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 studyIn 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 Pybracby 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.
The poems and novels of Pierre Louys were always destined for publication in illustrated editions. The writer himself was a decent draughtsman and photographer, whose images of his lovers were clear complements to his verse. His authorial imagination was such that he conceived of his works as a succession of ‘scenes,’ whether those might be imagined as theatrical or pictorial. What’s more, from the outset, his published work was quickly reissued in illustrated volumes, as commercial publishers appreciated how ideally suited they were to such editions. The text offered episodes readily translatable to visual form whilst the erotic content had an instant appeal to buyers. As I’ve argued before, the illustrated editions of Pierre Louys’ various books constitute a major literary corpus that also has considerable art historical significance: sixteen different works were illustrated by in excess of one hundred and thirty different artists and were issued in a total of over one hundred different editions.
The foregoing figures are impressive, but in concentrating upon them the danger is that the wider context within which such remarkable productivity was possible is taken for granted. We risk making the mistake of simply accepting that the publishers, artists- and market- were all available, but in reality a major contributing factor to the sheer wealth of artistic creativity that enhanced the writer’s own literary originality lies in the special circumstances of the book trade and visual arts in Paris during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Publishing & censorship
Perhaps the foremost facilitating factor was the relatively relaxed attitude of the French authorities towards the erotic book trade. Explicit depictions of sexual activity tended to be risky- which is not to say that out and out porn was not produced (but it was frequently undertaken covertly), nor that depictions of sexual contact were avoided where they could be defended as being ‘artistically justified.’ Editions of several of the more explicit works by literary authors included explicit plates- such as Guillaume Apollinaire’s Onze Milles Vierges (1942) and an edition of Paul Verlaine’s pansexual Oeuvres libres published by Jean Fort in Paris but which claimed to originate “À Eleuthéropolis” (near Hebron in Palestine). This attribution was a blatant attempt to pretend that the book was nothing to do with a French publishing house- one which was plainly still hedging its bets.
Many of the most explicitly erotic works of Pierre Louys were published following his death in 1925, and were accompanied by suitably graphic illustrations. Once again, these texts commonly alleged that they had been published outside France. For example, the 1929 edition of Bilitis apparently came from the Greek island Mytilene, where the heroine of the story lived, and the 1940 edition of Douze douzains de dialogues originated “A Cythère” (at Cythera, one of Aphrodite’s islands). The 1935 edition of the verse collection, Poésies Érotiques, claimed it came from Chihuahua, Mexico; the 1934 edition of Trois filles de leur mère alleged that it came from Martinique. These foreign publishers all sound highly improbable, and it’s surely likely that the authorities had a pretty good idea that they had really been produced in Paris. These stratagems aside, the book trade thrived for the first five decades of the twentieth century and, in its turn, encouraged a rich aesthetic community to complement it.
Paris- city of culture
Paris had been a centre of artistic excellence for several hundred years. In the recent past, of course, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Surrealism and other movements had been particularly linked with the city and, as a result, it had become a magnet for artists nationally and internationally, drawn by its schools, ateliers, salons, dealers and galleries.
A good example of the city’s draw for, and impact upon, painters may be the Bulgarian-born Jules Pascin (1885-1930). After studying and working in Vienna and Munich, he moved to Paris in 1905 and became immediately involved with the bohemian artistic and literary circles of Montparnasse, where he got to know painters and writers including Hemingway and Picasso. He enrolled at the academy run by Matisse and, on that painter’s recommendation, regularly visited the Louvre, where he copied the works of such eighteenth-century masters Greuze, Boucher, Van Loo, Watteau and Fragonard. Pascin’s own taste for erotica and nudes was doubtless reinforced by seeing these earlier painters’ canvases. Whilst Pascin was never commissioned to work on a book by Louys, he did produce a painting based upon Roi Pausole and, in the tight knit artistic community of the French capital, he knew illustrators such as Andre Dignimont and Marcel Vertès.
The artistic community of Paris was close-knit and somewhat incestuous and doubtless artists passed around news of possible commissions to illustrate books when they were drinking in Montmartre bars. The artistic capital of the world fostered talent in other ways, too: Auguste Brouet, who illustrated Louys’ Roi Gonzalve in 1933, earned money early in his career by producing cheap reproductions of paintings by other, much better-known artists- another good way of honing one’s skills and the instinct for what makes a good composition.
Magazines
A great deal of explicit material (written and visual) was tolerated by the French authorities and plainly contributed to a European perception that Paris was a uniquely ‘naughty’ place. Such an impression of ‘sauciness’ was doubtless further bolstered by the large number of magazines, such as La Vie Parisienne and Fantasio, in which suggestive images of glamorous nudes habitually appeared. The artist Chéri Hérouard is very typical of this genre. A good example of his output is a cartoon of a mermaid that appeared in Fantasio in 1921. The mermaid is seated, naked of course, on the sea floor, looking up at the bottom half of a woman in a bathing costume swimming above her. The image surely has a double entendre: the sea creature marvels amusingly at the strange behaviour of terrestrial beings, but at the same time we may enjoy the frisson of wondering if she is tempted by the shapely thighs and lower torso passing within touching distance. Topless or thinly veiled mermaids and nymphs regularly graced Herouard’s work, as did young beauties bound, or being either spanked or whipped, which were also popular with the artist. See too my post on the work of Georges Redon.
The importance of these magazines is not just what they tell us about the generally permissive mood in Paris, but also what they demonstrate about the artistic community working there. There was very evidently a pool of graphic artists with considerable skills in draughtsmanship and effective composition, upon whom the journal publishers could draw for cartoons, satirical sketches and other illustrations. Artists who worked on comic books or drew cartoons for newspapers and magazines included Jacques Touchet and Georges Beuville (both of whom worked on editions of Louys’ Roi Pausole), whilst Maurice Julhès, Pierre Lissac, André-Edouard Marty, Lucien Metivet and Maurice Leroy all illustrated Bilitis as well as drawing humorous sketches.
Georges Pichard, cartoon, 1950s
Graphic Novels
More recently, as I have described before, graphic novelists have been commissioned to work on Louys’ texts: Georges Pichard used his stark monochrome style to bring out the bleak depravity of Trois Filles in 1980 and Kris de Roover leavened the incest of Roi Gonzalve by means of bright colour blocks in 1990. Both these artists worked in established traditions, with Pichard drawing upon the inspiration of Robert Crumb and de Roover designing in the Belgian graphic style of ligne claire, initiated by Tintin’s creator Hergé. A close friend of Hergé was another Belgian, Marcel Stobbaerts, whose primary coloured and cartoonish illustrations of Pibrac from 1933- in which sexual explicitness and ribald humour combine- would seem to be another source of inspiration for de Roover.
Even more recently, the British artist, Robin Ray (born 1924), who uses the pseudonym Erich von Götha, illustrated an edition of a play by Louys, La Sentiment de la famille. Ray is known for the erotic and sadomasochist content of his illustrations and comic books. His most famous work is the series The Troubles of Janice, set in the time of the Marquis de Sade. The emergence of adult ‘comix’ (with an emphasis on the ‘x’) has provided a new medium for the presentation of Louys’ works to a modern audience.
The design of pin-up images is also something for which quite a few of the illustrators of Louys have been known. Early in his career, Georges Pichard honed his characteristic female character in such images (see above). The same is true of René Ranson (Trois Filles, 1936) and Raymond Brenot (an edition of Sanguines, 1961)- their partially nude figures were often incorporated into adverts and calendars for products such as motor oil (see commercial art later).
Children’s Books
A form of illustration related to comics and cartoons is that of children’s books, and the list of artists who provided plates for these- but who also worked on texts by Louys- includes Pierre Lissac, both Pierre and Maurice Leroy, Rojan, Maurice Julhès, Pierre Rousseau and Renée Ringel. Although there was an obvious gulf between the books’ contents, those artists working in the junior, as well as adult, markets had very valuable skills and were plainly in demand. Publishers appreciated that they could instantly capture the essence of a scene in a concise and attractive image- one that could not just complement but enhance and propel forward the narrative beside which it was printed.
René Ranson, ‘Hello sailor’
Commercial Art
Another branch of commercial art that also provided employment for talented draughtsmen was found in the continual demand for posters and advertisements and many significant painters and illustrators also made (or supplemented) a living by such work. Amongst the artists who undertook commercial design work (as well as illustrating works by Louys) were Nathan Iasevich Altman and Jean Berque (Bilitis, 1932 and 1935 respectively), Pierre Bonnard (Crepuscule des nymphes, 1946), André Dignimont (Bilitis, 1947) and Maurice Leroy (Bilitis, 1948) in addition to which there were those artists who were illustrators of multiple works by Louys- such as André Collot and André-Edouard Marty. Amongst the many multitalented and adaptable artists whose commissions included illustrations for magazines as well as Louys’ books were Georges Barbier, Luc Lafnet, Rojan and Louis Icart.
Finally, theatrical design was another source of income for jobbing artists, and illustrators who earned additional money creating sets and costumes included René Ranson and Georges Barbier. Barbier also designed jewellery whilst the painter and illustrator Pierre Bonnard made furniture.
Raymond Brenot
French Literature
Furthermore, Pierre Louys did not write in an artistic vacuum, neither literary or pictorial. His period saw not just an outpouring of cheap porn paperbacks alongside frank, sexually themed poetry and novels from authors like Collette, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Apollinaire; there were also regular reissues of earlier texts- for instance, new editions of eighteenth-century work by Casanova, Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereux) and, of course, the rediscovered and newly popularised Marquis de Sade. Very many of these volumes were illustrated- very frequently by the same artists who worked on titles by Louys.
Independent of literary erotica, and the illustrations that accompanied those works, it’s important to notice that artists were also producing their own freestanding portfolios of adult imagery. The Austrian Franz von Bayros (1866-1924) is particularly significant in this genre, but French/ Belgian artists André Collot and Martin van Maele, and Russian émigré Rojan, deserve mention because all three also provided plates for books by Louys. Van Maele and von Bayros shared a distinctly gothic or grotesque taste; all of them explored the complex but controversial interplay between sex, sexuality, perversion and various degrees of force and violence (see too Jules Pascin’s pen drawings and his 1933 portfolio Erotikon or the Sade-inspired portfolios of Fameni Leporini).
What these conjunctions emphasise is the fact that the illustrators just mentioned didn’t only respond to the content of the texts by Louys upon which they were commissioned to work. Their independent collections demonstrate that those books were merely reflective of wider interests and obsessions in European society at that time. However, the purely visual representation of these themes in the portfolios brings these themes more starkly and unavoidably to our attention. Decadence and Bohemianism were not just meaningless labels- in the books and etchings we are often witnessing the first stirrings of sexual liberation and a permissive society. Louys- along with many others- was a harbinger of these shifts in social attitudes, although he may have felt that his promotion of Greek social values and an openness to greater diversity and freedom of personal expression fell on deaf ears in his time.
Summary
In conclusion, the illustrated editions of the many novels and poetry collections of Pierre Louys stand as a remarkable body of collaborative creativity, a literary and artistic legacy deserving of much wider critical study and popular appreciation. These joint productions underline the degree to which individual artists depend upon the work of others. Pierre Louys’ achievements arose upon the foundations of previous writers, painters and illustrators, who had created an aesthetic and intellectual environment within which he could develop his own particular vision. As for the craftsmen and women whose images enhanced his words, this brief review repeatedly demonstrates how multi-talented they were, able to produce memorable designs in a wide range of media.
A longer, fully annotated version of this essay can be downloaded from my Academiapage. For further discussion of the market for illustrated books in its wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.
Georges Barbier, advert in Vogue, December 1st 1920
I have written a good deal about the books of Pierre Louys and about the numerous illustrated editions of those works that have been published. I now want to consider how the work of the Marquis de Sade has been treated by the publishing trade. As many readers will appreciate, de Sade bears many striking resemblances to Louys- the Marquis was doubtless an inspiration to the latter and they both dealt with similar themes of transgressive sexuality in manners that were sometimes shocking and provocative. Sade was, though, much more of a philosopher than Louys, far more concerned with wider social and political questions. Very narrowly, the content of their books guaranteed stimulating material for artists to work with, so that publishers knew that illustrated editions would be likely to sell well within a certain market.
Guido Crepax, Justine, 1979
It’s interesting, therefore, to find that there are maybe twenty illustrated versions of de Sade’s key works (Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom and 120 Days of Sodom), not an insignificant number, perhaps, but dwarfed by the total of illustrated editions of Louys, which exceed one hundred and twenty on my latest reckoning. In the case of Sade’s most notorious title, 120 Days of Sodom, this may partially be explained by the fact that the manuscript of the text was only rediscovered and published by the poet Apollinaire and then by the surrealist Maurice Heine in the late 1920s. In point of fact, though, most of the editions of de Sade post-date the 1960s, suggesting that it was only in more recent decades that publishers felt that it would be acceptable to issue his works without the risk of public complaints and criminal proceedings.
Philippe Cavell, 1983
I suspect that one of the first artists to respond to the works of Sade, since Bornet had illustrated the original editions of La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette in 1797, was the rather obscure French artist Fameni Leporini, probably in the 1930s. As others have observed, it seems very clear that the artist was working to a text (or texts), for otherwise some scenes make little sense to the viewer- their context is obviously lacking, as if they were meant to illustrate a narrative that is now absent. Personally, I regard his portfolios not as illustrations of specific titles, but rather as interpretations of the themes and scenes also addressed by de Sade (most obviously, I would suggest, Part Two of The One Hundred & Twenty Days of Sodom); this would seem to be confirmed by the inclusion of monks in a few prints as well as some images that show eighteenth century dress. Leporini was very capable of representing intense mutual passion between lovers, but he also reflected the violence and abuse of power that could be present in Sade’s works, meaning that he depicted not shared pleasure but dominance, distress and shame- an acknowledgment that male control and exploitation have often had the potential to distort interpersonal relationships.
In rather the same way, in the 1960s the German born surrealist Hans Bellmer produced a series of darkly erotic drawings and etchings inspired by the writer. These were interpretations of Juliette, Justine and 120 Days, but the works were unconnected to any edition of those books. The first was the drawing Life & Death (For de Sade) of 1946, A Sade from 1961 and culminating with the Petit traité de morale (A Little Moral Treatise) in 1968. Bellmer’s baroque images elaborate his figures’ anatomy in unreal ways that tend to dehumanise the subjects and distance the viewers. The results can be violent and disturbing, resembling dissection drawings, stressing that corporeality is close to decay and that lust verges on cruelty.
Blaine, Justine
New illustrated editions of Sade began to be published during the 1930s. In 1931 Heine’s transcription of 120 Days, with 16 lithographs by Andre Collot, appeared. In the manner typical of Collot, the images were as explicit as this violent and pornographic text demanded. They recognised, nonetheless, that the pain and humiliation is shared in de Sade’s book, with seducers as likely to be whipped or degraded as their victims.
One of Sade’s most popular books has always been Justine- or the Misfortunes of Virtue. There was a German edition in 1900, with colour illustrations in eighteenth century style by an unknown author. These imitate Bornet’s plates from 1797, notably his tendency to pile up figures in improbable pyramids, and like their models the plates they are highly explicit. The book- probably consequentially- appeared in a very small print run. However, in 1931, the same year as Collot’s 120 Days, an English translation of Justine was published in New York, with 27 “spirited illustrations by Mahlon Blaine.” Blaine was a colourful character who liked to claim that he had been born on Easter Island. One dealer has described his work as walking “the razor’s edge between the grotesque and beautiful.” He was a self-taught illustrator notable for his darkly erotic images, which are to be found in books which also include Flaubert’s Salammbo (1927) and William Beckford’s Vathek (1928). As will be seen, there’s considerable vigour in his designs, as in the representation of Justine’s death seen below.
In 1932, the Czech surrealist Toyen (whom we have encountered before in discussing her illustrations for Pierre Louys’ Pybrac) provided plates for an edition of Justine. These match the rather abstract style of her work on Pybrac that same year. Toyen’s husband, Jindřich Štyrský (1899-1942) who was a surrealist painter, poet, editor, photographer and graphic artist, also designed a photographic cover for an edition of de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, as well as writing a study of the Marquis’ work.
Jindřich Štyrský’s cover image for de Sade
A pause in publications followed until near the end of the war, when in 1944 a new edition of Juliette, illustrated by another Surrealist artist, the Argentinian Leonor Fini, appeared. The curator of a 2018 exhibition in New York on ‘Fini and the Theatre of Desire’ described how, for the artist, life was to be lived as an “investigation in the human psyche and, for her, gender and sexuality were the greatest ways to perform those kind of experiments, both on the canvas and in real time.” Fini illustrated about fifty books during her career, choosing authors and titles that coincided with her own interests. These included the Satyricon and works by Verlaine, Jean Genet and Charles Baudelaire. Fini’s twenty-two plates for Sade’s book responded in particular to the macabre elements in the text, emphasising skeletons and decay as much as erotica. This emphasis on mortality, I think, was her way of representing those aspects of de Sade’s work where carnal desire slips into cruelty and the reader/ viewer becomes uncomfortable and alienated.
Fini, Juliette, 1944
Two years later another female illustrator, Lilian Gourari, provided twenty one plates for a new edition of Justine, ou Les Infortunes de la Vertu. I’ve been unable to find out much about Gourari (or Gourary), other than she illustrated only a few books- amongst them children’s books such as Les Neufs Lutins de la Montaigne (The Nine Gnomes of the Mountain). Her work on de Sade appears to be the most significant. She didn’t flinch from depicting the various misfortunes inflicted upon the hapless Justine.
Gourari, 1947
A slowly accelerating flow of editions of de Sade had begun. In 1948 an edition of Eugenie de Franval (a story of incest and its punishment) appeared, with eight plates by Valentine Hugo (1887-1968). She was a writer and painter, best known for her work with Jean Cocteau and the Ballet Russes and her close association with the Surrealists (including an affair with Andre Breton). Her illustrations included editions of the Surrealist’s favourite, the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1933) as well as the surrealist Paul Éluard’s Les Animaux et leurs hommes (1937) and Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Poètes de sept ans (1938).
Eugenie de Franval, Valentine Hugo
Another version of Justine, this time illustrated by Schem, appeared in 1949. His twenty three coloured lithographs are typical of the sweet delicacy of his attractive illustrative work, featuring a good deal of nudity but nothing really shocking.
Schem
Eberhard Schlotter
A hiatus followed during the 1950s, perhaps because the market seemed well supplied, but interest in de Sade revived in the ’60s with three new illustrated editions of his work. Curiously, all of these featured the work of young German artists. The eldest was Eberhard Schlotter (1921-2014) who worked as a painter in Spain and Germany. In 1967 he designed a set of sixteen etchings depicting episodes from Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. The following year, the Polish-German Arwed Gorella (1937-2002) created 13 etchings for the second volume of Sade’s collected works (in German). The images- mostly portrait busts- remind me of those faces constructed from vegetables and fruit created in by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-93)- except that Gorella (naturally) used naked bodies. Uwe Bremer worked on volume three of the same edition, using a radically different style but yet- like Gorella- capturing the same anatomical aspect of Sade’s work that so many other illustrators had identified.
Gorella
Bremer
In 1972 Johannes Vennekamp (b. 1935), the German artist and colleague of Uwe Bremer, produced a portfolio of thirteen etchings based on 120 Days. He too opted for a kind of diagrammatic graphic approach, in contrast to which was the refreshingly cartoonish work of caricaturist and illustrator Albert Dubout (1905-76), who illustrated Justine in 1976 with some exuberant and exaggerated images. Dubout (who was married to illustrator of Pierre Louys Suzanne Ballivet) worked on satirical magazines such as Le Rire and illustrated numerous books, including Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel; perhaps this background helped him to locate the humour in de Sade, finding his extreme situations so over the top as to be laughable rather than shocking. In 1979 Guido Crepax took the next logical step and rewrote Justine as an exquisitely illustrated graphic novel (see image earlier). A graphic novel version of Juliette, by Philippe Cavell, followed in 1983 (see cover image earlier). His other illustrated work includes an edition of Fanny Hill and various erotic novels such as Petites alliees by Clary F and Nini Tapioca by Beatrice Tessica.
Johannes Vennekamp
Further illustrated editions have followed in the last few decades: these include (amongst others) Justine and Juliette by Martina Kugler (1945-2017) in 1991 and by Lisa Zirner in 2014. The former opted for simple pen drawings in an unusual ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ style, the latter for fifteen cheerful, bright, almost cartoonish illustrations which are notable for the joy and pleasure that she depicted amongst the participants. Interestingly, perhaps, in 1985 and 2006 respectively, both women had previously illustrated Histoire de l’œil by Georges Bataille, intellectual, philosopher and early associate of the Surrealists. The History is a 1928 novella that details the increasingly bizarre sexual perversions of a pair of teenage lovers. Bataille was heavily influenced by de Sade, making the separate publications quite closely linked.
Javier Gil (born 1961) created a series highly explicit pastels based on Philosophy in the Bedroom in 1996 whilst Alexander Pavlenko, who was born in Russian in 1963 but who now lives in Germany, has produced another portfolio of Sadean inspired works entitled A Sade- rather like several earlier German artists. Pavlenko’s approach was to produce rather exaggerated erotic images. Most recently, in 2014, the French illustrator Yves Milet-Desfougeres (1934-2022) created a series of quite crude-looking pen sketches to go with another edition of Philosophy; he too had also worked on Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil, in 2010.
Lastly, in 2000 a lavishly produced edition of Justine, with twenty designs by Cyriaque de Saint-Aignan, was published. These are impressive female nude studies, although not perhaps fully reflective of the book; the ‘glamour’ style of the pictures, most notably the frontispiece, which renders the virtuous and innocent Justine as a Carmen-like figure, seem at odds with the story.
What many of the illustrators of de Sade have confronted in the author’s texts is the risk that carnality can tip over into depersonalising cruelty, that a sense of the individual, consent and volition can be lost. This sets this body of work apart from many of the books I have previously discussed. Nevertheless, as I’ve proposed before, we see how the provision of illustrations with text can amplify the written word, reinforcing its impact as well as making the reader focus more closely upon what is being described or discussed. This can have an especially powerful effect with work such as de Sade’s.
The image of decadent Rome is constantly present in the works of Lorenz Alma-Tadema. In an 1883 lecture on the current styles of art in Britain, the art-critic John Ruskin criticised Alma-Tadema for making it his “heavenly mission to portray” Rome in its “last corruption […] and its Bacchanalian frenzy” (The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, 1884, 103). Ruskin was not mistaken in his analysis of the time frame of much of the painter’s work: the vast majority of Alma-Tadema’s historical scenes focus on the late-Imperial period of Rome. For example, in 1871 he painted A Roman Emperor, depicting a member of the praetorian guard bowing to a terrified Claudius, with the murdered body of the assassinated Caligula, his nephew and predecessor, sprawled close by. The Roses of Heliogabalus from 1888 shows the emperor Heliogabalus showering his dinner guests with rose petals, resulting in many being smothered to death- or so legend claims; his reign was brief as a result of his alleged excesses. The artist’s Unconscious Rivals (1893) began as a painting of the ceiling of Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden House) in Rome. Alma Tadema’s 1907 canvas Caracalla and Geta depicts the two sons of the emperor Septimius Severus in a magnificently decorated box in the Colosseum; the brooding Caracalla stares at his triumphant younger, but favoured, brother, Geta, foreshadowing the latter’s murder and Caracalla’s coming reign. According to Edward Gibbon, Caracalla would surpass even Nero and Domitian in tyranny to become the “common enemy of mankind.”
Alma Tadema, A Roman Emperor, 1871
Gibbon’s famous history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire– in which he argued that successive emperors’ hedonism and cruelty brought about the decadence and decline of the once-great Rome- is clearly echoed in Alma-Tadema’s canvases. He seldom chose to depict incidents or scenes from the positively-viewed Republican or Augustan eras; rather, it was Rome’s worst rulers, and the dissolution and cruelty of their reigns, which characterised Alma-Tadema’s Roman world. This was a deliberate turn against the idea of exempla virtutis, the moralistic view of earlier history painting which called for inspiring examples to be presented to the public.
Caracalla & Geta, 1909
I have mentioned before that French artist Thomas Couture first came to public attention with a painting of Rome during the Decadence (1847). The Polish-born painter, Henryk Siemiradzki (1843-1902) had close connections to Ukraine but spent a large part of his life studying and painting in Rome. He too painted classical scenes, both mythology and incidents in everyday life, but he also specialised in incidents from Polish and Russian history and from the Bible. Nero’s Torches (1876) combines Biblical history with neo-classicism by showing the Imperial court assembled to watch some Christian martyrs being incinerated; Christian Dirce (1897) shows a scene in the Colosseum, in which an opulent looking but thuggish emperor inspects the corpse of a Christian woman who was lashed to a bull before it was pitted against gladiators. Both have perished, it seems; the original Dirce was the Greek queen of Thebes who, according to myth, mistreated her niece, Antiope, and in revenge was killed by the latter’s sons by means of tying the queen to the horns of a bull.
Thomas Couture, Rome during the Decadence (1847)
An Orgy in the Time of the Caesars (1872) and Orgy on Capri capture the mood of the Rome of Edward Gibbons. We have the same nudity and inebriation that we see in Couture’s canvas, but with added menace. The brooding lighting of the palace in the 1872 painting suggests an obliviousness to the outside world; on Capri the bacchanal has brought cavorting revellers to the seashore, where they appear oblivious in their delirium to the corpses that have fallen down from the imperial villa above.
Siemiradzki, A Roman Orgy in the Time of Caesars, 1872
Siemiradzki, An Orgy of the Times of Tiberius on Capri, 1881
Rather like Siemiradzki, fellow Pole Wilhelm Kotarbiński (1848-1921) trained in Rome and worked for many years in Kyiv. He painted many scenes set in imperial Rome and Egypt, many exuding a sense of luxurious and indulgent lassitude; his orientalist images of courtesans in the seraglio are saturated with a comparable mood of bored carnality. Most striking, perhaps, is Kotarbiński’s orgy scene, a canvas that depicted some of the stereotypes of decadent Rome. From the 1890s, the painting is replete with the signifiers of doomed extravagance, the nudes, the wine, the flowers, the hints of sex.
For readers of a certain age, there may of course be a certain staid familiarity to some of these images- especially that of Claudius and the murdered Caligula- because they are all highly reminiscent of the BBC version of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, which was first broadcast in 1976. The series’ orgies were all very respectable affairs, with the dissolution of participants mainly marked by eating grapes straight off the bunches held above their heads (it seemed). Pretty tame stuff, especially when compared to the HBO’s Rome…
Kotarbiński, A Roman Orgy
Orgies are good fun to paint, of course; the artist can indulge himself in nudes and rich fabrics whilst showing off his skills in convincingly depicting candle and torch light. Nonetheless, I wonder if there are political undertones in some of these paintings as well. Certainly, Couture’s critique of Roman decadence was painted just a year before the 1848 revolution that toppled the Bourbon monarchy of Louis Philippe and the picture was understood by contemporaries to be a veiled attack on the crown. The Pole Kotarbiński could well have felt little affection for the Russian empire, partly as a result of native nationalism and partly because of the time he spent living in Ukraine- most notably when the Red Army invaded in 1919. He might well have welcomed the fall of the Romanovs in 1917. I am less convinced of this thesis in respect of Siemiradski, given that he spent many time studying in St Petersburg and the fact that many of his canvases hang in Russian galleries.
Part of the unspoken context of the artistic (and literary) orgies I have been discussing is the understanding that they were an indulgence of an elite. Only the rich and powerful can afford to stage them; only the rulers of society can command the slaves, servants and courtesans needed to entertain guests; only the privileged and connected can overcome any problems arising from participants getting overexcited and carried away- or, for that matter, can conduct themselves like this without serious reputational damage. Immunity from prosecution is ensured by status and wealth. It was in just such settings that the Marquis de Sade situated works such as Justine, Juliette, Philosophie dans le Boudoir and 120 Days of Sodom. Nobles and high-ranking churchmen are depicted kidnapping, tormenting, raping and murdering the young, the poor and the vulnerable, indulging their perverted tastes without consequence. Editions of his books issued during the Marquis’ lifetime were illustrated by Claude Bornet; his etchings show mixed groups of up to fifteen people copulating, beating and torturing each other- illustrations far more orgiastic than anything we’ll find in oils on canvas.
However, in the aftermath of the First World War, it may be argued that orgies and decadence became democratised. The horrors inflicted on the ordinary population in the first major war of mechanised destruction and slaughter appear to have led to a reaction- a wish to celebrate survival and to indulge the senses. The hedonistic Paris and Berlin of the 1920s are examples of this new mood- a rejection of politics and an embrace of personal liberation and pleasure. Arguably, this is reflected in the art of the period as well.
The very obscure and pseudonymous French illustrator ‘Fameni Leporini’ produced portfolios that depicted large and feverish group sex scenes. Next to nothing is known about the identity or biography of this artist; it is assumed he was born in the late 1880s or early 1890s, as he became active as a designer in the ’20s and ’30s. Some of his work seems very clearly to have been designed to illustrate de Sade’s books (the best fit would be the second part of The One Hundred and Twenty days of Sodom)– or at least was composed in response to the marquis’ writings: monks feature amongst the figures in a number of scenes. Other designs may well be the products of Leporini’s imagination, elaborating on some of the themes I have discussed; one of his series of prints was even titled La grande orgie (The Big Orgy). As other commentators on his work have observed, determining with certainty whether Leporini always depicted consensual activities, perhaps mixed with a little mutual S&M, or was portraying something more violent, is not always easy to say- especially in the mass scenes of writhing flesh that characterise his output. Given Leporini’s probable age, he is very likely to have seen service during the First World War. I speculate whether the damage inflicted upon many men’s psyches by these experiences may be part of the explanation as to why there was the marked boom in novels and illustrations depicting spanking and flogging that occurred in Paris after 1919 (see, for example, the work of Carlo featured previously).
The German illustrator Otto Schoff was able to undertake work similar to Leporini’s in Berlin during the 1920s, such as his Orgien (‘Orgies’) of 1924, a collection of ten lithographs in which every sexual combination seems to feature (even including pets). Die Liebesspiele der Venus (The Love Games of Venus) appeared in the same year, in which Schoff once again explored identical themes: one orgy even seems to be taking place in a nursery. Comparable family orgies may be found in Jules Pascin’s Erotikon of 1933. In these artists’ imaginations, all restrictions and boundaries seem to have broken down. Far worse, for sure, can be read in accounts of Emperor Tiberius and others, but space and time distanced those events and transformed them into curiosities about which audiences felt safe. Bringing identical behaviours into contemporary settings seems to have been more challenging to viewers, the artists thereby raising provocative questions about violence, pleasure, state power, personal liberty and the illogical mismatch between what’s lawful and permissible (mass killing) and what’s prohibited (mass copulation)…
Further reading might include Burgo Partridge’s History of Orgies (2017) or, perhaps, A Photographic History of Orgies (2020) by Alexandre Dupouy, whose study of Paris- City of Pleasure, I have previously reviewed. For more information on Victorian era art, see details of my bookCherry Ripe on my publications page.
The Surrealist movement in art was very conscious of its relationship to sexuality. The poet Andre Breton, one of the founding figures of the movement, proposed that sensuality and sensibility were identical and that there was only a difference of degree between the emotions aroused by poetry and those provoked by erotic pleasure. Surrealist philosopher Sarane Alexandrian has identified ‘extravagant love’ as one of the key values of surrealism: “it ensures that, in most surrealist works, the image of woman shines out like that of a guardian goddess.” Breton himself praised ‘woman’ as the “great promise,” the male’s partner in sexual alchemy and creation, acting as a medium or bridge for artists. Many of the male writers and artists who initiated Surrealism believed that women had a closer connection to the desired irrationality of dreams than men. From their very beginning, the Surrealists were interested in the work of Freud on unconscious and how that might release creativity. The group contended that the liberation of the unconscious imagination allowed a dark light, “une lumiere noire,” to shine on human affairs. As I have observed before, Surrealism was often a very sexist and non-progressive movement, with deplorably chauvinist attitudes to women, but it was at the same time alert to new ways of thinking and new ways of creating art.
In December 1959, the tenth international exhibition of surrealism opened in Paris. Its chosen theme was ‘EROS’- a subject deliberately selected because it was regarded as being both ‘anti-aesthetic’ and more directly connected with emotional power. Breton wrote to exhibitors describing eroticism as “a privileged place, a theatre in which incitement and prohibition play their roles and where the most profound moments of life make sport.” He reminded the artists too that, “far from necessitating the representation of scabrous scenes, [eroticism] derives a great deal from equivocation and can readily undergo many transpositions.” In other words, eroticism should not be confused with pornography; it can achieve its impact just as effectively by merely hinting at sexual desire, as well as by substituting for direct expressions of sexuality. Overall, for Breton, eroticism could be identified as one of the defining characteristics of the surrealist movement; it was a deeply serious matter: it lay at the heart of human consciousness and self-awareness. Art was both the “accommodation of secret desires” and the “marvellous precipitate of desire.”
The artist Marcel Duchamp reinforced what Breton believed in an interview in which he declared how important eroticism was to his work. Its significance to him was:
“Enormous. Visible or conspicuous or, at any rate, underlying… I believe in eroticism a lot, because it’s truly a rather widespread thing throughout the world, a thing that everyone understands. It replaces, if you wish, what other literary schools called Symbolism, Romanticism; it could be another ‘ism,’ so to speak… [It helps] to reveal [things that are usually hidden] and to place them at everyone’s disposal- I think this is important because it’s the basis of everything- and no one talks about it. Eroticism was a theme… [that] kept me from being obliged to return to already existing theories, aesthetic or otherwise.”
Going further still, the expression of unrevealed erotic desire demanded the dissolution of conventional norms. “Unleashed eroticism demands excess, blasphemy, subversion, even the blood-letting of the sadistic act. As such, it is an act of violence akin to a revolutionary act…” The surrealist conception of eroticism therefore saw it as a means of expression, both a revolutionary weapon and a source of revelation. However, giving unbridled sexuality such a significant status involved risks, as matters could potentially be taken to extremes. According to one authority, the surrealist movement “has always been sympathetically predisposed towards sexual perversion. ‘Eros noir’ not only violates taboos, and trespasses in forbidden domains, it also prospects in a country where desire is without limits and freedom intoxicating.” Surrealist art was frequently about the “multiplication of erotic possibilities.” It searched everywhere “for fresh temptations, new stimuli and satisfaction.” This search led, logically, to what the movement called eros noir (the dark eros).
Dorothea Tanning, Eine kleine nachtmusik
Eros noir is a term that reflects the potential violence and danger of sexuality and, as such, is related to Freud’s idea of the ‘death drive’ (the destructive instinct that is opposed to the libido, but which can still be expressed sexually through S&M practices, for example). Surrealism always particularly celebrated eros noir, both in its own output and in the works of earlier artists that the Surrealists admired. Another surrealist philosopher, Georges Bataille (1897-1962), detected the dark eros in the Mannerist painting of the sixteenth century and in the nineteenth century works of Delacroix, Manet and Gustave Moreau. It was at the heart of de Sade’s writings and it manifested itself in modern works by Paul Delvaux and Hans Bellmer. Eros noir has been defined very broadly: it is decadence, an aesthetic of violence, a quest for fever and the hot, dark heat given off by eroticism; it is a hatred of convention, a high atheism and it’s to be found in perverse and wildly transgressive erotica.
What the surrealists judged to be within the proper sphere of eroticism may be judged from the Succinct Lexicon of Eroticism that was appended to the catalogue for the 1959 EROS exposition. The entries within this brief encyclopaedia covered psychiatrists and psychologists, such as Freud, Havelock Ellis and Reich; notable figures from literature- for example, Fanny Hill; a range of sexual terms and, lastly, leading writers and artists. The list includes such poets and authors as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sappho, Casanova, Pierre Louys, the Comte de Lautreamont and the Marquis de Sade; painters as diverse as Balthus and Hans Baldung Grien and, even Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)- whose photographs were highlighted and accepted as being consciously erotic compositions, although the author of the entry (the film critic and writer Robert Benayoun) was ambiguous, if not critical, in his view of the man.
This list offers a summary of what- and who- the surrealists under Breton regarded as erotic and noteworthy. The approval given to the Marquis de Sade is especially notable: “no-one would call de Sade crazy anymore” declared his entry, and poet Guillaume Apollinaire is praised for having put de Sade in “his true place (the highest).” Conversely, whilst Vladimir Nabokov is noted for creating the character Lolita, “the prototype of the nymphet” and for defining the type, he is condemned for his “spineless defamation of de Sade.” The prominence given to de Sade helps to define eros noir more clearly but it also reinforces, I think, the impression of male chauvinism at the heart of Surrealism. The promotion of Sade’s extreme erotica to the level of key texts of world literature is, to say the least, surprising, whilst de Sade’s taste for writing about male domination of women and sexual violence hardly seems like something to be condoned or encouraged. Nevertheless, he was seen as a major source of ‘dark erotic’ inspiration and was promoted accordingly. The Surrealists’ rehabilitation of de Sade probably has to be viewed in the wider context of a taste for BDSM and fetish erotica that flourished in interwar France; it is in this light that we might also understand portfolios published by artists such as the pseudonymous French illustrator Fameni Leporini, like his series titled La grande orgie (The Big Orgy); Jules Pascin’s Erotikon of 1933; Orgien published in 1924 by German Otto Schoff (1884-1938), or the output of Austrian Otto Schatz (1900-61). All these works exploit elements of force and group sex, but I think Leporini’s ‘Big Orgy’ especially captures some key tonal elements of de Sade, as found in One Hundred Days of Sodom or Juliette. The artist’s orgies are, indeed, ‘big,’ but the writhing bodies, drawn in a rather amateurish style, take on a febrile aspect bordering on the comic. It’s very hard to treat them as erotic; instead, they’re both unpleasant in their atmosphere of casual cruelty and very silly in their over the top intensity. Leporini seems to push the dark eros over the edge into parody. Lastly, it should be noted that neither de Sade (nor any of the illustrators I’ve mentioned) displayed any of the “equivocation” that Andre Breton had praised in his letter connected with the 1959 EROS exhibition…
Academic Robert Stuart Short has contended that surrealism was “unique amongst contemporary revolutionary movements in putting itself unreservedly at the service of Eros.” Many surrealist works are expressly sexual. Examples may be found in much of the output of Hans Bellmer and Salvador Dali; the Czech artist Jindrich Styrsky even went as far as to illustrate his 1933 book Emilie prichazi ka mne ve snu (Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream) with collages that comprised images taken from hardcore pornography. His partner, the painter Toyen, provided some notably erotic illustrations to an edition of Pybracby Pierre Louys. The Belgian painter Paul Delvaux populated a large number of his Quattrocento townscapes with statue-like naked women; several of the paintings of the female surrealists Leonor Fini or Dorothea Tanning even more clearly demonstrate the prevalence of eroticism in the genre.
For more information on Lewis Carroll and the Surrealists, see my bookEat Me! When Alice Grew Up.
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