The legacies of Louys

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

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hesitate fully to endorse this statement, as the most erotic of Pierre Louys work only emerged after his death when his unpublished and unknown manuscripts began to emerge.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

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

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

Book Illustration

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

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

Painters

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

Homage to Pierre Louys

Levy-Dhurmer, Bilitis, 1900

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

Auriol, Bilitis a la japonaise

Stanisław Eleszkiewicz, study for Bilitis

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

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

Conclusions

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

Pierre & Marie from Curiosa, 2019

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

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

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. For further discussion of the market for illustrated books in its wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

Georges Barbier, advert in Vogue, December 1st 1920

Woman & Puppet- a story of misogyny and frustrated desire

Philippe Swyncop, 1936

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

Mariette Lydis, 1934

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

Antoine Calbet, In the Fabrica 1899

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

Armand Coussens, In the Fabrica, 1933

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

Lydis, In the Fabrica, 1934

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

Paul-Emile Becat, In the Fabrica, 1945

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

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

Edouard Chimot, 1937

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

John Graz, 1919

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

In the Fabrica, Virolle, 1930

J-P Tillac, 1930

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

Jean Virolle

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

L. Clauss, 1946

Andre-Jo Veilhan, 1946

Roger Wild, 1947

Pablo Roig, 1903

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

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

Grau-Sala, 1951

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

At the Fabrica, Tice

Yunge

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

William Siegel, 1935

Kind mit puppe, Müller, 1946

For more on the works of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography for the writer. See as well my books page for details of my other writing on him. For a complete discussion of the illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

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

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

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

Sylvain Sauvage, 1927

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

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

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

Damenbar from Jeanne Mammen’s Bilitis series

Chanson de Bilitis, Marie Laurencin, 1905

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

Kuhn-Regnier

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

Greuell, 1931

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

Lissac

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

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

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

Plates by Albert Gaeng

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

Andre Michel

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

Plates by Dignimont

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

Maurice Leroy

Maurice Leroy

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

Mariette Lydis, 1948

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

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

For a complete discussion of the illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

Decline & Fall- Rome, Orgies and the Decadent West

Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888)

The image of decadent Rome is constantly present in the works of Lorenz Alma-Tadema. In an 1883 lecture on the current styles of art in Britain, the art-critic John Ruskin criticised Alma-Tadema for making it his “heavenly mission to portray” Rome in its “last corruption […] and its Bacchanalian frenzy” (The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, 1884, 103). Ruskin was not mistaken in his analysis of the time frame of much of the painter’s work: the vast majority of Alma-Tadema’s historical scenes focus on the late-Imperial period of Rome. For example, in 1871 he painted A Roman Emperor, depicting a member of the praetorian guard bowing to a terrified Claudius, with the murdered body of the assassinated Caligula, his nephew and predecessor, sprawled close by. The Roses of Heliogabalus from 1888 shows the emperor Heliogabalus showering his dinner guests with rose petals, resulting in many being smothered to death- or so legend claims; his reign was brief as a result of his alleged excesses. The artist’s Unconscious Rivals (1893) began as a painting of the ceiling of Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden House) in Rome. Alma Tadema’s 1907 canvas Caracalla and Geta depicts the two sons of the emperor Septimius Severus in a magnificently decorated box in the Colosseum; the brooding Caracalla stares at his triumphant younger, but favoured, brother, Geta, foreshadowing the latter’s murder and Caracalla’s coming reign. According to Edward Gibbon, Caracalla would surpass even Nero and Domitian in tyranny to become the “common enemy of mankind.”

Alma Tadema, A Roman Emperor, 1871

Gibbon’s famous history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire– in which he argued that successive emperors’ hedonism and cruelty brought about the decadence and decline of the once-great Rome- is clearly echoed in Alma-Tadema’s canvases. He seldom chose to depict incidents or scenes from the positively-viewed Republican or Augustan eras; rather, it was Rome’s worst rulers, and the dissolution and cruelty of their reigns, which characterised Alma-Tadema’s Roman world. This was a deliberate turn against the idea of exempla virtutis, the moralistic view of earlier history painting which called for inspiring examples to be presented to the public.

Caracalla & Geta, 1909

I have mentioned before that French artist Thomas Couture first came to public attention with a painting of Rome during the Decadence (1847). The Polish-born painter, Henryk Siemiradzki (1843-1902) had close connections to Ukraine but spent a large part of his life studying and painting in Rome. He too painted classical scenes, both mythology and incidents in everyday life, but he also specialised in incidents from Polish and Russian history and from the Bible. Nero’s Torches (1876) combines Biblical history with neo-classicism by showing the Imperial court assembled to watch some Christian martyrs being incinerated; Christian Dirce (1897) shows a scene in the Colosseum, in which an opulent looking but thuggish emperor inspects the corpse of a Christian woman who was lashed to a bull before it was pitted against gladiators. Both have perished, it seems; the original Dirce was the Greek queen of Thebes who, according to myth, mistreated her niece, Antiope, and in revenge was killed by the latter’s sons by means of tying the queen to the horns of a bull.

Thomas Couture, Rome during the Decadence (1847)

An Orgy in the Time of the Caesars (1872) and Orgy on Capri capture the mood of the Rome of Edward Gibbons. We have the same nudity and inebriation that we see in Couture’s canvas, but with added menace. The brooding lighting of the palace in the 1872 painting suggests an obliviousness to the outside world; on Capri the bacchanal has brought cavorting revellers to the seashore, where they appear oblivious in their delirium to the corpses that have fallen down from the imperial villa above.

Siemiradzki, A Roman Orgy in the Time of Caesars, 1872

Siemiradzki, An Orgy of the Times of Tiberius on Capri, 1881

Rather like Siemiradzki, fellow Pole Wilhelm Kotarbiński (1848-1921) trained in Rome and worked for many years in Kyiv. He painted many scenes set in imperial Rome and Egypt, many exuding a sense of luxurious and indulgent lassitude; his orientalist images of courtesans in the seraglio are saturated with a comparable mood of bored carnality. Most striking, perhaps, is Kotarbiński’s orgy scene, a canvas that depicted some of the stereotypes of decadent Rome. From the 1890s, the painting is replete with the signifiers of doomed extravagance, the nudes, the wine, the flowers, the hints of sex. 

For readers of a certain age, there may of course be a certain staid familiarity to some of these images- especially that of Claudius and the murdered Caligula- because they are all highly reminiscent of the BBC version of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, which was first broadcast in 1976. The series’ orgies were all very respectable affairs, with the dissolution of participants mainly marked by eating grapes straight off the bunches held above their heads (it seemed). Pretty tame stuff, especially when compared to the HBO’s Rome…

Kotarbiński, A Roman Orgy

Orgies are good fun to paint, of course; the artist can indulge himself in nudes and rich fabrics whilst showing off his skills in convincingly depicting candle and torch light.  Nonetheless, I wonder if there are political undertones in some of these paintings as well. Certainly, Couture’s critique of Roman decadence was painted just a year before the 1848 revolution that toppled the Bourbon monarchy of Louis Philippe and the picture was understood by contemporaries to be a veiled attack on the crown. The Pole Kotarbiński could well have felt little affection for the Russian empire, partly as a result of native nationalism and partly because of the time he spent living in Ukraine- most notably when the Red Army invaded in 1919. He might well have welcomed the fall of the Romanovs in 1917. I am less convinced of this thesis in respect of Siemiradski, given that he spent many time studying in St Petersburg and the fact that many of his canvases hang in Russian galleries.

Part of the unspoken context of the artistic (and literary) orgies I have been discussing is the understanding that they were an indulgence of an elite. Only the rich and powerful can afford to stage them; only the rulers of society can command the slaves, servants and courtesans needed to entertain guests; only the privileged and connected can overcome any problems arising from participants getting overexcited and carried away- or, for that matter, can conduct themselves like this without serious reputational damage. Immunity from prosecution is ensured by status and wealth. It was in just such settings that the Marquis de Sade situated works such as Justine, Juliette, Philosophie dans le Boudoir and 120 Days of Sodom. Nobles and high-ranking churchmen are depicted kidnapping, tormenting, raping and murdering the young, the poor and the vulnerable, indulging their perverted tastes without consequence. Editions of his books issued during the Marquis’ lifetime were illustrated by Claude Bornet; his etchings show mixed groups of up to fifteen people copulating, beating and torturing each other- illustrations far more orgiastic than anything we’ll find in oils on canvas. 

However, in the aftermath of the First World War, it may be argued that orgies and decadence became democratised. The horrors inflicted on the ordinary population in the first major war of mechanised destruction and slaughter appear to have led to a reaction- a wish to celebrate survival and to indulge the senses. The hedonistic Paris and Berlin of the 1920s are examples of this new mood- a rejection of politics and an embrace of personal liberation and pleasure. Arguably, this is reflected in the art of the period as well. 

The very obscure and pseudonymous French illustrator ‘Fameni Leporini’ produced portfolios that depicted large and feverish group sex scenes. Next to nothing is known about the identity or biography of this artist; it is assumed he was born in the late 1880s or early 1890s, as he became active as a designer in the ’20s and ’30s. Some of his work seems very clearly to have been designed to illustrate de Sade’s books (the best fit would be the second part of The One Hundred and Twenty days of Sodom)– or at least was composed in response to the marquis’ writings: monks feature amongst the figures in a number of scenes. Other designs may well be the products of Leporini’s imagination, elaborating on some of the themes I have discussed; one of his series of prints was even titled La grande orgie (The Big Orgy).  As other commentators on his work have observed, determining with certainty whether Leporini always depicted consensual activities, perhaps mixed with a little mutual S&M, or was portraying something more violent, is not always easy to say- especially in the mass scenes of writhing flesh that characterise his output. Given Leporini’s probable age, he is very likely to have seen service during the First World War. I speculate whether the damage inflicted upon many men’s psyches by these experiences may be part of the explanation as to why there was the marked boom in novels and illustrations depicting spanking and flogging that occurred in Paris after 1919 (see, for example, the work of Carlo featured previously). 

The German illustrator Otto Schoff was able to undertake work similar to Leporini’s in Berlin during the 1920s, such as his Orgien (‘Orgies’) of 1924, a collection of ten lithographs in which every sexual combination seems to feature (even including pets).  Die Liebesspiele der Venus (The Love Games of Venus) appeared in the same year, in which Schoff once again explored identical themes: one orgy even seems to be taking place in a nursery.  Comparable family orgies may be found in Jules Pascin’s Erotikon of 1933. In these artists’ imaginations, all restrictions and boundaries seem to have broken down. Far worse, for sure, can be read in accounts of Emperor Tiberius and others, but space and time distanced those events and transformed them into curiosities about which audiences felt safe. Bringing identical behaviours into contemporary settings seems to have been more challenging to viewers, the artists thereby raising provocative questions about violence, pleasure, state power, personal liberty and the illogical mismatch between what’s lawful and permissible (mass killing) and what’s prohibited (mass copulation)…

Further reading might include Burgo Partridge’s History of Orgies (2017) or, perhaps, A Photographic History of Orgies (2020) by Alexandre Dupouy, whose study of Paris- City of Pleasure, I have previously reviewed. For more information on Victorian era art, see details of my book Cherry Ripe on my publications page.

Otto Schoff, Girls’ Friendship, 1920

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. This showed gay as well as straight bars and clubs. It was followed up, in 1932, by a portfolio titled Dames seules (Women Alone), which comprised fifteen lithographs by Vertès illustrating aspects of lesbian life in the capital: couples together in their homes, women’s bars, women cruising for sex in the Bois de Boulogne and, in one case, a woman catching her girlfriend with some else.

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 Pierre Louys bibliography. For more discussion of work of Vertes and de Roover and of the illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

Emile Munier- girls & kittens

Girl with a basket of plums (1875)

Émile Munier, was born in Paris on June 2, 1840. He came from a working class family of cloth mill workers but was introduced to drawing and painting at an early age. He received training as a draughtsman under Abel Lucas at the Gobelins tapestry factory where his father worked. Later, he became a close friend of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, often visiting his studio, which led him to develop a strong identification with the academic style of art and a deep respect for the sorts of canvas produced by his mentor. The 1860s marked the beginning of his professional recognition, when Munier won three Beaux-Arts medals and exhibited his work at the prestigious Paris Salon. His affinity with Bouguereau is immediately visible in Munier’s paintings, which reflected the style and composition of his teacher’s masterpieces. Perhaps more so than the latter, Munier, a less accomplished artist, focussed upon winsome girls painted for the popular art market.

Sugar & Spice, 1879

Munier at first also worked in glass and tapestry design but from 1871 he devoted himself exclusively to painting. A very important early commission was the painting Angel Comforting His Grieving Mother, requested by Jane Stanford to immortalize her son, who died at an early age. Even more important, though, was Trois Amis/ Three Friends (1885), which depicts a little girl playing with her two kittens. When this was exhibited at the Paris Salon, it received rave reviews. Reproductions of the painting sold very well and Pears Soap even purchased the rights to use the image in its advertising.

The Morning Meal (1880)

With Trois Amis Munier definitively established himself as one of the leading painters of small children and their pets (dogs and caged birds were also included- the latter surely reminding us of much more charged pictures by Greuze, who often showed girls grieving over dead birds or hugging them to their bosoms). Numerous very similar pictures followed, often using his own daughters as models. These paintings include Her Best Friend, Feeding New Friends and Little Girl and Cat (1882), Playing with the Kitten (1893), Best Friends, A Special Moment, Girl with a Kitten and Puppy, Girl with a Basket of Kittens, etc etc etc . Until his death in 1895, Munier regularly painted a wide range of other subjects, including loving mothers and daughters, rural, mythological, religious and animal scenes, as well as landscapes and seascapes, but these images were always derivative. Just like Bouguereau, he often depicted cupids, buxom nymphs and very regularly showed country girls picking fruit or gathering herbage, feeding small animals like rabbits, doves or chicks, fetching water, tending sheep or goats or washing clothes. Nonetheless, kittens were what sold- especially if they were paired with pretty young girls, often looking equally cuddly and sweet in their night dresses.

Although there was commercial success and popularity to be found in such highly sentimental subjects, Munier would still include subtexts and academic references in his paintings. Hence, The Broken Vase below consciously invokes the Broken Pitcher by Greuze, an allegory for lost virginity. In his version, Munier replaces the young woman with a little girl and, whilst retaining the disordered dress that reveals the left side of the chest, in his case substitutes Greuze’s suggestion of sexual assault with a jokey and entirely innocent accident with a skipping rope. The child here is not a victim but is the naughty offender, dreading parental anger (and we, of course, are placed in the position of the annoyed adult).

Best Friends (1892)

Munier’s Best Friends (1892) is but one example of the entire contemporary genre of paintings that matched small girls with cuddly pets. Professor of Art History, Anne Higonnet, remarked how this sort of picture tends to “liken children to animals, making the child seem less human, less conscious, more at one with nature… Occasionally the pet is absurdly huge, cueing instead the viewer’s projection of his or her adult self as the child’s protector.” In the case of Best Friends, the large eyed girl is made more vulnerable and appealing by the fact that her straw hat is slightly damaged. It’s an almost subliminal message that she’s poor and may herself be in need of care. The small child cuddling small furry animals is the epitome of cuteness and of innocence; what’s more, the wholesome innocence of the ‘Romantic’ child is consciously opposed to the knowledge of adult. Yet, simultaneously, as Higonnet recognised, “the dubious overtones of paintings [of girls with kittens] let the innocence-knowledge seesaw tip back and forth… Do the imagined girls in [paintings like Best Friends] mimic adult flirtation a bit too well, providing viewers with the signs of sexual availability coyly grafted onto bodies coded with the signs of innocence? And what about that pussy in the little girl’s lap?” Higonnet argued that a very complex process of sexualising little girls and infantilising adult women may be involved here (see Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence- The History & Crisis of Ideal Childhood, 1998, 33-34 & 38). As I’ve observed before, these mixed messages are quite common in this period; the subliminal references to the work of Greuze would achieve the same effect for those familiar with his work.

The Broken Vase

Munier’s Sugar and Spice, famously detourned and parodied in a collage by the Surrealist Man Ray in the journal Minotaure (no.7, 1935, page 16) is another case in point. The girl sits, besides another borrowed image of a naked girl, between curtains in an enigmatic room. One is reminded of the pictures of bored brothel workers idly awaiting a client painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Pascin and others. The image is printed on the page in Minotaure next to a photo of two of Lotte Pritzel’s disturbing dolls and overleaf from a strange Cupid-like figure by Hans Bellmer, heightening the sense that these girls are arranged and manipulated by others for their own purposes. Doubtless, for the Surrealists, Munier was an excellent target for their co-option and subversion: his art represented everything that was superficial and sentimental. They sought out the unconscious and repressed through their work; he catered to a public demand for decorative, reassuring and ‘nice.’ The posture of the girl in Sugar and Spice also puts me in mind of Balthus‘ paintings of Therese Blanchard. In four she has one leg raised in the same manner; in two (Therese Dreaming (1938) and Girl with Cat (1937)) she also raises her hands to her head in the same way. These were but the first of numerous very similar pictures that the artist painted over his subsequent career, all fully exploiting the potency of the pose.

from Minotaure no.7

For all his mediocrity and want of depth, Munier’s work continues to be very popular. It may be ‘chocolate box’ but it is instantly accessible and attractive, evoking in adults an instinctive wish to provide care and nurture.

For more information on Victorian era art, see details of my book Cherry Ripe on my publications page.

The Rescue 1894

Surrealism & the Dark Eros

Leonor Fini in Venice, 1951- a dark Eros?

The Surrealist movement in art was very conscious of its relationship to sexuality. The poet Andre Breton, one of the founding figures of the movement, proposed that sensuality and sensibility were identical and that there was only a difference of degree between the emotions aroused by poetry and those provoked by erotic pleasure.  Surrealist philosopher Sarane Alexandrian has identified ‘extravagant love’ as one of the key values of surrealism: “it ensures that, in most surrealist works, the image of woman shines out like that of a guardian goddess.” Breton himself praised ‘woman’ as the “great promise,” the male’s partner in sexual alchemy and creation, acting as a medium or bridge for artists.  Many of the male writers and artists who initiated Surrealism believed that women had a closer connection to the desired irrationality of dreams than men.  From their very beginning, the Surrealists were interested in the work of Freud on unconscious and how that might release creativity. The group contended that the liberation of the unconscious imagination allowed a dark light, “une lumiere noire,” to shine on human affairs.  As I have observed before, Surrealism was often a very sexist and non-progressive movement, with deplorably chauvinist attitudes to women, but it was at the same time alert to new ways of thinking and new ways of creating art.

In December 1959, the tenth international exhibition of surrealism opened in Paris.  Its chosen theme was ‘EROS’- a subject deliberately selected because it was regarded as being both ‘anti-aesthetic’ and more directly connected with emotional power. Breton wrote to exhibitors describing eroticism as “a privileged place, a theatre in which incitement and prohibition play their roles and where the most profound moments of life make sport.”  He reminded the artists too that, “far from necessitating the representation of scabrous scenes, [eroticism] derives a great deal from equivocation and can readily undergo many transpositions.”  In other words, eroticism should not be confused with pornography; it can achieve its impact just as effectively by merely hinting at sexual desire, as well as by substituting for direct expressions of sexuality.  Overall, for Breton, eroticism could be identified as one of the defining characteristics of the surrealist movement; it was a deeply serious matter: it lay at the heart of human consciousness and self-awareness.  Art was both the “accommodation of secret desires” and the “marvellous precipitate of desire.”  

The artist Marcel Duchamp reinforced what Breton believed in an interview in which he declared how important eroticism was to his work.  Its significance to him was:

“Enormous.  Visible or conspicuous or, at any rate, underlying… I believe in eroticism a lot, because it’s truly a rather widespread thing throughout the world, a thing that everyone understands.  It replaces, if you wish, what other literary schools called Symbolism, Romanticism; it could be another ‘ism,’ so to speak… [It helps] to reveal [things that are usually hidden] and to place them at everyone’s disposal- I think this is important because it’s the basis of everything- and no one talks about it.  Eroticism was a theme… [that] kept me from being obliged to return to already existing theories, aesthetic or otherwise.”

Going further still, the expression of unrevealed erotic desire demanded the dissolution of conventional norms.  “Unleashed eroticism demands excess, blasphemy, subversion, even the blood-letting of the sadistic act.  As such, it is an act of violence akin to a revolutionary act…”  The surrealist conception of eroticism therefore saw it as a means of expression, both a revolutionary weapon and a source of revelation. However, giving unbridled sexuality such a significant status involved risks, as matters could potentially be taken to extremes.  According to one authority, the surrealist movement “has always been sympathetically predisposed towards sexual perversion. ‘Eros noir’ not only violates taboos, and trespasses in forbidden domains, it also prospects in a country where desire is without limits and freedom intoxicating.”  Surrealist art was frequently about the “multiplication of erotic possibilities.”  It searched everywhere “for fresh temptations, new stimuli and satisfaction.” This search led, logically, to what the movement called eros noir (the dark eros).

Dorothea Tanning, Eine kleine nachtmusik

Eros noir is a term that reflects the potential violence and danger of sexuality and, as such, is related to Freud’s idea of the ‘death drive’ (the destructive instinct that is opposed to the libido, but which can still be expressed sexually through S&M practices, for example).  Surrealism always particularly celebrated eros noir, both in its own output and in the works of earlier artists that the Surrealists admired.  Another surrealist philosopher, Georges Bataille (1897-1962), detected the dark eros in the Mannerist painting of the sixteenth century and in the nineteenth century works of Delacroix, Manet and Gustave Moreau.  It was at the heart of de Sade’s writings and it manifested itself in modern works by Paul Delvaux and Hans Bellmer.  Eros noir has been defined very broadly: it is decadence, an aesthetic of violence, a quest for fever and the hot, dark heat given off by eroticism; it is a hatred of convention, a high atheism and it’s to be found in perverse and wildly transgressive erotica. 

What the surrealists judged to be within the proper sphere of eroticism may be judged from the Succinct Lexicon of Eroticism that was appended to the catalogue for the 1959 EROS exposition.  The entries within this brief encyclopaedia covered psychiatrists and psychologists, such as Freud, Havelock Ellis and Reich; notable figures from literature- for example, Fanny Hill; a range of sexual terms and, lastly, leading writers and artists. The list includes such poets and authors as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sappho, Casanova, Pierre Louys, the Comte de Lautreamont and the Marquis de Sade; painters as diverse as Balthus and Hans Baldung Grien and, even Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)- whose photographs were highlighted and accepted as being consciously erotic compositions, although the author of the entry (the film critic and writer Robert Benayoun) was ambiguous, if not critical, in his view of the man. 

This list offers a summary of what- and who- the surrealists under Breton regarded as erotic and noteworthy.  The approval given to the Marquis de Sade is especially notable: “no-one would call de Sade crazy anymore” declared his entry, and poet Guillaume Apollinaire is praised for having put de Sade in “his true place (the highest).”  Conversely, whilst Vladimir Nabokov is noted for creating the character Lolita, “the prototype of the nymphet” and for defining the type, he is condemned for his “spineless defamation of de Sade.”  The prominence given to de Sade helps to define eros noir more clearly but it also reinforces, I think, the impression of male chauvinism at the heart of Surrealism. The promotion of Sade’s extreme erotica to the level of key texts of world literature is, to say the least, surprising, whilst de Sade’s taste for writing about male domination of women and sexual violence hardly seems like something to be condoned or encouraged. Nevertheless, he was seen as a major source of ‘dark erotic’ inspiration and was promoted accordingly. The Surrealists’ rehabilitation of de Sade probably has to be viewed in the wider context of a taste for BDSM and fetish erotica that flourished in interwar France; it is in this light that we might also understand portfolios published by artists such as the pseudonymous French illustrator Fameni Leporini, like his series titled La grande orgie (The Big Orgy); Jules Pascin’s Erotikon of 1933; Orgien published in 1924 by German Otto Schoff (1884-1938), or the output of Austrian Otto Schatz (1900-61). All these works exploit elements of force and group sex, but I think Leporini’s ‘Big Orgy’ especially captures some key tonal elements of de Sade, as found in One Hundred Days of Sodom or Juliette. The artist’s orgies are, indeed, ‘big,’ but the writhing bodies, drawn in a rather amateurish style, take on a febrile aspect bordering on the comic. It’s very hard to treat them as erotic; instead, they’re both unpleasant in their atmosphere of casual cruelty and very silly in their over the top intensity. Leporini seems to push the dark eros over the edge into parody. Lastly, it should be noted that neither de Sade (nor any of the illustrators I’ve mentioned) displayed any of the “equivocation” that Andre Breton had praised in his letter connected with the 1959 EROS exhibition…

Academic Robert Stuart Short has contended that surrealism was “unique amongst contemporary revolutionary movements in putting itself unreservedly at the service of Eros.” Many surrealist works are expressly sexual.  Examples may be found in much of the output of Hans Bellmer and Salvador Dali; the Czech artist Jindrich Styrsky even went as far as to illustrate his 1933 book Emilie prichazi ka mne ve snu (Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream) with collages that comprised images taken from hardcore pornography. His partner, the painter Toyen, provided some notably erotic illustrations to an edition of Pybrac by Pierre Louys. The Belgian painter Paul Delvaux populated a large number of his Quattrocento townscapes with statue-like naked women; several of the paintings of the female surrealists Leonor Fini or Dorothea Tanning even more clearly demonstrate the prevalence of eroticism in the genre.  

For more information on Lewis Carroll and the Surrealists, see my book Eat Me! When Alice Grew Up.

from Paul Delvaux’s sketchbook, 1939-40

Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre- painter & illustrator of Pierre Louys

The Secret

Louis Berthommé Saint-André was born in Barbary in Brittany on February 4th, 1905,  but spent his early childhood in Saintes, a commune near Angouleme in the southwest of France. Initially a student of architecture, Berthommé Saint-André changed to studying fine art when he entered the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris in 1921.

Self Portrait, 1925

Fillette republicaine

The artist is particularly known for his portraits, boudoir scenes, nudes, studies of ballet dancers and landscapes, which are painted in a vibrant, expressive style. His work shows the influence of both Cezanne and Eugène Delacroix, and, like many French painters of the period, he was influenced by his travels in North Africa, where he stayed for some time, developing his ‘Orientalist‘ interests. He exhibited widely from 1924 and received considerable professional acknowledgment in terms of awards, prizes and distinctions. He also designed attractive modernist ceramics later in his career.

Villa Abd-el-tif, 1926

Danseuse au maillot

As well as being prolific painter, Berthommé Saint-André created erotic illustrations for works by Baudelaire, Diderot and Voltaire and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Oeuvres Erotiques completes (1934), he illustrated the notorious Gamiani (or Two Nights of Excess), which published anonymously by Alfred de Musset in 1833, the lesbian heroine being a portrait of his lover Georges Sand. These may be seen as a natural progression from his voluptuous female nudes, which often show women lying on beds, dressing and undressing, arranging their hair or make up before mirrors, or posing, partially dressed, in their underwear. One critic has summarised this aspect of his work in these terms: “His lively and colourful paintings in their sparkling sensuality, in a deliberately old-fashioned style, are essentially centred on the theme of seductive young girls- pleasantly provocative, half-naked in their boudoir.” The artist’s personal preferences are manifest: he pretty evidently had a preference for buxom, well-built young women.

Dans la loge

Marie

Given the outrageously obscene material provided by Pierre Louys, any accompanying book plates needed to be daring.  Berthommé Saint-André, in his illustrations, was notably explicit.  He was faithful to the texts- and didn’t hold back in his illustrations to a 1931 edition of Trois filles de leur mere; for Pibrac: Quatrains Erotiques (1933), Berthommé drew further lesbian and group sex scenes.  His plates for Louys’ Poesies Erotiques (1946) are comparably faithful to the text; they include brothel scenes and orgies. His quite regular pictures of dancers, and images such as 1937’s ‘Two Girls on a Sofa,’ suggest that the painter may, in any case, have been rather familiar with the seamier or more Bohemian sections of Parisian society. The pose of the two girls, underwear exposed, is certainly highly reminiscent of images of sex workers relaxing painted by Pascin, Toulouse-Lautrec and other artists of the previous generation.

Two Girls on a Sofa

Needless to say, Berthommé’s illustrations to Marcel Seheur’s 1932 edition in French of ‘My Secret Life’ (Ma Vie Secrete) by the English writer calling himself ‘Walter‘ are just as unbridled as those just described. The book is a detailed account of the writer’s numerous sexual exploits from early adulthood and, like Saint-Andre’s responses to Louys, the illustrations are marked by their frank eroticism. Some very similar scenes were illustrated by Berthommé Saint-Andre for an edition of Apollinaire’s Oeuvres erotiques complètes of 1934. Once again, we see sex in a variety of age and gender combinations- plus many macabre and bizarre scenarios as well.  Because he worked in loose pen work and water colour, though, Saint-Andre’s book plates often managed to mitigate the potential obscenity of the material he was illustrating.

The various books illustrated by Louis Berthommé Saint-Andre are now highly collectable. They are regularly advertised through specialist art booksellers and auction houses, commanding high prices for volumes, whilst there is an active market for his bright and attractive landscapes and nudes.

Collected poems, 1949

For details of my essays on the French interwar illustrators, and other areas of art history, see my books page. More information on all the poetry and prose written by Pierre Louys can be found on the bibliography page for the author. For a more discussion of the work of Saint-Andre and of illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.

Paris- city of pleasure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leo Fontan