Illustrators, artists and the Parisian book trade

Mermaid, 1921, Cheri Herouard

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 Academia page.

Georges Barbier, advert in Vogue, December 1st 1920

‘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

Translation, Interpretation & Illustration- Ways of Seeing Art & Literature

Maurice Julhès’ illustration of the song ‘Uncertainty’ from Chansons de Bilitis Part II

Here, I’m going to test out an argument that the illustration of works of literature may be regarded as a form of translation- from one medium of communication to another. I’d like to propose that, whether the passage is from one language to another, or from the word on the page to the line, the same considerations and difficulties can apply.

Translation is by no means the neutral process that we might suppose it to be. We can all achieve instant AI translations now, at the click of the mouse, but we would be mistaken in accepting these too readily. This may change as AI becomes more intelligent, but- at present- it reflects the choices made by the individuals who created the tools- the very same process of selection made by human translators working directly from a text- but perhaps neither so intelligently or expertly in the case of AI. 

I have written a lot about the work of the Belgian born and French speaking novelist and poet Pierre Louys (1870-1925) and (as I mention on another page) I have had cause in my research to translate several works by him that are currently not available in convenient English editions. Now, I’ll admit, I generally run these through an online translation tool to begin with; it’s quick and it almost instantly gives you a basic text to work with. But what you get always needs tidying up. As we know, words can have several meanings and it is not unusual for online translators to choose the commonest- or perhaps the standard- definition, something that can reduce a sentence to nonsense. To restore what I consider to be the correct sense, of course, I’ve got to make another subjective selection. Slang is often poorly handled by translation tools- especially if it’s from a century ago. Then there are fundamental linguistic differences that have to be resolved: French, for example, often uses the present tense to discuss past events, something which sounds odd in English. Grammar and style have to be sorted out to make a passage easily readable and, all the time, there is an almost unconscious input from the person doing the transcription- preferred ways of saying things; words you’d rather not use (at all or in certain contexts)- a whole constellation of taste and prejudice which can get involved. Then, of course, there’s the question of verse. Do you aim to preserve the meaning, and produce blank verse, or do you try to reproduce something of the metre and rhyme pattern too, which can force you into quite major divergences from the literal sense of the text? This is especially an issue with Pierre Louys, who took a delight in matching the verse forms of classical literature with very rude content. Part of the parody is the contradiction between the sonnet form and the smut. Which do you choose?

In short, a translated work can only be the author’s words filtered through a third party’s well-intentioned, principled and carefully considered prejudices and selections. Perhaps, then, this is an argument for saying that illustrations are a more neutral form of translation, as the illustrator only has to represent what he or she has read. However, as I’ve pointed out several times before, selection and taste always intervene. The artist has to decide: which character(s) or which moment to depict; the manner of that depiction; the general artistic style employed (to choose extremes- a ‘photo-real’ illustration, or something very free and impressionistic?) Once again, all sorts of issues of taste and choice intervene- probably further shaped by a publisher’s editorial policies, house style, target market and so on. Illustration is no less neutral than verbal translation.

So, I turn again to various translations of Pierre Louys’ Chansons de Bilitis, and to wonder whether the 1945 edition illustrated by Maurice Julhès (1896-1986) was one of the most effective combinations of words and image in the long history of publication of this work.

Julhès was born in Sannois, in the Oise valley, and trained in the decorative arts before becoming an illustrator for humorous newspapers after 1918. During World War II, Julhès worked for several magazines that were under German supervision and, as a result, after the Liberation, he was suspended from his work for two years. However, in 1947 he returned to illustrating comic strips and children’s books. Despite his primarily satirical and mocking output, he was commissioned to illustrate adult works such as the Poésies of Sappho or the Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire- as well as his work on Bilitis. Coming to the work as a cartoonist on this text, Julhès took care to reflect the Greek setting and brought his skills in capturing vivid and concise imagery, as well as the ability to weave the text around the pictures in a dynamic way. 

Julhès: pages from Parts II & III of Les Chansons de Bilitis

In 1999, I might add, a graphic novel version of Aphrodite by Pierre Louys also appeared. The three parts of the book were published as separate volumes with different illustrators; Milo Manara illustrated Book 1, Georges Bess worked on Part 2 and Claire Wendling on Part 3. The books feature lavish full-page colour plates. Other contemporary graphic novel style approaches to the novels of Louys have been mentioned before: Georges Pichard‘s work on the novella Trois filles de leur mere in 1980 and Kris de Roover‘s illustration of the unfinished L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve in 1990. All these editions (as well as the older ones) will be found to be readily available through Abe Books and Amazon.

My last examples purport to be translations but are actually pornographic pirates of Les Chansons. In 1930 Les Veritables Chansons de Bilitis appeared, a work (probably) of Pascal Pia (1903-79). Born Pierre Durand, he was a French writer, journalist, illustrator and scholar; he used a number of pseudonyms, including Pascal Rose, Pascal Fely and others. In 1922 Pia published the erotic work Les Princesses de Cythère (Cythera being the island of Aphrodite) and followed this up in 1928 with La Muse en rut (The Muse in Heat), a collection of erotic poems. His ‘pastiche’ of Bilitis fits within this genre of writing and perhaps reflects his sense of humour (often expressed in absurdist tendencies). 

Two illustrated versions of Les Veritables Chansons followed, the first with plates by Lucien Metivet (1863-1932) a poster artist, cartoonist, illustrator and author. The text purports to be a new translation of a Justinian manuscript. If this refers to the Roman emperor Justinian (482-565 CE) we are looking at a time period some 900 years after the purported dates of the ‘original’ Bilitis in the book by Louys. The new version is in prose, not verse, and takes various incidents from the original by Louys and expands upon them in detail, going far beyond what the Songs either say or imagine. Hence we have, for instance, a detailed description of Bilitis and Glottis having sex together and a later episode in which Bilitis and Mnasidika decide to enter into a menage a trois with an innocent girl called Galatee. My guess is that this name was borrowed from a character Louys’ Aventures du Roi Pausole, which Metivet coincidentally had also illustrated in 1906. Metivet’s illustrations are in his trade mark red and black ink and reflect the explicit contents of the new version of the story.

The Metivet version

A further edition of the Veritables Chansons appeared in 1946, illustrated by Jean Jouy. This was a further pirating of the original, in the sense that the prose passages from the 1937 version were rendered into verse and matched with large colour plates. The book has moved a long way from what Louys wrote, as there is a large heterosexual element, as well as mixed orgies, both in the text and the images. Jouy’s plates are very attractive, but highly explicit. There is also an undated edition entitled Les Chansons Secrets de Bilitis with illustrations by an unknown artist which are very similar in form and content to Jouy’s.

These last two examples are not ‘translations’ as such, but they illustrate how editors and writers adapting the texts of others can depart from the originals they’re working to create almost wholly new books. To return to my thesis at the start, I think it’s not uncommon for readers to take illustrations in books rather for granted but, when done well and thoughtfully, they can be as much part of the visual and intellectual experience as the text itself.

Icons of Aphrodite: Some More Illustrators of Pierre Louys

In the course of researching my recent posting on Sound and Vision and the art of illustrating literary texts, I turned up a handful of new artists who were not previously familiar to me; all worked on Pierre Louys’ second novel, Aphrodite, and deserve a mention.

Edmond Malassis was one of the earliest illustrators of the book (1896- reprinted 1898); for brightness of colour and sheer energy of his plates and headpieces, I prefer his work to that of Antoine Calbet or Edouard Zier. His street scene is alive with gossip, rumour and sly seductive looks; the episode in which Chrysis discovers Rhodis and Myrtocleia in her bed is accurately portrayed- the young courtesan initially forgetting that she has company because she is so obsessed with her own appearance.

Malassis, On the Jetty of Alexandria (Book 1, c.2)

Malassis, Chrsis neglects her guests (Book 1, c.7)

Perhaps the most interesting is Jean-Andre Cante (1912-77) who was a painter, sculptor, engraver and architect. He was a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux between 1927 and 1934 and then worked as an illustrator until 1948. After this time, he became a teacher at the school of Applied Arts in Paris, whilst also switching his attention to new techniques for integrating works of art into concrete architecture. As a technician and researcher, he developed new materials to achieve this, in particular synthetic resins combined with polystyrene or polyvinyl chloride. His illustrative work is very pleasing and pretty, as in the cover image for an edition of Louys’ Aphrodite (above), from 1949. Reverting to the discussion of that earlier post, we see here the Ephesian flute players, Rhodis and Myrtocleia, depicted exactly as the Pierre Louys must have imagined them.

Pierre Rousseau (1903-91) was an illustrator and official French army painter. Amongst the works he illustrated were various literary and ‘adult’ titles, such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1927, an edition of Restif de la Bretonne in 1928, Alphonse Daudet’s Sapho (1929), Baudelaire’s Spleen in 1947 and Prosper Merimee’s Les ames de purgatoire in 1946. He also worked on numerous children’s books. In 1941 Rousseau illustrated a life of Marshall Petain that was, essentially, propaganda for the French regime then ruling that part of France not occupied by the Germans. It has to be noted that several of the contemporary writers whose works Rousseau illustrated during this period collaborated with the Nazis. Nevertheless, his work on Louys’ Aphrodite in 1929 is beautiful, with its use of simple blocks of colour and bold design. As can be seen below, in the image heading chapter 7 of Book 1 of the novel, Rousseau appreciated that there was little difference in age between Chrysis and the two Ephesian musicians, Rhodis and Myrtocleia, and in his illustration, he was faithful to the text by Louys.

Rousseau, Aphrodite, showing Chrysis with Rhodis & Myrtocleia

Firmin Maglin, 1899

Firmin Maglin (1867-1946) was a French painter and lithographer. He trained at two drawing schools in Paris and began exhibiting his work at the Salon of French Artists in 1890, at the Salon des Indépendants in 1895 and at the Salon d’Automne in 1903 and 1904. His paintings are mainly landscapes in a post-impressionist style, but he also produced orientalist work (such as Le Harem in 1935 and Les Jardins du Serail– The Gardens of the Seraglio). Maglin also designed lithographed illustrations for works of literature, supplying twelve engravings for an edition of Aphrodite in 1930: as noted before, these are in a rather dated style, although with a certain lively charm. The artist was rather older than the other illustrators discussed here and I suspect that he depicted the women in the styles of his youth, their hair piled on their heads as would have been fashionable around the turn of the century. His nudes remind me of another French artist of the same generation, Georges Picard (1857-1946), whose nymphs and faeries likewise looked like society ladies accidentally naked in the wrong surroundings. The ‘orgy’ scene below is notable for several reasons: in the background you can just about spot Rhodis and Myrtocleia providing the music, whilst the krater full to the brim with red wine in the foreground indicates how wild things might get later… (They do- in several ways: the musician Rhodis’ sister Theano, who’s a dancer, is dipped head first in the wine before being seduced- and then a slave is crucified).

from Aphrodite: Chrysis at the party, by Maglin

Frontispiece of the 1931 edition by Ray

Plate by Ray, showing influence of art deco style and Walter Crane’s ‘Renaissance of Venus‘ (1877)

A further- and apparently very commercially successful- edition of Aphrodite was published in 1931 by Carteret. The illustrator was Maurice Ray (1863-1938), a successful painter and illustrator who worked in a variety of styles, most notably producing nude and semi-nude female figures in Neoclassical and Orientalist (Egyptian) settings. This ideally suited him to work on Louys’ second book and he captured the decadent atmosphere very well- although we may remark how he has raised the ages of Rhodis and Myrtocleia in the plate shown below. The success of this edition of the book may well be ascribed to its plentiful illustration, for it included 32 watercolours by Ray along with twenty-five woodcuts taken from his designs by a Madame Moro-Ruffe.

Ray- Chrysis, Rhodis & Myrtocleia

Cover of the 1931 edition- woodcut by Moro-Ruffe

A E Marty

In 1936 the artist Andre-Edouard Marty (1882-1974) worked on a further edition of Aphrodite. He was also later to produce some striking illustrations to Les Chansons de Bilitis. His work on Louys’ second novel is characterised by its bold art deco style and beautiful colouring. His strong lines and bright tones doubtless explain why Marty was also commissioned to design posters for the London Underground in 1933.

A E Marty

The Second World War caused a hiatus in a lot of publishing for obvious reasons, although I suspect that in occupied Europe the book trade discovered that the Wehrmacht offered an active market for some products- both the fine art and more trashy erotica. This may partly explain why in 1944 a new edition of Aphrodite appeared in Brussels, with an illustrated and coloured title page and fifteen plates designed by Renée Ringel. She was a prolific illustrator of books, from children’s works (Les plaisirs et les jeux, 1940) through to adults texts (such as Collette’s Claudine books and Ovid’s L’Art d’Aimer, ‘The Art of Love,’ also 1950- a title notable for featuring a lesbian couple on its title page). Ringel had an extremely attractive style, highly reminiscent of Mariette Lydis, or perhaps Suzanne Ballivet; sadly, I’ve been unable even to discover dates for her, although she was active during the 1940s and ’50s.

Renée Ringel’s edition, 1944

Lastly, the artist calling himself Morin-Jean (1877-1940) also worked on an edition of Aphrodite in 1947. Morin-Jean initially studied law but switched to become an artist in 1911. Amongst his other illustrative work was an edition of Flaubert’s Salammbo (1931). His woodblock engravings are highly distinctive, their bold outlines being appropriate to the ‘antique’ subject matter, and the colour covers are simple but striking.

Once again, I feel that these designs indicate how good illustrations can enhance and add additional layers of meaning to the text that they complement. They are, in their own small way, a gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art in which media are combined to create a single, cohesive whole (one of the earliest literary examples might be the Almanac of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in 1912). Theory aside, the pleasure of a beautifully designed volume hardly needs to be described or proved; there have been numerous illustrated editions of Aphrodite, one of the most popular popular books that Louys wrote, and these continue to be highly sought after by collectors (as most of my illustrations here show, as they are taken from various dealers’ websites). Books like these have to be appreciated as a whole, experiencing the plates alongside the story and enjoying their interaction in the imagination.

Sound and Vision (and Taste) in the Works of Pierre Louys

Chrysis & Djala, in Aphrodite, by J A Cante, 1949

I have posted previously about the close connection between the writing of Pierre Louys and the art associated with that. I am pleased to discover that I’m not alone in making that connection. The scholar of French literature, Maja Vukušić Zorica, from the University of Zagreb, has observed how, “from antiquity, the ‘graphy’ of ‘pornography’ has always oscillated between writing and painting.” She said this in the context of Louys’ book La Femme, an autograph collection of his earliest erotic verse which was designed principally as a celebration of the female body (his lovers’ bodies) and was illustrated with his own sketches of his partners naked. It is highly intimate and erotic and it underlines for Louys how word and pencil line existed symbiotically, supporting and reinforcing each other and extending our understanding of the author’s literary vision. As the remark by Vukušić Zorica makes clear, the line of text does not displace the pen stroke that delineates form; one is not superior to the other, necessarily. Their relative significance may change from period to period: both within the life of a single artist, such as Louys, and between eras. Perhaps photography and the internet make the present a more visual than aural or textual age.

Book illustration is more than just expanding upon an idea through an image. The message conveyed by the picture is embodied as well in the form of the image itself.  What’s more, this is a complex subject to discuss, because part of the communication that’s involved in subliminal.

My particular interest here is the image that accompanies a text.  Almost always, that text was not written by the artist, who therefore comes to it as a third party, just like any other reader.  Some artists are able to liaise and collaborate with authors, but for most of the texts I have discussed in my postings, that was not possible because the authors were dead (Pierre Louys died in 1925, and it was only after this that many of his books were published, having hitherto been unknown manuscripts).  This fact means that the transmission of the writers’ ideas through imagery becomes a complex process.  Artists must read a text and find their own interpretation of it. They must choose suitable scenes to depict, decisions which hinge upon their own interpretations of what’s relevant to a story or verse.  They must then design an illustration.  What this conveys- and how it complements the text- in large measure depends upon the image itself, but this is not all: the illustration also speaks though its design, colouring, line and overall style.  What’s included and excluded, the manner in which its presented, the realism or abstraction of the draughtsmanship all contribute to the plate’s meaning, and thence to our reactions to the text and how we remember characters and incidents.  The message is the medium as much as it is the subject of the image itself.

Aphrodite 1929

In the matter of illustrating the works of Pierre Louys, the illustrator was confronted with very different tasks, depending upon the commission. Much of Louys’ poetry, such as Pybrac, is very concise and condensed, presenting the reader with a single visual image over just a few lines of verse. Illustrating the author’s poems was rather straightforward as a result; the same applies to his Manual of Good Manners for Young Ladies, which comprises a series of terse aphorisms that are readily translated into single illustrations.

Chrysis & Djala by Firmin Maglin, 1930

The task of illustrating Louys’ novels was, necessarily, more complex, for the reasons already described and, as well, due to the fact that- with some- determining the correct tone or approach for the artist could be fraught. An example of this, I think, is the novella Trois filles de leur mere (Three daughters of their mother), which appeared posthumously. This book is, in my opinion, one of the most iconographically complex of Louys’ prose works, as determining the author’s intent is very difficult indeed. Was it meant to be pure erotica (I doubt this profoundly); was it meant to be a declaration of sexual independence and personal freedom (possibly- in some respects), or was it meant to be a portrayal and condemnation of abuse and captivity (also, possibly, yes)? This uncertainty is reflected by different illustrators’ responses. Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre provided plates that, whilst not avoiding some of the more controversial aspects of the text, still tended in their delicate draughtsmanship and style to reduce some scenes to genteel suburban sex parties. In contrast, Georges Pichard‘s interpretation was to see the story as bleak narrative of violent exploitation (in which he decided to follow the student narrator of the account- although the voice of the narrator is not necessarily that of the author himself). Pichard’s illustrations are, as a result, more explicit but much less erotic, as the text is translated as a succession of unpleasant and desperate scenes. That Pichard also produced fifty-three plates for this 1980 edition compounds the tenor of his work; he was able to portray almost every scene and to bring home in graphic detail many of the more dismally depraved aspects of the text.

Mariette Lydis, Chrysis, 1934

By way of contrast, we might consider the treatment of individual characters in stories, as in Pierre Louys’ second novel, Aphrodite. The depictions of the main character, the courtesan Chrysis, vary widely from one illustrator to another. J. A. Cante showed her with her handmaiden Djala, both clothed and looking like respectable Greek women; the contact between their hands is the only suggestion that there may be more to their relationship (see head of page). Firmin Maglin rendered Chrysis and her servant naked together, but they still look quite staid and sober, rather like middle class matrons pretending to be Greeks. Mariette Lydis‘ response was to present the heroine as a reflective solo nude, a figure who could just as well be one of Lydis’ own lovers as an illustration for a story, although perhaps her pose and her contemplative air is suggestive of the pride that will destroy Chrysis. Pierre Rousseau’s bold design brings out more clearly the courtesan’s awareness of her own physical beauty and her willingness to display this and to manipulate others through it; the bright colours and bold design reflect something of Chrysis’ character, we might say. It is only really in the frontispieces by Clara Tice and Paul-Emile Becat that Chrysis’ full, dangerous vanity is expressed; both artists show her with the stolen mirror, necklace and comb that lead to her execution. In passing, we may note too the illustrations provided by Louis Icart for a 1940 edition of Aphrodite that was retitled Chrysis. The name Chrysis derives from her golden hair, which is a key element in her attractiveness and is much mentioned in the story. Icart, perversely, gave her black hair, as may, perhaps, better suit a woman of Jewish origin who was brought up as Susannah, but it makes a nonsense of the story.

Chrysis, by Louis Icart

In fact, I think the way that two lesser characters in the story of Chrysis were portrayed by artists is far more interesting and informative than their treatment of the heroine of Aphrodite. Present throughout the novel are two Greek flute players, a couple of girls called Rhodis and Myrtocleia from Ephesus. They are old enough to have left their home to seek work in Alexandria; they are also old enough to be lovers and to occasionally share a bed with Chrysis. They are referred to in the text a couple of times as the “little flute players,” yet they are plainly not so little. Clara Tice and Mariette Lydis follow the words of Louys, with Lydis even showing one older and more mature than her partner. Maglin, however, decided to take the adjective ‘little’ literally and has apparently halved the pairs’ ages. They are reduced to children of eight or nine, seen struggling to carry the corpse of Chrysis after her execution and appealing to the courtesan’s friend Timon for help. Their need for assistance is emphasised, but the fact that the couple are in a relationship and plan to marry is quite lost. That this is the case is especially noticeable if we contrast Maglin’s plate with illustrations for the book by Serge Czerefkov (1928) and by Georges Villa (1938): both these artists chose to be explicit about the pair as lesbian lovers, showing them making love together and (very gymnastically in Villa’s case) with Chrysis. 

The essential point is this: that illustrations can shape perceptions, unconsciously affecting our responses to, and interpretations of, a text. Where an artist departs significantly from the author’s conception, this can influence the reader’s impressions. An illustrated book should be conceived as a whole, with one medium supplementing the other; author and illustrator may rank equally in their impact upon the reader experience- hence my series of postings on the many illustrators of the books of Pierre Louys.

Flute player and dancing girl by Clara Tice

Rhodis & Myrtocleia, by Mariette Lydis

Antoine Calbet, 1910

The Death of Chrysis, by Firmin Maglin

Sound and vision are very important in the form of Louys’ work, then, but I’d argue that the sense of taste was also extremely significant to him. Taste (along with smell) is, of course, part of our experience of sex anyway and the entire oral and sensuous aspect triggers associations with eating and food. From my readings of Louys, it appears to me that food took on its own sensual nature for him, so that the boundaries between cuisine and sex became blurred.

For example, two female medical students feature in the Douze Douzain de Dialogues discussing how an ointment including Vaseline, mustard flour and cayenne pepper can (literally) spice up personal pleasure. Mustard is also applied in Trois filles de leur mere and Pybrac to heighten sensitivity- both deliberately and accidentally. Elsewhere, Louys’ febrile imagination found unexpected uses for salad oil, butter, bananas and aubergines and conceived of diners being put off their meals in a restaurant by one couple’s use of their table. The most notable intersection between the physical pleasures of the gourmet and the hedonist is found on Louys’ Utopian Ile aux Dames, in which he imagined a restaurant that provides entertainment for diners beneath the table as well as on top (as it were). This union of bodily sensations represents what may very possibly have been the writer’s conception of the pinnacle of experience.

For more detail, see my Pierre Louys bibliography, most especially my longer note on ‘Pierre Louys and Food.’

Two Less Well Known Illustrators of Pierre Louys

Vertès, Blond Girl

Marcel Vertès (1895-1961) was a costume designer and illustrator of Hungarian-Jewish origins. He was born in Budapest and his first commercially successful works of art were sketches of corpses, criminals and prostitutes he made for a sensationalist magazine in Budapest (he subsequently published a portfolio of this work as Prostitution in 1925). Vertès later provided illustrations for many of the clandestinely printed publications opposed the continuation of the Hapsburg monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War.

After the Great War, Vertès moved first to Vienna and thence, in 1925, to Paris, where he became a student of fine art at the prestigious Academie Julian. He quickly established himself on the Paris art scene, concentrating on illustration, painting and printmaking, especially lithography. He became a close friend and disciple of fellow émigré Jules Pascin, with whom he shared many tastes and interests.

Amongst the work Vertès undertook were forgeries of Toulouse-Lautrec’s works, which helped him earn his art tuition fees. His illustration commissions included working on various erotic books, which included several works by Pierre Louys. Amongst the titles Vertès illustrated were La Semaine Secrete de Venus, 1926, which was written by Pierre Mac Orlan, a leading author of erotic and spanking fiction during the interwar period in Paris (and another friend of Pascin’s); also Collette’s Cheri in 1929 and the collection of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems, Ombre de mon Amour, in 1956. These may all have led to his commissions to work on several books by Louys, but it may also have helped that Vertès (like Toulouse Lautrec and Jules Pascin before him) seemed to have a good knowledge of the world of Parisian brothels, as demonstrated by his album of colour lithographs, Dancings (Dancing Halls) which he produced soon after his arrival in Paris in 1925.

Harper’s Bazaar, October 1940

The artist first tackled Pierre Louys’ novel Trois Filles de leur mere in 1927. His seventeen dry-point prints were graphically faithful to the text; Vertès depicted all the perversities of the family at the heart of the novella. Next, Vertès illustrated Pybrac in 1928, unflinchingly recording the highly varied sex and sexuality that features in the hundreds of short poems that make up the collection. The artist also contributed plates to an edition of Les Aventures du Roi Pausole in 1932, which faithfully detailed the incidents of the story in thirty-eight pen and ink drawings. Six years later, he tackled Pierre Louys’ Poésies érotiques. Much like Rojan’s version of the previous year, Vertès provided thirty-two pencil and watercolour plates that fully portrayed all the lesbian and other incidents narrated in the verses.

Vertès, Three Girls

In 1935 Vertès made his first trip to New York in search of business contacts. Two years later he staged his first one-man exhibition in New York. That same year, in Paris, he provided the fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli, with advertisements for her new perfume called Shocking, work that was considered rather suggestive and a little shocking by some in the industry, with their hints of dryads and discrete nakedness. Schiaparelli herself obviously liked the artist’s work, for the campaign ran for seven years.

Harper’s Bazaar, October 1944

At the start of Second World War, Vertès returned to New York with his wife, escaping the Nazi invasion of France by just two days. Ten years later, he returned to live in Paris but still maintained his lucrative professional contacts in the USA. These led his work on the 1952 film Moulin Rouge about the life and times of artist Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec, for which Vertès won two Academy Awards; in addition, he painted the murals in the Café Carlyle in the Carlyle Hotel and in the Peacock Alley at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.  Furthermore, he designed the sets for Ringling Brothers’ Barnum and Bailey Circus in 1956, contributed illustrations to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and was a jury member at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. In France, his work was recognised when he was made an officer of the Legion d’Honneur in 1955, after designing sets for ballets at the Paris Opera. Vertès also published a number of books himself, including The Stronger Sex, Art & Fashion in collaboration with Bryan Holme, It’s All Mental, a satire on psychoanalysis, and Amandes Vert, an illustrated biography.

As his enormously eclectic output will indicate, Vertès was able to work in a variety of styles and media, turning his hand to almost any commission he received.  In this, he resembled many of the illustrators I have described in my postings: whilst they may have regard themselves as painters or engravers, earning an income demanded that they were constantly flexible over subject matter and materials.

Reynard the Fox

Kris de Roover (born 1946) was an artist from Antwerp, Belgium. He studied architecture before becoming an illustrator and, during his career, worked on illustrating a wide range of subjects, including erotica, with his designs being published across Europe and in the USA. De Roover employs revived the ligne claire style of comic art, which was pioneered in Belgium by Herge and other artists at Tintin magazine.

De Roover illustrated a comic strip version of Marcel Russen’s retelling of the medieval tale of Rynaert de Vos (Reynard the Fox, 1999), Die verhalen uit het kasteel der lusten- het verboden boek (1984- which was translated later as ‘The Chateau of Delights,’ 1990) and Pierre Louys’ L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve et des douze princesses (1990). He also created the children’s comic De Tocht der Petieterkees (The Tour of the Petieterkees, 1989).

My interest here is de Roover’s work on Roi Gonzalve. His previous work on Het kasteel der lusten, had indicated a talent for erotica, but the uncompleted novel by Louys represented a challenge to his representational skills. The origins of the story itself are unclear; the king seems to be an invention of Louys, taking his name from the eleventh century king Gonsalvo of the counties of Sobrabe and Ribagorza in the Pyrenees (and, as such, being a neighbouring realm to the imaginary kingdom of Trypheme in Louys’ Les Aventures du Roi Pausole). The twelve princesses of the full title, and their unnatural relationship with their father, may be an echo of the twelve children that the god Uranus had with his sister Gaia in the Greek myth of the Titans. Moreover, one of these offspring, Cronus, had six children with his sister Rhea and two of these, Zeus and Hera, became husband and wife, although Zeus previously was married to his aunt, Themis, sister of Cronus and Rhea. Rather like cartoonist Georges Pichard in his earlier work illustrating Louys’ Trois filles de leur mere, it seems that the Spanish publisher of Roi Gonzalve considered that a graphic novel style would be the best way of tackling the adult content of the story, thereby creating some distance and unreality. De Roover accordingly seems to have depicted the king as a louche, Lothario-like figure in a dinner jacket with a large seventies moustache, a slightly dodgy looking monarch whose character was well suited to the plot of the unfinished text, such as it is. 

De Roover’s choice of style for the book involved emphasising elements in his previous work: his plates feature strong outlines and very brightly coloured designs, using blocks of colour for each figure or item and depicted in a very simple manner (a style that might be very suitable for a children’s book- although primary tones are distinctly stronger than those he used for Reynaert de Vos in 1999). De Roover surrounded these with a pen and ink border design of female nudes which closely resemble his delicate work in the Kasteel der lusten. These elements further help to reduce the challenging nature of the content and to lighten the mood, by making the novella seem more like an action comic. It’s notable too that de Roover, like Paul-Emile Becat before him, chose to depart from the text of the book and overall raised the ages of the princesses he drew, lessening some of the potentially controversial impact of Louys’ narrative, although his plates are still explicit and are clearly tied to the text with quotations of the passages depicted.

We may well wish to reflect upon the fact that the two most recent illustrators to work upon the posthumously published works of Pierre Louys felt that such a style was more suitable or acceptable. For more discussion of these issues, see my book In the Garden of Aphrodite and also refer to my Pierre Louys bibliography.

On Leda, Pasiphaë and Little Red Riding Hood- modern uses of ancient myth

Valentin Serov, The Rape of Europa, 1910

In a recent posting I examined the late nineteenth century fascination with Gustave Flaubert’s story of Salammbô– and the wider contemporary interest in representations of sinful women involved with serpents. These images were just one facet of a larger theme in western art. 

In truth, depictions of cross-species relationships are nothing new in the history of human imagination. They have an ancient and classical pedigree. We need only think of the myths of Leda and the Swan, or of Europa and the Bull, in both of which Zeus took animal form in order to get close to women. Most memorable is the case of Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete, who had a wooden cow constructed for her by Daedalus so that she could couple with a bull, a union which gave rise to the hybrid Minotaur. Classical literature was just as outrageous, as, for example, in Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Book 10, c.22). Ancient art too unashamedly depicted such scenes, as in the famous Greek sculpture of Pan and a She Goat. In more recent British folklore, sexual relationships between humans and selkies (seal-folk), leading to part-seal/ part-human offspring, are quite common. This is a theme which has plainly engaged our imaginations for millennia.

Masson, Pasiphae, 1942

These myths have long contributed subjects and themes to fine art. Pasiphaë and the bull have been painted by Symbolist Gustave Moreau, John Buckland-Wright and, most notably, by the French Surrealist Andre Masson who, from 1932 onwards, produced a series of studies of the myth and, in turn, inspired Jackson Pollock to do so. We should also note Matisse’s lino-cuts of the Pasiphaë story that he designed to accompany an edition of de Montherlant’s play of the same name in 1944. Felix Labisse’s Strange Leda of 1950 is a late Surrealist exploration of the myth of nymph and swan, but in this case, Leda herself partly metamorphoses into the animal that molests her.

Jackson Pollock, Pasiphaë, 1943

Labisse, Strange Leda, 1950

Other artists have appropriated the classical story lines but relocated them to more familiar stories and settings. For example, in 1930 the Paris-based Russian artist Rojan (Feodor Stepanovich Rojankovsky-1891-1970) produced a series of illustrations of an adult re-imagining of Le Petit chaperone rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) in which the interaction between the girl and the wolf becomes more a matter of Greek myth than familiar fairy-tale. Subsequently, in 1935, the artist revert to classical precedent when he produced a portfolio based on Apuleius’ L’ane d’or (The Golden Ass) that depicted the episode in the book involving a taboo relationship with a man metamorphosed into the titular quadruped (see too Rojan’s Zoo (1937)). Most surprisingly perhaps, Rojan then moved to the United States and established himself as a leading illustrators of children’s books, leaving far behind this rather troubling period in his early career.

Rojan

Rojan was far from being alone in producing such material at the time. Whilst these themes have clear classical precedents, we might trace them most directly in French literature from the famed and scandalous Gamiani of 1833, a book generally ascribed to Alfred de Musset. The novel concerns the Comtesse Gamiani and her unbridled sexuality; the text features a lot of straight and lesbian sex, but also, disturbingly, scenes that reference and develop Apuleius. Gamiani‘s particular shock value seems to have lain in the way that it used the classical myths and classical storylines. Ancient models help to justify or make familiar and respectable what otherwise would seem wholly unacceptable. It appears that de Musset’s book helped to have establish something of a malign precedent in French literature; it was soon followed by Théophile Gautier’s Le petit chien de la marquise (The Marchioness’ Lap-Dog, 1836). These themes didn’t go away, but persisted into the next century. This was, I suspect, a reflection of new attitudes to human nature that emerged from the middle of the Victorian era onwards: Darwin’s work started to demolish the idea that humans were created distinct from other animals and that we were somehow superior to them; rather, our common descent meant that we shared many characteristics with ‘wild beasts.’ Secondly, Freud’s investigations into the human psyche revealed how much we are driven by subconscious and instinctual desires. This less separate- and less noble- view of human nature appears to have fed back from science into art; perhaps this is part of the message of Labisse’s Leda: that she is not at some levels so different from the bird.

In the writing of Pierre Louys- notably in his novel Trois filles de leur mere, which was written- but not published- in about 1914, the author indulged in a few scandalous scenes, albeit- as I’ve indicated previously– in such an exaggerated manner that I think they should be understood as hyperbolic parodies of Gamiani and the classical myths that Louys knew so well- and of Pasiphaë in particular. The purpose of the scenes was also to highlight the abuse and exploitation- even ‘martyrdom’- of the one of the book’s characters. Similar incidents are also to be found in some of Louys’ poetry collections, such as Pybrac and, in his Twilight of the Nymphs, Louys presented his own reworkings of various classical myths- including that of Leda. These scenes were, in turn, illustrated by the artists who worked on editions of his books- for instance, Paul-Albert Laurens, Leda & the Swan, 1898, Louis Berthomme-Saint Andre, Jean Berque, Marcel Vertes and Georges Pichard for Trois filles, by Rojan for an edition of Louys’ Poésies érotiques in 1937, and by Vertes for Pybrac in 1928.

Paul-Albert Laurens, Leda & the Swan, from Pierre Louys, The Twilight of the Nymphs, 1898

Hard to understand as it is, this sort of material would seem to have had a market- both texts and, more problematically still, images. Various other artists included scenes which were reminiscent of the myths of Leda and Pasiphaë, but which did not illustrate or draw upon them- in collections they published: examples include several of the portfolios by von Bayros, André Collot’s Jeunesse from 1933, a plate in Rojan’s illustrations for Renée Dunan’s novel Dévergondages (‘Wantonness’ or ‘Immoral Behaviours’) of 1948 or Jean Dulac’s 1952 plates for Trente et quelques attitudes. I personally struggle to understand the demand for such material that led to such a flow of books and art work from the presses (although the editions were very likely to have been quite limited), but they must be seen as depressing evidence of a high degree of very unpleasant misogyny. This probably tells us a lot about extremely regrettable male attitudes towards women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These books and illustrations may seem more outrageous to us because they do not seek to depict the mythology or to imitate classical settings, but this should probably not distract us from the very deep-rooted misogyny and gynophobia for which the Greek myths may also be evidence. 

The ancient myths remain powerful and fascinating. They are valuable vehicles that enable us to discuss many difficult aspects of human nature and, as such, they continue to provide inspiration even into the twenty-first century. Contemporary South African artist Diane Victor frequently references Greek mythology in her work, including Leda and the White-Backed Vulture, Endangered Liaisons- The Lady and the Rhino (2004) and Pasiphae (2001/2, reworked 2003). I am also a great admirer of the work American graphic artist and painter Stu Mead, who has long confronted issues of masculinity in his work. He clearly has a broad knowledge of themes and precedents in art history and borrows subtly but cleverly from the Greek and Roman canon, from classically inspired works of the Renaissance, and from more contemporary images such as film and musical. Accordingly, Mead has adopted the narrative traditions and the iconographical lineage of ancient mythology, but has relocated these ancient themes within a modern context- as we see in his allusion to Leda below.

For more information, see my recommended reading page.

Stu Mead: a modern version of the myth of Leda?

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.