book here, but you can easily find them online if you wish. Nevertheless, I hope it may be clear that Traynier must have seemed like a very suitable artist to commission for the Louys title, having a track record in this kind of book, a readiness to produce images that matched the content and tone of the text they would sit beside and, as well, a clear and simple style with strong lines and bold designs.

In the same year, 1949, Traynier also supplied illustrations for an edition of Louys’ La Femme et le pantin (The Woman & the Puppet). This was one of a five volume set of the author’s works issued by Albin Michel. The story tells of a middle aged man who falls for a girl in her teens and is tormented by her, giving her money and gifts and never having his love requited. It is set in Spain, as Traynier’s illustrations make clear.

For more on the many works of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography of his available books. For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page. For more discussion of the work of Traynier and of illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

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Paris- city of pleasure

In 2019, the French author Alexandre Dupouy published City of Pleasure: Paris Between the Wars, a study of the diverse and liberated culture of the French capital in the inter-war period. He explains how, after the austerity and horror of First World War, the French longed for a care-free existence, sensuous indulgence- and sexual freedom. Men and newly-emancipated women alike rejected pre-war social values and moral restraints and instead enthusiastically embraced new lifestyles, discovering a lust for extravagance, pleasure and erotic experimentation that led to the next two decades being labelled the ‘mad years’ and Paris gaining a reptation as the ‘City of Pleasure.’

In 1971, the author Paul Morand, looked back at the era in his travel book Venises and explained: “Everything that had happened in Paris during my years of absence confirmed the revolution in morals that had begun in 1917. A generation was returning from the war, sickened by yesterday, curious about tomorrow, about those who would know how to explain it to them and reveal to them this new world…” The mood had changed and there was an acute hunger to live- as so many no longer did.

Dupouy’s book offers an uncensored photographic record of the period, revealing the daring erotic life of the capital, its fetish scene, its licensed brothels and gay nightclubs, the first sex shop chains, erotic photography, pornography, and much more. Paris became, perhaps, the world’s most decadent city.

In many respects, though, none of this was new. The ‘Gay Paris’ of the fin-de-siecle is renowned, with the can-can dancers of the Moulin Rouge and the many artists who documented the period- such as Jules Pascin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Other capital cities, too, reacted to the end of the Great War in similar ways: the Berlin of Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret is an obvious example; nonetheless, Paris seemed to take matters further.

Paris already had an well-established ‘alternative’ scene: lesbian culture in the city was well-developed before 1914 and daring artists and writers were associated with a bohemian and progressive lifestyle. Nevertheless, the post-war reaction seems to have accentuated these existing trends, which were further fuelled by artistic movements such as Surrealism (who, by the way, championed the work of the Marquis de Sade, an early promoter of alternative sexualities) .

I have often written about Pierre Louys. His late nineteenth century books, Aphrodite and Chansons de Bilitis, had depicted lesbian relationships in an entirely accepting and very open manner. He carried on writing into the next century, but ceased to publish after about 1906. When Louys died in 1925, a wealth of daringly, scandalously erotic books were uncovered in manuscript, titles such as poetry collections Pybrac and Cydalise and the outrageous novella Trois filles de leur mere, and their publication in the following years is symbolic of the fact that France- and especially Paris- was a centre for an active erotic book trade. A flood of titles appeared, dealing with lesbian sex, spanking and leather fetishism (often all in the same story), materially enhancing the reputation of Paris as the city where absolutely anything could be experienced.

This was not a hidden nor a shameful trade. Notable Impressionist artists such as Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre illustrated works by Louys, as did costume designer Marcel Vertes and art deco jeweller Georges Barbier. The painter Leo Fontan both wrote and illustrated spanking erotica, as did the Expressionist Nicolas Sternberg and the Belgian Luc Lafnet, whose BDSM illustrations were a source of additional income to (believe it or not) his main work painting religious murals in monasteries and churches.

Interwar Paris is a fascinating place, a melting pot of radical art, philosophy, politics and new approaches to sexuality. There will be much more to say about the city. For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page.

Leo Fontan

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.