Viennese Decadence- the art of Franz von Bayros

Dante’s Inferno, canto 19

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

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

The artist in 1898

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

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

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

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

The White Peacock

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

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

A 1911 bookplate

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

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

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

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

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

Bambi, Berlin & Babylon- some reflections

Heinrich Zille, Beim Kartenspiel

I have just been re-watching the German series Babylon Berlin and, towards the end of the third season (the most recent), I was struck by some elements of an emerging story. A schoolgirl of thirteen or fourteen, called Toni, is keen to make some money of her own so she can buy two pet birds in a cage. She bumps into a disreputable friend of her uncle, a man who seemed to be trying to seduce her in an earlier season, and he offers her a well paid and easy job- reading aloud to a lonely old man. Toni sees no reason to refuse, and we watch her reading the story Bambi to the elderly man; he sits in an armchair listening, his eyes closed in a dream or an orgasmic haze. It’s little surprise when, at the end of one visit, he offers her a hot bath in his flat, the only stipulation being that she leaves the bathroom door open whilst she washes.

Toni’s older sister, Charlotte, is now a police officer but before this she had to do whatever she could to make ends meet. She worked during the day as a typist, but in the evenings she seems to have provided fetish sexual services in the basement of a nightclub. It looks as though Toni may be heading in a similar direction.

Irene Bohm as Toni Ritter

So far, so sordid. A young girl reads a children’s story, just like a mother to a child, but to an older man; it’s a bizarre but ostensibly rather harmless kink on his part. But there is, I think, more to it than that. Toni reads Bambi– and that’s more than just a story about a deer.

Bambi was published in 1923 by Hungarian writer Felix Salten (1869-1945). It was a considerable success and, of course, we remember it today more for the Disney cartoon than we do for the actual book itself. Salten followed it up with titled Bambi’s Children: The Story of a Forest Family in 1939, plus two other stories which were made into Disney films. We see him very much as a children’s author, therefore, although his reported aim when writing Bambi was to offer a serious parable of the dangers and persecution faced by Jews in Europe. (It’s worthwhile noting, too, how Babylon Berlin repeatedly, but very subtly, reminds us of the large Jewish presence in the Berlin of 1929. They’re just another part of the city’s population at this stage, but we already know that the Nazis are on the rise).

Returning to Toni, the story she reads to the old man is only six years old, so she’s clearly not recreating his childhood for him in some explicitly Proustian way. That being so, why did they choose Bambi? I think the answer to this seems clear.

Zille, Alter Mann mit Kindern in einem Berliner Hinterhof

Bambi was not Salten’s first book. He took a while to find success, for the novel was, in fact, his seventh. As a new and struggling writer, with a young family to support, Salten initially needed to find a quick source of income. Like Toni and Charlotte, he realised that sex sells. However, in his case, he wrote erotica. In 1906 an anonymous story was published- Josefine Mutzenbacher oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt (The Story of Josephine Mutzenbacher, Viennese Whore, Told in Her Own Words). Salten never officially admitted writing this book- for reasons that will become apparent- but he is universally accepted as having been the author.

Josephine Mutzenbacher’s story is presented as an autobiography, written in later life shortly before her death. It is an account of her sexual experiences from the age of about eight until she becomes a prostitute, aged thirteen. Pepi, as she’s called for short, lives in a very poor part of Vienna but her childhood is undeniably rich (if that’s the right word) in sexual revelation and experimentation. She begins her discoveries with her brother and a couple of friends of a similar age, but progresses rapidly to having sex with school friends, a teacher, a priest, lodgers in the family flat and, ultimately, her father. She has sex with women and girls, she engages in group sex, she’s photographed by an early pornographer. By the end of the book, there’s very little Pepi’s not tried. She tells the story largely with optimism and humour, but it can easily be seen as a grim account of exploitation, degradation and abuse. At the end, she and a friend are sent out onto the streets to sell themselves so as to support her father and another man, meaning they can stay in the flat and drink all day. There’s bleakness and tragedy underlying the endless ‘poking.’ It’s not a great book, either, by reason of that very poking. There’s a limit to how many descriptions of sexual intercourse any reader can put up with. Salten tries to liven things up (like modern porn films) with lots of exclamations and cries of delight, but it all ends up sounding rather repetitive and silly. Be that as it may, it has become a ‘classic’ of a sort.

Which brings us to the film Mutzenbacher, released in March this year by Austrian director Ruth Beckermann. Cineuropa website summarises it as follows:

“With an ad in a newspaper, Ruth Beckermann announced a casting call for a film based on a well-known pornographic text. For more than a hundred years, the novel, Josefine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore has been the subject of controversy for its lustful depiction of child and female sexuality. Though banned for a period, it has also been celebrated as a world-renowned work of Viennese literature. The film, Mutzenbacher , sees a hundred men [of all ages] confronted with excerpts from the novel at a time when sex is more ubiquitous than ever, and yet is met with a highly charged moral environment.”

I haven’t seen the film, so I’ll cite the same website’s review:

“In an old factory location adorned with a tattered pink couch with gilded flower patterns, Beckermann (always off screen) receives her subjects – sometimes just one, sometimes in groups, most often paired up. Several are given passages (mainly steamy ones) to read out loud and then react to. The book and its characters are discussed from a number of perspectives, including the alarmingly young age of the protagonist and the permissiveness of then versus now. ‘They seemed to still have fun in those days,’ laments a middle-aged man before going into current debates on toxic masculinity and the cancellation of flirting. His Millennial ‘couch-mate’ assures him there’s still fun to be had out there.

The socio-political aspects of the period are confronted and dissected. Several accounts go into personal sexuality and its fantasies. There are aesthetic evaluations on vulgarity versus stylistics. Some show disgust, while others can’t help but be mildly amused by quotes like: ‘My bum danced a czardas on the desk.’ In her quest for reactions, Beckermann has found a highly effective catalyst in this novel.”

So, Beckermann uses the still-controversial book to stimulate debate about society and sexuality. Babylon Berlin, meanwhile, much more discretely hints at the same issues. Without knowing the history of Bambi and its author, Toni’s visits might seem ‘just’ an example of her personal exploitation and lack of options. In fact, the clever reference to the Josefine Mutzenbacher story sets up much broader resonances and makes Toni’s trajectory more representative of the problems faced by women in a male dominated and increasingly militarised and violent society. I suspect season four of Babylon Berlin may only bring worse for her.

Zille, Ein lustiges Trio, Madchen von Hinten

On First Looking Into Pierre Louys’ ‘Pybrac’

Toyen, A Girl Sleeping Under the Stars, 1944

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

with profuse apologies to John Keats

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

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

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

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

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

Toyen, Two Girls with Flowers, 1932

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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