The legacies of Louys

I have written at length on the books and poetry of Pierre Louys- and the illustrated editions of those works. It is fair for readers to ask why? What is this little known writer’s significance? Here, I shall try to justify that.

In literary terms, in his time, Louys was a best selling author and an influence on André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, and Stephane Mallarmé; moreover, the other French authors regarded him at the time as a writer of major significance. However, it has been said that these writers came to overshadow that of their mentor and friend. The Encyclopaedia Britannica suggests that “Louÿs’ popularity, which rested more on his eroticism than on purely aesthetic grounds, has faded.” I hesitate fully to endorse this statement, as the most erotic of Pierre Louys work only emerged after his death when his unpublished and unknown manuscripts began to emerge. Before that, works like Pausole, Bilitis, Aphrodite, Crepuscule des nymphes and La femme et le pantin, whilst having some ‘adult’ passages, were also rightly extolled for their purely literary merits- and still deserve a readership for that reason today.

In his time, the fact that he wrote Les Chansons de Bilitis and was friendly with and supportive of the lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney was significant for helping a distinctively lesbian artistic culture to first emerge. The book itself gave its name in 1955 to the Daughters of Bilitis, one of the first lesbian organisations campaigning for civil and political rights in the USA. Now, whilst it is fair to admit that a stereotypical heterosexist male fascination with female same-sex relationships plays an undoubted role in the composition of Bilitis and other works, there was more to it than that. As professor of French Tama Lea Engelking has observed, both Louys and Barney “looked toward ancient Greece for a model of how open-minded and tolerant she wished society would be… [they were] both enthralled by the hedonistic sensuality they associate with Hellenism in contrast to Christianity’s disdain for the body.” Each of these writers were somewhat ahead of their times in their views. In the case of Louys, his liking for eroticism and his tendency to seek to provoke can deflect from his message; by employing the medium of erotica to convey challenging concepts, he risks alienating audiences who do not see beyond his parodies and jokey filth to the serious social philosophy beyond. Louys’ views on diversity and tolerance remain valid.

As I have described previously, a number of Louys books formed the basis for musical works, such as Debussy’s songs based upon Les Chansons de Bilitis or the plays and operas based upon Aphrodite and La Femme et le pantin. The latter novel also translated to film, directed by Josef von Sternberg in 1935 and Bunuel in 1977. In 1933, Alexis Granowsky made a feature film based on Roi Pausole. In that same posting, I illustrated the sculpture of Aphrodite that Louys’ friend Rodin created for the staging of the play based upon the author’s second novel. Many of my postings have examined the graphic art impact of Louys.

Book Illustration

To repeat what I have emphasised before: the sixteen different published works of Louys have generated nearly 150 different editions, illustrated by over one hundred artists. When we appreciate that there are only four illustrated versions of Apollinaire, twenty-one editions of various works by Paul Verlaine and a roughly similar number of editions of de Sade, we begin to appreciate what a significant body of books this represents. It is testament (of course) to interest in the writings of Louys, but it is indisputably a major source of evidence on the evolution in graphic styles over the last century and a quarter.

Some artists may be especially defined through their work on volumes of Louys’ prose and poetry. Leading examples include Mariette Lydis, who worked on five editions of his books; Edouard Chimot likewise illustrated five different titles, whilst Paul-Emile Becat, Marcel Vertes and Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre all illustrated four different works. Amongst those who illustrated three works by Louys are Andre Collot and Rojan. The art generated in response to Louys’ writing was significant at the time in terms of what it told us about aesthetic developments and the public’s literary and artistic tastes (and, therefore, about deeper cultural developments). It remains of importance today: there is still considerable and active interest in these illustrated volumes, as evidenced by the regular sales of Louys’ books by auction houses such Christies, Sotheby’s, Bonhams and Drouot in Paris.

Painters

The artistic inspiration of Louys extended beyond book plates, as I have mentioned previously. Jules Pascin painted a scene from Roi Pausole and Paul Albert Laurens designed a set of etchings of Aphrodite that were not destined for an actual edition of the book. In 1942, the American painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) painted a Homage to Pierre Louys– the picture was recently sold by Bonhams- the canvas was reused three years later for another picture, hence its rather odd appearance at the back of the frame of the second work.

Homage to Pierre Louys

Levy-Dhurmer, Bilitis, 1900

It is Les Chansons de Bilitis which has had the greatest artistic impact of all Louys writings. I have described before how British photographer David Hamilton very freely adapted the book into a film and a photo album. From a date soon after the book’s publication, in fact, the story was a source of inspiration for visual artists. The Symbolist Lucien Levy-Dhurmer (1865-1953) drew a beautiful pastel image of Bilitis as early as 1900. Others that have been equally inspired include George Auriol (1863–1938), who was a poet, songwriter, graphic designer, type designer and Art Nouveau artist. He created illustrations for the covers of magazines, books, and sheet music; these include a floral cover and a wonderful Japanese print inspired portrait of Bilitis. Secondly, just like Levy-Dhurmer, the Polish painter Stanisław Eleszkiewicz (1900-63)- who had lived in Paris since 1923- was inspired to create a study of Bilitis and a lover (presumably Mnasidika).

Auriol, Bilitis a la japonaise

Stanisław Eleszkiewicz, study for Bilitis

Erté designed a series of costumes for a production of Les Rois des Légendes (Legendary Kings) at La Marche a l’Etiole Femina Theatre, Paris, in 1919, one of which represented a jocular Roi Pausole in flamboyant Middle Eastern/ Babylonian robes. The photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue also took a series of photographs on set at the filming of “The Adventures of King Pausole” on the Cote d’Azur in 1932, a production for which he was assistant director. The French sculptor and painter Theo Tobiasse (1927-2012) in 2011 created a bronze sculpture based on the story.

Lartigue’s photo of King Pausole’s harem of queens, 1932

Conclusions

Louys continues to have a cultural impact. In July 1988, in Rome, the premiere took place of Aphrodite (which described itself as a ‘Monodramma di costumi antichi’- a piece for a solo performer in antiwue dress) with the music and libretto composed by Giorgio Battistelli. In 2019 there appeared Curiosa, Lou Jeunet’s French film depicting the complex relationship between Henri Regnier, his wife Marie (nee Heredia) and Louys. Pierre and Marie conducted a protracted affair, both before and after her marriage to Louys’ friend Regnier.

Pierre & Marie from Curiosa, 2019

What then, is the legacy of Pierre Louys? I would argue that it is manifold: Louys was- first and foremost (of course)- a talented writer, immensely skilled in versification, capable of compelling plots. His works formed the vehicle for more though: examinations of religion, morality and social relationships; ideas for the ideal form of the state and government. This wasn’t just theory, as we’ve seen, but had real, practical results. What’s more, and for the very reason that he was a notable author and poet, he inspired others artists- composers, playwrights, painters, illustrators, sculptors, film makers, photographers- to create their own works. This seems, to me, an impressive record, nearly a century after his death.

For more on the writing of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography of his work; for details of my own writings on his novels and poems, see my books page.

‘Three daughters and their mother’- scandal and complexity from Pierre Louys

Teresa & family by Edouard Chimot

During the last decade and a half of his career, Pierre Louys completed three major works- the Handbook of Manners for Young Ladies, which was a parody of deportment manuals; the novel Trois Filles de leur mere, and the poetry collection Pybrac. It is arguable, in fact, Pybrac was never actually completed, in the sense that Louys added continually to the quatrains that comprise it and the published versions of the book only include a fraction of the total known number of verses. There were, in addition, several unfinished works: the novels Toinon and L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve and the mock-travelogue/ novel L’Ile aux dames. These texts all have a number of themes in common: Louys’ encyclopaedic literary knowledge coupled with a tendency to mock those books; his filthy sense of humour; the utopian strand to his writing, and his liking for erotica.

Here, I focus on Trois Filles de leur mere (Three Daughters of Their Mother), arguably one of the most difficult books by Louys. This considerable difficulty for readers arises from the tension between the surface content of the text- some of his obscenest erotica- and the deeper purposes of his writing.

Louys had a number of aims and targets in writing Trois Filles. He felt a deep antipathy for the stifling morals and conventions of the Catholic church within which he’d been raised (hence his regular recreations of the pagan faith of classical Greek and Roman seen in several of his works) and it’s clear that the book is, in part, an assault upon many of the sacraments and concepts of the faith: the story features sex in a church, a vicious parody of communion, and a perverse immaculate conception, for example. One of the three daughters, Charlotte, is something of a martyr-figure, and it’s even arguable, I think, that the mother, Teresa, stands as a satanic temptress figure for her trinity of girls. Amongst the other targets for Louys’ derision, alongside casual piety, were French wine snobbery and the general bourgeois mood of propriety.

In addition, the book is deeply literary. There are repeated references to classical and Renaissance and later French authors, such as Clement Marot (1496-1544) or La Fontaine, which readers are expected, implicitly, to know. Some of these sources are quoted, some are parodied and mocked. An obscene passage is attributed to the Humanist scholar Erasmus, which I’m sure he never wrote (although I’ll confess I’ve not checked all 86 volumes of his collected works). One contemporary French writer is condemned as merely deadly dull (just as was the case with the moralist Guy du Faur in Pybrac): after a rather overstimulating session with the mother, Teresa, the student narrator concludes “I took from my library a ‘heady’ novel by Henri Bourdeaux that I had purchased especially for the purpose of calming myself down when I was in a worked-up state.” Bourdeaux (1870-1963) was a lawyer and author known for his traditional Catholic morality and his very correct French style.

Besides citing classical authors, Louys borrowed themes from them just as he modelled parts of his plot on the Bible. Hence, we find traces of Leda, Pasiphae and Europa in some of the incidents described.

René Ranson’s title page

The book is also ‘metatextual’ before that term was invented. It is repeatedly aware that it is a story, pretending to be a memoire. For example, the student narrator addresses us, as readers, explaining “I would have taken much more pleasure in inventing a story where I could give myself (so easily) a more sympathetic role” or “That’s the trouble with memoires: they get monotonous. In a novel, this kind of repetition can never be excused, but in life it has to be accepted.” When a play is acted out in the final chapters of the book, the artificiality of that make-believe within the wider pretence of the story-telling is continually highlighted, the use of dramatic jargon constantly reminding us that it is all invented and staged: for example “Teresa probably did not know that she had introduced a prosopopoeia into her speech, but there is no need to know the figures of rhetoric to put them… at the service of persuasion. Was it the apostrophe, the hypothesis, the exhortation or the prosopopoeia that won? I do not know…” Very evidently, this sort of passage is not part of standard work of pornography.

The text can be understood at several levels simultaneously, I would argue. The basic plot concerns a student who moves into a new flat next door to Teresa and her three daughters and discovers that all four are sex workers. A few weeks of uninhibited sensual indulgence with the entire family follows, before they suddenly disappear. The novel may be interpreted as a condemnation of the sex trade and its malign impact upon the women trapped within it. At the same time, though, there are elements of the narrative which celebrate female sexual autonomy and women’s right to control over their bodies and their pleasures. Teresa is proud of her physical prowess; she comes over as a powerful and determined woman- except that the downside of her assertiveness is the fact that she dominates her family and is involved in damaging incestuous relationships with all of them. Then again- as he often did- Louys seems to suggest that self-sufficient lesbian households may represent some sort of social utopia– an ideal of independence and happiness. Yet he also interrogates lesbian or bisexual identity, perhaps ultimately tending towards a position that sexual fluidity is a more accurate way of understanding individuals.

On its face, Trois Filles may appear outrageously, shockingly pornographic, but I think it’s plain that any text that casually mentions Jesuit preacher Louis Bourdaloue, Roman poet Tibullus, the Greek playwright Aeschylus, Alexander the Great, Melisandre, and the painter Ingres, has depths and intentions that are not instantly obvious. The complex and multi-faceted nature of Trois Filles means that we are constantly left unbalanced by it, not quite sure of Louys’ meaning, uncertain whether he is playing a game and always returning to the text to uncover new layers of significance.

As ever, I find the novel’s bibliology as fascinating as the book itself. Illustrated editions proved extremely popular with publishers and several artists whom we’ve already encountered before, because of their work on texts by Louys, were commissioned to provide imagery. The first edition of Trois Filles was released by Pascal Pia in 1926, with twenty plates by Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre. Further illustrated editions followed in due course: in 1930, with plates by Andre Collot; in 1935, illustrated with sixteen etchings by Marcel Vertes and in 1936, with 34 watercolours by René Ranson (1891-1977). Ranson was one of the most important designers at work during the interwar heyday of the Parisian music hall, working for the Folies Bergère between 1924 and 1932. Renowned for his draughtsmanship, he was a painter, illustrator and costume designer as well. Ranson also supplied designs to the Paris Opera, and for several film studios, including Fox, Pathé and Paramount. Over and above his theatrical work, Ranson painted glamour or pin-up nudes and provided plates for works such as Baudelaire’s Fleur du mal. In past posts I’ve remarked on the frequency with which cartoonists and caricaturists found work as illustrators- and, for that matter, how often the skills acquired in illustrating children’s books might be transferred to the distinctly adult content of the works of Pierre Louys. René Ranson demonstrates how theatrical and costume designers might find additional work in book illustration; other examples I’ve noted previously include George Barbier, Louis Touchagues and Andre Dignimont. All of them surely deserve our respect for their multi-talented ability to turn their hands to almost any artistic commission offered to them.

After the end of the Second World War, further editions of Trois Filles followed: Jean Berque provided sixteen plates for an issue in 1955 and, late that same year, Edouard Chimot also illustrated an edition with a dozen plates (see head of page for the family in their best ‘New Look’ dresses). Then, in 1960, an edition illustrated by Rojan was published. Finally, as I have mentioned several times, a version illustrated by graphic novel artist Georges Pichard appeared in 1980. In all these cases, the illustrators were faithful after their own style to the text they were commissioned to work upon, meaning that in most cases the plates are not really suitable for publication on WordPress. This explicitness can- as I’ve suggested- have its own implications for the text that the images accompany. Pichard, used to multiple frames in cartoon strips, designed an impressive fifty-three plates to go with Louys’ book. The sheer number of these, coupled with his graphic style of strongly drawn images, has the effect of underlining the more bleak and depraved aspects of the book. His monochrome plates emphasise the elements of tragedy and desperation in the narrative- something that Chimot’s and Ranson’s very pretty coloured illustrations definitely do not do.

This post is a simplified version of a longer, fully annotated essay on the novel that can be downloaded from my Academia page. I have also written there in detail on Louys’ attitudes towards religion. For readers who are interested, several translations of the book are readily available, the most recent being Her Three Daughters, available from Black Scat books (published December 2022). See as well my Louys bibliography and details of my other writing on the author.

The cover of Pichard’s edition

Woman & Puppet- a story of misogyny and frustrated desire

Philippe Swyncop, 1936

‘Woman and Puppet’ (La Femme et le pantin) was the third major novel published by writer Pierre Louys during his decade of creativity, before he slipped into addiction and illness and fell silent. Published in 1898, it drew its inspiration from Carmen by Prosper Mérimée (1847), which was itself inspired by an episode in the life of Casanova. The novella is an accomplished work, with a lean, tense narrative and a fast pace, but many modern readers will find the author’s presentation of the central female character, Conchita Perez, highly problematic.

Mariette Lydis, 1934

There are two primary themes to the book. Firstly, there is an older man’s desire for a younger female. In this case, Mateo Diaz, who is in his mid-thirties, develops a passionate desire for Conchita, who is fifteen when he first sees her. He has had many lovers; she is a virgin with “budding breasts” and a “little brown belly.” Conchita is presented consistently as an object of lust: asleep on a train, she is “so childish and sensual that I doubted sometimes whether, in her dreams, the movements of her lips sought a nurse’s breast or the lips of a lover.” Barely a year later, though, she is depicted dancing the flamenco- naked except for her stockings- in a bar in Cadiz, displaying her “supple body and muscular loins.”

Antoine Calbet, In the Fabrica 1899

Simultaneously, Louys’ entire presentation of Conchita’s character is deeply misogynist. She is portrayed as a cynical and calculating tease: she continually offers Mateo her love and her body, but then postpones consummation whilst at the same time taking considerable sums of his money and receiving many goods from him as presents for herself and others. Her torture of him appears vindictive and dramatic, yet the story is told from the perspective of a man who asks “Why should we consider refusals, disdain or even delays? We ask and women give themselves”- and who later warns “There are two kinds of women who should be avoided at all costs: the first are those who do not love you, and then those who do love you.” Mateo Diaz is plainly used to seeing women as attractive chattels and, although Conchita’s manipulating behaviour is portrayed as unforgivably cruel, had he achieved his aim of seducing her at the outset, it is highly likely she would have been treated even more poorly once he had tired of her. Mateo’s exploitative character is revealed in a reference he makes to an Italian girlfriend he had for a while: Giulia was a dancer, “a large girl with muscular legs who would have been a pretty animal in the confines of a harem,” but he was unable to care for her, despite her passion and affection.

Armand Coussens, In the Fabrica, 1933

The most distasteful scene of all in the book is when Mateo beats Conchita and she thanks him: “How well you have beaten me, my heart! How sweet it was! How good it felt… Forgive me for all I have done to you!” Conchita then finally consents to have sex with him, suggesting that being punched repeatedly was really what she wanted (and needed) all along. The chauvinist masculine attitudes displayed in the book are doubtless of their time, but they are deeply depressing and unattractive now.

Lydis, In the Fabrica, 1934

Whilst modern readers may have problems with the story, it was much respected in its time, to the extent of being turned into an opera in 1921. In addition, between the date of first publication and the late 1950s, over twenty illustrated editions were released, three quarters of these being designed by artists whom we have not previously encountered in our discussions of the books of Louys. This is an impressive indication of the book’s popularity, and it takes to over one hundred the total number of illustrated editions of his works that were produced last century.

Paul-Emile Becat, In the Fabrica, 1945

Being set in Spain, the novel offered plenty of colourful, if cliched, opportunities to depict women in traditional dress, performing wild and erotic dances; also popular with the many illustrators was the episode in which Mateo visits the Fabrica, the cigarette factory in Seville, to ogle the female employees- the place is so hot in summer that most strip off to their skirts. His misogynist attitudes are on full display: the workplace, for him is “an immense harem of four thousand eight hundred women.” “The spectacle was diverse.  There were women of all ages, childish and old, young or less young… Some were not even nubile.  There was everything in that naked crowd, except virgins, probably.  There were even pretty girls.”

Some of the artists commissioned to work on this book are known to us already: Edouard Chimot, Mariette Lydis, Antoine Calbet, Paul-Emile Becat and Jean Traynier. I especially like Chimot’s frontispiece (see below), which reminds me strongly of pictures by Gustav Klimt.

Edouard Chimot, 1937

Amongst the other editions are two featuring portraits of the author (by Pierre-Eugene Vibert in 1912 and Galanis in 1958). Vibert (1875-1937) was Swiss but travelled to Paris in 1893 to complete his studies. He established himself amongst the artistic community of the French capital and got to know many writers as well, which led to many commissions to work on books, which included texts by Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Anatole France and Heinrich Heine. He was particularly known for his literary portraits- hence the picture of Louys forming the frontispiece to the 1912 edition- but he also engraved Stendahl, France, Verhaeren and Remy de Gourmont. Nevertheless, when the Vibert edition was reissued in 1919, it was much enhanced by the addition of eleven watercolour designs by Swiss artist John Graz. Editions with simple black and white woodcuts of characters and dancers were created by Achille Ouvré in 1922 and, in the next year, with Iberian street scenes cut by C-J. Hallo (who was mainly known for his fabric designs).

John Graz, 1919

Many other artists were much more adventurous and colourful, including Jean Virolle and Jean-Paul Tillac in 1930, Armand Coussens in 1933 and the Belgian Philippe Swyncop in 1936. Swyncop (1878-1949) was mainly a portrait painter, but he had supplied lively illustrations for magazines and books; this, plus the fact that he had lived in Spain for a while, doubtless recommended him for the commission. The same applied to Tillac (1880-1969), a painter, engraver, sculptor and illustrator who had travelled widely before settling in the Pyrenees, from which he regularly visited the Basque country and Spain. Coussens (1881-1935) was a Provencal artist who specialised in etching everyday scenes and also had experience illustrating humorous and satirical periodicals (like so many of the artists who worked on Louys’ books).

In the Fabrica, Virolle, 1930

J-P Tillac, 1930

Sex and sexuality are powerful themes in the book, as exemplified by the scene in which Mateo sees Conchita performing nearly naked in a private bar in Cadiz. Very readily, though, this spills over into sexism, most notably in the ways Louys has her torture Mateo with promises of consummation which are continually withheld or which seem to be granted to others but denied to him. This depiction of the girl as a calculating tease has already been criticised, but it did make for highly dramatic illustrations. Coussens captured the older man’s desperate obsession in his frontispiece, whilst Virolle dramatised her ability to mock and torment.

Jean Virolle

Following the end of the Second World War, there was a rush of new editions of the book, rather as we have seen with other works by Louys. Amongst these were striking designs by illustrators Louis Clauss and Andre-Jo Veilhan, both in 1946 and by the Swiss artist Roger Wild (1894-1987) in 1947. Wild’s commission seems especially apt when we learn that he founded a publishing house in Paris in the 1920s, the Fanfare de Montparnasse, specifically to publish the illustrative work of his friend Jules Pascin.

L. Clauss, 1946

Andre-Jo Veilhan, 1946

Roger Wild, 1947

Pablo Roig, 1903

Lastly, several Spanish artists worked on the text. The plates supplied by Carlos Vasquez in 1909 are rather straightforward etchings; by way of contrast, in 1903 Pablo Roig produced some much more striking colour illustrations, which were further enhanced by page designs by Riom. The painter and illustrator Pau Roig i Cisa (1879-1955) lived in Barcelona and produced portraits, landscapes and figure studies; his cover, showing Concha with an actual puppet, may be rather literal but it’s effective. Gustave Riom (1839-1898) was a French graphic artist who worked in an Art Nouveau style and specialised in floral designs. Their collaborative work is an example of the fruitful interaction between art work and text, a gesamtkunstwerk, that I have discussed previously.

Finally, in 1951 Emilio Grau-Sala (1911-75) provided illustrations for one of the last illustrated editions of Femme et pantin. Born and trained in Barcelona, he began to exhibit in and visit Paris in the early ’30s, before moving there permanently in 1936. He was influenced by the paintings of Jules Pascin, but made his living decorating restaurants and cruise liners, designing theatrical sets and costumes, and illustrating books. As well as Louys, he worked on titles by Flaubert, de Maupassant, Colette, Proust, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire.

Grau-Sala, 1951

Several English translations appeared, the first in 1903 not long after the original publication, but illustrated editions had to wait a few more decades. The first was part of the series produced by the Pierre Louys Society in the USA: as with the other titles the Society issued, Clara Tice was the illustrator. As we can see from her frontispiece for the 1927 volume (reissued in 1932), she went for the imagery of a literal puppet. Tice was also attracted by the scene involving plentiful nudes in the Fabrica, as we can see.

At the Fabrica, Tice

Yunge

Other illustrated versions of ‘Woman and Puppet’ appeared in 1930, illustrated by the prolific US painter and illustrator William Siegel (1905-90) and in 1935, with plates by British illustrator John Yunge-Bateman (1897-1971), who seemed to specialise in quite erotic imagery. The plate by ‘Yunge’ that I reproduce underlines the tendency of Conchita to reveal herself to Mateo, and yet to be inaccessible to him; other artists depicted this scene. As for Siegel’s illustration, what strikes me most is that the pose was copied in 1946 by the Austrian painter Richard Müller: the similarities are so astonishingly close we must assume that Müller possessed a copy of the American version of Louys’ book (surprising as that may sound).

William Siegel, 1935

Kind mit puppe, Müller, 1946

For more on the works of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography for the writer. See as well my books page for details of my other writing on him.

Illustrators of ‘Bilitis’- from the death of Pierre Louys to 1950

In this post I examine the ways in which Pierre Louys first major book (and success), Les Chansons de Bilitis (The Songs of Bilitis) was illustrated during the period of the late 1920s through to the late 1940s. A separate post deals with artists’ interpretations after 1950. Louys died in 1925, and there was a distinct rush by publishers to release the large number of unpublished materials discovered when his apartment was cleared. This encouraged firms to release new editions of books already well known to the public, as was the case with Bilitis. As we shall see, we’re talking about at least a dozen and a half new editions in just thirty years; within this, there was naturally a concentration immediately after the author’s death and a pause during the 1940s. In fact, the grouping of the publications is even more striking: there were eleven in the period of thirteen years after Louys’ decease (1925-38)- these include editions that I have discussed elsewhere, by Edouard Chimot (1925), prolific book illustrator Willy Pogany (1926), Jean Berque (1935), Lobel-Riche (1937) and Paul-Emile Becat (1938). A further seven followed between 1946 and ’49, including one by Mariette Lydis in 1948 and by Louis Icart in 1949, both of which are also discussed separately. This is a remarkable tribute to the text itself and to the demand for fine art editions.

Sylvain Sauvage (1888-1948) was born Felix Roy and worked as a book illustrator and designer; he was also director of the Ecole Estienne (or Ecole de Livre- the College of Book Design). Amongst the various books he illustrated were works by de Sade, Casanova, Diderot, Voltaire, Anatole France and Sappho. Given his frequent commissions to work on erotic texts, it’s hardly surprising that, within two years of Louys’ death, Sauvage was employed to work on a new edition of Bilitis. This 1927 volume is decorated in a quite austere modern style, suggestive of Greek sculpture and clearly conveying the sexual nature of the contents.

Sylvain Sauvage, 1927

Within a year, Jean de Bosschère (1878-1953), a Belgian writer and painter, was appointed to decorate an English translation of the text. Initially, Bosschère attended the École d’Horticulture in Ghent but, in 1894, his family moved to Antwerp and he renewed his studies at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts between 1896 and 1900. After graduating, Bosschère became a writer, with a particular interest in the arts, but in 1909 he issued a volume of his poetry which he had also illustrated himself, in a style heavily influenced by Aubrey Beardsley. Bosschère spent the Great War in London, where he got to know many writers and publishers and, accordingly, during the 1920s and ’30s illustrated erotic classics by authors such as Aristophanes, Ovid, Strato and Apuleius. The artist had a life long fascination with erotic and occult matters and it was out of these interests that his plates for the 1928 Songs of Bilitis arose. His strong outlines and simple blocks of colour are very attractive and his treatment of the sexual content frank but delicately done.

A German translation followed in the succeeding year, when Willi Jäckel (1888-1944) German Expressionist painter and lithographer was commissioned to illustrate the Lieder der Bilitis. Jäckel trained in Dresden but developed his career in Berlin. He became a professor of art in 1933 but very soon fell foul of the new Nazi regime, losing his post and having his art condemned as ‘degenerate.’ His studio was destroyed in Allied bombing in 1943 and Jäckel himself died in an air raid in 1944. His ten plates for the 1929 edition are attractive monochrome etchings with a restrained sensuality. In 1932, the same German publisher planned a version of the book illustrated by Jeanne Mammen. This was never published and only ten prints of the lithographs survive. Mammen translated the story to contemporary, permissive Berlin, so that we have, for example, a scene set in a lesbian bar. Given the very clear lesbian themes of so much of Mammen’s work, it is hardly surprising that the Nazi government objected to her representations of ‘German woman’ and suppressed her ‘Jewish’ and ‘degenerate’ art even more comprehensively than Jäckel’s.  A portfolio of illustrations for the Lieder der Bilitis was also prepared by the erotic artist Otto Schoff, whom we’ve encountered before. It’s unclear whether these were ever published, but they must predate his death in 1938. The eight watercolour drawings are all explicit representations of Bilitis with her lovers.

Mammen survived the war but her work on Bilitis was never published. Along with the illustrations by Mariette Lydis, these editions of the book were, until the last few decades of the twentieth century, some of the very few female responses to the story. What’s more, they were responses by lesbian and bisexual women to a work with a central queer theme- albeit one written by straight man and overwhelming illustrated by men. Mention should be made here as well of Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) who was a French painter and printmaker in the Cubist style. She too was a bisexual woman and her print of the Chansons de Bilitis of 1904-05 may be regarded as a significant work for her, artistically and personally. The figure of Bilitis was taken up as a figurehead by female artists and writers in Paris in the early 1900s; both Louys and Laurencin moved in these circles and must surely have made contact.

Damenbar from Jeanne Mammen’s Bilitis series

Chanson de Bilitis, Marie Laurencin, 1905

Joseph Kuhn-Régnier (1873-1940), was a French illustrator based in Paris. His work is easily recognisable because of the themes and figures he drew from Greek classical art; these often feature a black background and single colour figures inspired by Greek poetry, but he also designed full colour ‘Greek’ scenes that feature ancient dress and settings, but very modern looking and often saucy young women (see, for example, his Works of Hippocrates, 1934, which has clear sexual undertones). Kuhn-Régnier also contributed illustrations, caricatures and advertisements to magazines such as La Vie Parisienne, Fantasio and Le Sourire. In 1930 he designed twelve coloured plates for a further edition of Les Chansons de Bilitis. As will be seen, these are in the style he used for his humorous magazine illustrations (rather than his more austere classicist style), whilst remaining reasonably faithful to the text itself. That said, as may be observed below, the ages of Glottis and Kyse have been doubled by the artist, for reasons we can only speculate about.

Kuhn-Regnier

In 1931 the Belgian artist Arthur Greuell illustrated an edition of Bilitis published in Brussels. His images of women are always marked by a severe profile and melancholy expression and the 35 plates for this version of the Chansons was no different, even for the poems celebrating the poetess’ love. Greuell’s women are, at the same time , muscular and energetic,

Greuell, 1931

Pierre Lissac (1878-1955) worked as a painter, illustrator, engraver, cartoonist and caricaturist. He studied under Lefebvre at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and went on to work for humorous magazines such as Le Rire and La Vie Parisienne. He also designed adverts and illustrated books, especially for children, but his work on a 1932 edition of Bilitis is attractive for its bold colours and strong lines; once again, the artist has departed from the words of Louys’ text and Glottis and Kyse have become young women. For both Lissac and Kuhn-Régnier we might speculate about the reasons for this: a disapproval of this part of the book (but given its overall tone, why work on it if it was so inimical?); misinterpretation or carelessness, or a preference for drawing the nudes we have. As I observed in another post, illustration may reasonably be classed as a form of translation, but- even though we might think of images as an international means of communication- it should not be regarded as any more faithful or reliable than the transition from one language to another.

Lissac

Nathan Iasevich Altman was born in 1889 in Vinnitsa in Ukraine and died in Leningrad in 1970; he trained as an artist in Odesa before travelling to Paris he to study and work between 1910 and 1914, developing a post-impressionist style. He was active producing revolutionary art in Russia after 1918 but by 1929 he was back in Paris, where he stayed until 1935, designing posters and illustrating books. One of these was the 1932 edition of Bilitis (the second that year, by mischance), for which he created pointilliste lithographs.

Andre-Edouard Marty (1882-1974) initially studied philosophy before travelling in Italy. Perhaps this experience awoke a love of art, for on his return he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts before becoming a humorous cartoonist, as well a designing posters, stage sets and fashion plates. His book illustration commissions included La Fontaine, Diderot, Musset, Maeterlinck and three works by Louys, the Poesies de Meleagre, Aphrodite (1936) and, in 1937, Bilitis. His style is noted for its stylised nature, especially the elongated and graceful figures, but it was very popular. His approach to Bilitis was suitably erotic (see below and his image of Bilitis in a tree, illustrated in my post on dryads).

A pause in new editions followed: initially the market was saturated, possibly, and then the war disrupted the fine art book trade (although the market for cheaper erotica persisted throughout the period). However, as soon as 1946, a new version of Bilitis appeared, this time illustrated by Albert Gaeng (1904-75). He was a Swiss artist who worked in a variety of media: glass painting, mosaic, oil painting, sculpture and murals. His training introduced him to cubism and futurism and, against this avantgarde background and with a strong interest in religious art, his illustrations for Louys may be something of a surprise. His drawings are pleasant without seeming hugely inspired.

Plates by Albert Gaeng

The next year Andre Agricol Michel (1900-72) was commissioned to work on another edition. Michel was born in Paris and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He found work as a painter, printmaker, and illustrator and exhibited frequently. During the 1940s he became a set designer for the Paris Opera and became known for his drawings and prints of ballet. In addition to fine art, Michel was a prolific illustrator, creating works for a variety of publishers as well as publishing his own books of illustrations. Delicate line drawings accompanied the 1947 edition of Les Chansons de Bilitis, such as the illustration of Bilitis and Mnasidika seen below.

Andre Michel

Andre Dignimont (1891-1965) was a very prolific artist and illustrator over four decades. Born in Paris, he studied at the College Juilly, worked for a time in London, and then returned to Paris to study at Academie Julian. Dignimont was primarily a pen and watercolour artist in the tradition of Jules Pascin and, like his good friend and predecessor, he was fascinated by the world of prostitutes, brothels, cafes, bars and Parisian nightlife. In addition to his paintings, he created theatre and opera designs, posters and illustrated over fifty books. Dignimont’s plates for the 1947 edition of Bilitis are highly typical of his style of topless young women, entirely appropriate to the subject and respecting the text itself. He also worked on Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine’s Oeuvres Libres in 1935.

Plates by Dignimont

Maurice Leroy (1885-1973) was a painter, decorative artist and cartoonist, mainly known for his illustrative work in books and popular and humorous magazines; he also designed posters and postcards. Amongst the books he worked on are children’s stories as well as LaFontaine, Victor Hugo, Balzac and Voltaire. More significantly, he illustrated a 1947 edition of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Les Quinzes joies de marriage (1941). His commission for a 1948 edition of Bilitis fits within these titles and the colour plates are faithful to the text- for example, his depiction of the opening scene of Bilitis in the tree and what I interpret to be the marriage of Bilitis and Mnasidika.

Maurice Leroy

Maurice Leroy

Mariette Lydis had been commissioned in 1934 to illustrate an edition of Bilitis as one of a set of Louys’ books being published by Union Latines D’Editions. In 1948 she was commissioned to tackle the text again, this time by the publisher Georges Guillot. Her twenty dry-point etchings are, of course, distinctively hers; they are variations on the images provided for the earlier edition, showing individual women and female lovers together.

Mariette Lydis, 1948

Lastly, Pierre Leroy (1919-90) was an author, engraver and illustrator, much of whose work was on children’s books. His eighteen colour illustrations for the 1949 edition of Les Chansons are extremely attractive, but yet are frank renditions of the content.

What’s especially notable, I think, with many of the illustrators discussed here- and in the other related posts- is the frequency with which cartoonists and children’s artists were asked to work on the very adult Chansons de Bilitis. As I suggested in another recent post, I assume that their facility with combining text and image- and their ability to create an image that captured and concentrated the essence of a scene- was what recommended them to publishing houses. Lastly, of course, the abiding status of Pierre Louys’ first book- a classic based upon the classics- is brought out.

Auguste Brouet- engraver of Parisian street life

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Brouet

Auguste Brouet (1872-1941) was born and raised in a poor family in Paris and its suburbs. As a youth, he became a lithographer’s apprentice, whilst also developing his talent for drawing by attending evening drawing classes at the École des Beaux-Arts– also including a short stint at the studio of Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. From about 1895 he began to earn a living in an etching workshop, making engravings of famous paintings ranging from Rembrandt to Whistler. He supplemented this by producing painted copies of popular contemporary paintings as well as by working as an assistant in the studios of successful and well-known artists, such as Degas and Whistler. 

Brouet, La Parade, 1900

From about 1902, Brouet began to produce his own engravings. His favoured subjects were street scenes in the poor areas of Paris- something he knew well and for which he felt great sympathy. He also depicted dancers, nudes and life in working class bars and theatres, as well as cityscapes and some landscapes. After a period of hardship during the First World War, Brouet’s fortunes began to revive. His work became fashionable through exhibitions, public awards and published articles.

Resting dancers

By the 1920s, Brouet’s had established a reputation and his etchings were in demand. As the market entered a golden age, he also attracted increasing commissions from Parisian publishers for book illustrations, especially from Devambez which was then under the artistic direction of artist Edouard Chimot. Like Chimot himself, Brouet suffered severely from the impact of the market crash and depression of the late ’20s, and he spent most of the rest of his life in poverty.

Salon

Brouet illustrated a considerable number of volumes, including Virgil’s Georgics, several books by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Brouet’s interest in the life of poor working females, especially actresses and dancers, well suited him to working on the work of Pierre Louys. Brouet first began to receive commissions to undertake erotic illustrations in the mid-1920s. The first to be published, in 1926, was Un été à la campagne– a notorious epistolary novel by Gustave Droz which describes two girls’ sexual adventures with a range of partners over one summer in the country.

Brouet’s work in 1933 on Pierre Louys’ Le Histoire du Roi Gonzalve et des Douzes Princesses is probably his most daring. The manuscript for this book was unfinished at the author’s death; it was sold by his widow and first published in 1927, illustrated by Paul-Emile Becat. The story concerns a king with incestuous desires for his twelve daughters; in its unfinished state it is little more than a succession of explicit erotic scenes. Becat’s response to the text was sexually frank, but with aspects of the relationship between king and princesses elided. Brouet created a dozen line drawings to accompany the text which much more faithfully followed the details of the text. Brouet’s associations with less common aspects of sexuality may be judged by two of his nude studies from 1924- one, Small Nude, shows a reclining girl of ten or eleven from behind; far more interesting, though, is Les Etheromanes (The Etheromaniacs)- two naked young women side by side on a bed, one of whom is holding a small glass. We are to understand that the couple are drinking ether, a late-nineteenth and early twentieth century drug habit practised to induce euphoria. It’s not clear whether they may be using ether to enhance physical sensations or whether the implication is that they are prostitutes who are numbing themselves to their work.

Benezit’s Dictionnaire des Peintres describes Brouet as “a sensitive interpreter of the authors of his choice.” His work is constantly attractive, partly for his skilled technique but also for his subject matter, which gives a real insight into everyday metropolitan life for ordinary Parisians. The website auguste-brouet.org is devoted entirely to his work. For more discussion of subjects covered here, see my book In the Garden of Aphrodite and also refer to my Pierre Louys bibliography.

Reclining dancer

Edouard Chimot- women of the night and figures from the past

Pierre Louys, Les poemes antiques, 1949

Édouard Chimot (1880-1959) was a French prolific artist who worked as an editor, painter, watercolourist, engraver and draughtsman/ illustrator, editor and even an early film-maker. His career reached its peak during the 1920s in Paris, when he was involved with the publication of fine quality art-printed books.

Maurice Magre, Les Belles de nuit, 1927

Chimot was born in Lille, but studied at the École des Arts décoratifs in Nice, before returning north for further study at the École des Beaux-Arts in his home city. It appears that he began exhibiting only in his early thirties (perhaps after a spell as an architect) and then had his career disrupted by military service during the Great War. 

During the period just before the outbreak of war, Chimot had a studio in Montmartre in Paris and often sketched in the lesbian bars of the quarter. His first exhibition in 1912 secured a commission to illustrate René Baudu’s text Les Après-midi de Montmartre with etchings of “petites filles perdues“- the little lost girls of the red light district, which was finally published in 1919. This association with bohemian culture was going to remain with him. As he was later to say, “I chose women as my favourite subject- and then as my only one.”

La femme et le pantin, Louys

Further commissions followed, for example illustrating the grimly real war novel L’Enfer by Henri Barbusse and Baudelaire‘s Spleen. This in turn led to work with the publisher Les Éditions d’Art Devambez, for whom he was artistic director between 1923 and 1931. Besides arranging artists to illustrate texts, he still worked on some himself, He reserved some choice texts for himself, for example choosing Pierre Louys’ works Les Chansons de Bilitis (1925), Poesies de Meleagre (1926), La Femme et le Pantin (1928), Aphrodite (1929) and, lastly, Parallèlement by Paul Verlaine (1931)- these reflect his continued interest in representing scenes of sex and sexuality. Chimot was also involved in making two films during this vibrant period.

However, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 destroyed the market for costly luxury books in limited editions. Chimot’s work and income was never as assured again. Hence, his work increasingly comprised erotica: in 1931, for example, he issued Maurice Magre’s Les Belles de nuit, lithographs of prostitutes, Baudelaire‘s Fleurs du mal in 1941, Prosper Merimee’s Carmen in 1951 and a collection simply entitled Chats (Pussies) in 1936. He was also asked to provide plates for editions of Louys’ Poems inedits (1887-1924) in 1938 and Trois filles de leur mere in 1950. He described his technique for designing illustrations in an interview in 1926: “I make a lot of drawings in the atmosphere of the text, then I choose among them. The engraving becomes a free translation of my drawing. It then takes me two to four weeks for an engraving; I only make etchings.”

Louys, Les poemes antiques, 1949

Chimot’s description of his interaction with the text, his search for the ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ (l’ambiance) is fascinating. It indicates the interaction between artist and author: the former must first choose key or representative incidents in a story, and then seeks to get to the emotion and dynamics underlying that particular scene so as to be able to depict them most authentically and effectively. S/he has to identify with the artist’s motivations and reactions and to be able to find an expression of these and of his/her own responses. As I have suggested before, when this is done perceptively and well, the result lifts the entire artwork. It’s worthwhile observing in relation to this that Chimot’s illustrations are often notably faithful to the text: for example, his Mnasidika in Bilitis is as young as Louys indicates and his plates for Trois filles are as explicit as the text demands.

Despite these financial pressures, Chimot still produced some striking art, such as his 1958 portfolio of sixteen female nudes, Les Belles que voilà: mes modèles de Montmartre à Séville (‘Here are the Beauties: my models from Montmartre to Seville’). As the collections’ title indicates, Chimot moved to Spain during the Second World War. It’s fascinating to note that he had a commission with Seville, a city much haunted by Louys late in the last century- especially because of the working girls he encountered there.

For more information on the writings of Louys, please see my bibliography page and details of my own books.

Chimot, Study of a Girl

Comedy and Parody in the work of Pierre Louys

One strange aspect of the work of Belgian-French author Pierre Louys was his tendency to indulge in parody. He parodied major French writers, such as Victor Hugo and Jules Verne, but he also- more surprisingly- continually parodied himself.

One of Louys’ first works was a translation of the Roman poet Lucian’s Dialogues of Courtesans (1892), a text which indicates Louys’ constant interest in erotic matters, as well as his skills as a classical scholar. He later parodied this work in his Douze Douzains de Dialogues (or Twelve Dozen Dialogues), a collection of outrageously exaggerated exchanges between lovers based around various perversions and fetishes.

Louys’ major novel, Les Aventures du Roi Pausole (1901), imagined a pagan kingdom in south-west France which constituted a kind of social and moral utopia for the author. Louys subsequently savagely parodied his own ideals in another novel (which was never finished), L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve et des douze princesses (The History of King Gonzalve and the twelve princesses), an account that starts in fairy tale form with ‘Once upon a time’ and rapidly descends into a wicked distortion of everything he had held up as admirable in Roi Pausole. His L’Ile aux dames (The Island of Women) is a parody partly of Pausole but mainly of Jules Verne’s book The Mysterious Island. The island invented by Louys is another utopia, a version of the classical world of sexual diversity and equality found in Bilitis and Aphrodite but brought into the modern world- and (naturally) taken to excess.

I have written before about his poetry collection, Pybrac. Its non-serious and mocking nature is once again revealed when you appreciate that the title is derived from sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralising quatrains were common reading for French youngsters until the nineteenth century. Louys attacked the prim worthiness of du Faur by savagely inverting everything he stood for: each of the three hundred plus quatrains in the book start with “I don’t like to see,” followed by a description of some over the top sexual scene. On the face of it, he plays the Puritan condemning impurity, lust and vice, but in his detailed pictures of what it is that he doesn’t like, Louys of course achieves the opposite effect- he conjures it explicitly for the reader and leads us to suspect that he actually is rather obsessed with and excited by what he purports to condemn.

Lastly, Louys wrote La femme et le pantin (Woman and Puppet) in 1898- in itself, it was a parody of Prosper Merimee’s Carmen. He then parodied La femme et le pantin‘s theme of a calculating woman manipulating and exploiting a man in his later novella Trois filles de leur mere (Three Daughters of their Mother). This- like Roi Gonzalve– goes to extremes, tasting the boundaries of taste with its utterly over the top scenarios and outrageous exaggeration. I would also argue that Trois filles is a parody of the work of the Marquis de Sade, the great French innovator in over-the-top pornographic fantasy. De Sade is already so extreme in his fevered orgies and (of course) sadism that the only route to mockery is through hyperbole. Louys achieved this, at the same time reversing the male exploitation of women seen in One Hundred Days of Sodom and simultaneously ridiculing the helpless innocence displayed by the heroine in Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). By so doing, he exposed the the chauvinism and misogyny that runs through de Sade’s work.

As several academic authorities have underlined, Trois filles is not to be mistaken for mere coarse pornography, though. As in all his works, Louys works into his text literary references, so that we understand that he is consciously parodying and deforming existing authors and genres. In Trois filles, for example, he cites Roman writers, Renaissance French poets and the theologian Erasmus- as well as contemporary writers. John Phillips, a scholar of French literature, has described how Louys made an important contribution to the inventiveness of French erotic literature, making creating something that was obscene and yet, as a result of his humour, unerotic. He exaggerated the conventions of the genre until they were extreme- and, as a result, unreal and even ridiculous. Phillips put it rather neatly: whereas porn aims for physical pleasure, Louys sought “textual pleasure,” through excess achieving a skilful manipulation of a literary form (Forbidden Fictions, 1999, c.3).

It has been common for the artists illustrating Louys’ works to mirror visually his writing style. Just as the text is exaggerated to the point of preposterousness, so the book plates can be extravagant and excessive to the point of caricature. Some illustrators have gone for artistic and elegant images (for example, Georges Barbier’s art nouveau colour plates in the 1922 edition of Chansons de Bilitis), but others, notably Edouard Chimot and Georges Pichard, in illustrating editions of Trois filles in 1950 and 1983 respectively, went for a style verging on the cartoonish.

This was especially true of Pichard (1920-2002), who illustrated a series of graphic books from the mid-1950s onwards. Born in Paris, he was educated at the École des Arts Appliques, and after World War II worked as illustrator in advertising before publishing his first cartoon strip in La Semaine de Suzette in 1956, featuring a ‘girl next-door’ character called Miss Mimi.

In the early ’60s, Pichard met screenwriter Jacques Lob, with whom he collaborated on two superhero parodies, Ténébrax and Submerman. After a few years, though, Pichard left the family-friendly comics entirely, so that by the late 1960s, his work was increasingly testing moral boundaries, with (as Wikipedia puts it) a “style of shaping his female heroines into tall, well-endowed women with excessive eyeliner make-up to create a gothic appearance.” Having collaborated with Danie Dubos on the more daring ‘Lolly-strip’ which was serialised in Le Rire in 1966, Pichard and Lob began work within the adult genre of comics with the strip ‘Blanche Épiphanie’ in V Magazine in 1968. This marked a distinct change in Pichard’s style: the heroine Blanche is a pure orphan (rather like de Sade’s Justine), as naive as she is physically desirable, who finds herself the target of men’s lust and inevitably finds herself stripped naked and stunned. Blanche Epiphanie caused a scandal when it was published in France-Soir . Thereafter Pichard continued to push moral boundaries when he collaborated with Georges Wolinski to create a yet more controversial series featuring the eponymous character ‘Paulette,’ which began serial publication in Charlie Mensuel in 1970. Le Monde has described how the artist “became an undisputed master of adult comics with his buxom, falsely naive heroines, who are always forced into risqué situations.”

Pichard’s early work from the late 1940s and ‘50s featured busty young women, but his draughtsmanship was simple, even cartoonish.  By the time of his version of Ulysses in 1968, his characteristic strong lines and the dark, full-lipped, heavy-lidded and large breasted female figure has emerged and is well established by Caroline (1975), along with elements of bondage, sexual torture and various other perverse practices.  The influence of US cartoonist Robert Crumb is plain in the development of Pichard’s work; the American stressed that he drew comix- that is, X-rated comics- and the French artist’s mature style is definitively situated in this genre whilst his women, both in their physique and their strong personas, bear a close resemblance to those drawn by Crumb.

In 1977 Pichard’s book Marie-Gabrielle de Saint-Eutrope, with its explicit focus on BDSM and strange tortures (reminiscent of the gothic fantasies of Carlo), led to many popular bookshops ceasing to stock his work. Nonetheless, having become something of a specialist in erotic art, into the 1980s Pichard continued to illustrate free adaptions of classic erotic stories such as Sader-Masoch’s ‘Red Countess’ (1985), ‘The Lotus Flower’ by Jin Ping Mei (1987), Les Exploits d’un jeune Don Juan by Guillaume Apollinaire (1991), The Kama-Sutra by Vatsyayana (1991), La Religieuse by Denis Diderot (1992), Germinal by Émile Zola (1992), Prosper Merimee’s Carmen (1995) and, of course, Trois filles. His Marie-Gabrielle in the Orient is modern Orientalist exploitation.

The artist’s version of the Odyssey, transformed “the bewitching Circe into a super-sexy vamp,” according to Le Monde. Summarising his career, the paper’s obituary said that “Drawing women with generous shapes with a pen, highlighted by black and white enhanced by screens, Georges Pichard wanted to be the heir of the libertines of the Age of Enlightenment. Dandy, dressed to the nines, convinced feminist, he was one of the precursors of eroticism in comics and one of the main French counter-culture cartoonists of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Pichard’s illustrations are rendered in black and white in a cartoonish manner, often highly stylised and unrealistic. The men are often either ruggedly handsome or aged and grotesque. The women have exaggerated breasts and nipples, full lips, abundant lashes and freckles and very dark eyes. This kind of cartoon approach to Louys plainly makes sense to some publishers, hence the edition of Roi Gonzalve which appeared in 1990, illustrated by Dutch graphic artist Kris de Roover. His pictures are bright, bold and colourful in comic book manner. The virtue of these pairings of caricature-like images with the French author’s texts is to remind us that what Louys wrote was frequently not to be taken seriously: he was burlesquing and sending up books that he often regarded as pompous and boring- or he was simply lampooning himself for the fun of it. Accordingly, Pichard’s series of illustrations for Louys Trois filles de leur mere (1983) are very consciously drawn with stark, strong lines in a highly explicit style that confronts the graphic nature of the book head on: Pichard’s reading of the text seems to been to find it grotesque and pitiable- hence the almost haunted look he gave to some of the characters. In this respect, it’s interesting to contrast his artistic response to that of Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre, whose light, lyrical lines and watercolour washes tend towards a happier, more homely sense of the family, or Edouard Chimot‘s lively and brightly coloured illustrations, which help to emphasise the excitement and pleasure of the family Louys described. These radically contrasted illustrative strategies underline my argument that the contribution of the artist to illustrated books can have a major impact upon the reader’s interaction with the text itself.

Pichard’s later style and subject matter must unavoidably have been shaped by the Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emergence of the ‘permissive’ society, bringing with it a greater tolerance not just of sex, but of varied sexualities, must have given him the confidence to explore what was graphically acceptable with publishers and the buying public. He came to work on Trois Filles de leur mère at the end of this more liberal and radical era, but his response to the text sits clearly within its values. Louys may have written the book six decades earlier, but the issues he portrayed had become elements of serious contemporary debate and Pichard must hve approached it in full knowledge of what it symbolised.

Pichard’s personal reaction to Trois filles was, I believe, to consider it to be a disturbing account of family abuse and filial enslavement, combined with a depiction of the brutalising effects of prostitution; this seems to have been adopted from the student narrator of the story, who expresses shock and revulsion at various points in the other characters’ narratives. Pichard’s illustrations were, accordingly, shaped by his understanding of Louys’ message. The artist’s illustrations are stark and monochrome, a choice that emphasises the harshness of their reading of the narrative. The romanticising- even cheerful- element that Chimot’s artwork introduced, is entirely absent. This is compounded by the fact that Pichard treated the text in the manner of a comic strip, with multiple plates, rather than the five to ten that might be more usual. This multiplicity of images only serves to hammer home the grimness and strained helplessness of the story he portrayed.

For more information, see my bibliography for Pierre Louys.

Inventing the past- Pierre Louys & Ancient Egypt

I have described previously the book Aphrodite, published by Pierre Louys in 1896. This is one of his first and most accomplished books. It first outlines the theme of reviving the classical world which is addressed again more daringly in Bilitis, in which he actually passed off his own work as a rediscovered ancient text. What’s more, he had previously translated a text by Lucien (Mimes des Courteasans), in which the sexual themes which came to characterise his writing were first broached. In the case of Aphrodite, Louys set his story in the Egypt of the Ptolemies- the pharaohs descended from Alexander the Great.

The action of the novel takes place over no more than two weeks, if that, and never leaves the narrow confines of one quarter of the city of Alexandria. The Greek goddess Aphrodite is at the core of the story, with all action revolving around her worship. By locating his story in a far-off and exotically alien environment, Louys was able to present his readers with a culture that was deeply strange and unfamiliar, but which could be accepted because it was so remote and unknown to us. The author consciously created “an imaginary alternative to the physical and moral climate of his time,” a place that was “anti-modern, anti-Northern and anti-Protestant.” Instead, Louys’ imaginary Hellenistic world is “oriental, syncretic, hybrid and hedonistic, allowing expression of a sensual, symbolist and decadent aesthetic” (P. Read, ‘Pierre Louys, Rodin and ‘Aphrodite’: Sculpture in fiction and on the stage, 1895-1914′ French Studies, 2007).

At the heart of the tale is the vast complex of the temple of Aphrodite. Demetrios, a Greek sculptor, has created a new sculpture of the goddess for the shrine, basing it upon the body of his lover, Queen Berenice. However, he is now enamoured of his own marble ideal beauty, rather than the young and demanding woman. Demetrios then meets Chrysis, a Judean girl brought to Alexandria to work as a courtesan. Chrysis typifies the hedonistic culture of the city (and of the worship of Aphrodite). She provides her services to any customer, regardless of age or sex, although she prefers women. With this aspect of her character, Louys first addresses in detail what was to become one of his favourite themes. Chrysis’ lovers include her Indian slave Djala and two Greek flute players, Rhodis and Myrtocleia. The latter couple have been devoted to each other since childhood and, just as he would do in Bilitis, Louys imagines a Greek marriage ceremony for female partners, a union that the pair aspire to in time.

Chrysis is not averse to sex with men from time to time- for the rough excitement, if nothing more- and, when she meets Demetrios, she decides to play along with his instant infatuation for her. She holds out the tantalising promise of a sexual relationship, provided that he first steals certain precious items as gifts for her- including the necklace adorning his statue of Aphrodite in the temple. Demetrios is besotted enough to do this, murdering the high priest’s wife to get one item and, by stealing another, bringing about the execution of a slave (she is actually crucified by her mistress during a dinner party).

Another link between Chrysis and Demetrios is that they have both visited the same courtesan at the temple of Aphrodite. As the goddess of love, sex lies at the core of Aphrodite‘s worship. The temple is served by priestesses who engage in ecstatic orgies together. Girls come to the temple to dedicate themselves to the goddess for, attached to the shrine, there is a school which teaches young girls the skills of sex. When they have completed their studies, they go on to work as holy prostitutes within the brothel facility that sits in the temple precinct. Demetrios likes to wander at night in the gardens there, choosing different women each time he visits. Eventually, he comes across new courtesan, a girl of ten and a half years called Melitta, who has already been visited a couple of times by Chrysis- and has a crush on her. The scenes with Melitta, involving his favourite themes of lesbian, underage and group sex, are very typical indeed of Louys. His details of the erotic nature of the worship of the goddess at the temple in Alexandria emphasise the weird otherness of classical religion and, in fact, the entire society he imagined, sitting as it does entirely outside the moral framework and social and legal assumptions of the Christian west.

E. Zier

The foolishness of youth is key to the story- it’s manifested in the impetuous recklessness of Chrysis, Demetrios and other characters. He madly steals the treasures for her; she brazenly parades in them in the heart of the city, and is arrested and executed. Demetrios’ final tribute to her is to sculpt her dead body. Rhodis and Myrtocleia ensure a proper burial for her in a touching final expression of their love. Some of Louys’ later works are rather monotone in their unremitting concentration (obsession, even) with some of the more ‘niche’ aspects of sex and sexuality, but Aphrodite has a complex and intertwined plot and is full of intriguing and well developed personalities.

This book, with its rich combination of sex, violence, oriental culture and pagan mysticism, offered illustrators huge scope for exotic, colourful and dramatic scenes. It has run to many editions over the subsequent century and many of these have benefitted from colour plates that enhance the excitement and curiosity of the text itself.

George Villa, Chrysis

Since 1896, there have been at least a fifteen illustrated editions of Aphrodite. The book plates in these have ranged from the tame and modest (see, for example, the art work of Edouard Zier, for the edition of 1902 to be found on Gutenberg). Zier’s plates may be contrasted to art such as that created in 1938 by George Villa, which is explicit as well as emphasising the absolute otherness of Graeco-Egyptian society: in the temple school, the young students are given instruction as they study a couple having sex; strange ceremonies are dedicated to the goddess; there is frequent and acrobatic sex- on horse back, for example- or in groups, such as the wild tangle of limbs between Chrysis and the two Ephesian flute players, reflecting Louys’ suggestion of their almost frenzied passion. The Ukrainian artist Serge Czerefkov produced very similar line drawings of similar energetic scenes between the three young women (1928) whilst Clara Tice, who painted in a brightly coloured and almost child-like style, in 1926 designed a set of charming images which echoed classical pottery or murals.

Clara Tice

Another female artist, Mariette Lydis, focussed on the women in the story in a more tender and sympathetic manner (see below). Her plates (as was her preference) avoided the frantic ardour of other artists’ designs, but they still retained the underlying sensuality and exoticism of the story. This wasn’t always the case, though: Edouard Chimot, who produced some notable images for other books by Louys, in 1929 illustrated Aphrodite with a series of female portraits that seemed to be 1920s fashion plates (complete with fashionably bobbed hair).

As one of his most successful books, Aphrodite was graced with designs by other artists who often illustrated his texts: these include Paul-Emile Becat, Antoine Calbet, Andre Collot. and Louis Icart. All contributed plates that enhanced the pleasure of the book itself and all are worth tracking down online. As I’ve commented before, these books, primarily dating from the 1920s to 1940s, are now regarded as highly collectable masterpieces, with the plates being sold separately as works of art in their own right.

For more detail of the writing of Pierre Louys, see my Bibliography for him. For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page.