De Sade Designs- illustrating the notorious author

I have written a good deal about the books of Pierre Louys and about the numerous illustrated editions of those works that have been published. I now want to consider how the work of the Marquis de Sade has been treated by the publishing trade. As many readers will appreciate, de Sade bears many striking resemblances to Louys- the Marquis was doubtless an inspiration to the latter and they both dealt with similar themes of transgressive sexuality in manners that were sometimes shocking and provocative. Sade was, though, much more of a philosopher than Louys, far more concerned with wider social and political questions. Very narrowly, the content of their books guaranteed stimulating material for artists to work with, so that publishers knew that illustrated editions would be likely to sell well within a certain market.

Guido Crepax, Justine, 1979

It’s interesting, therefore, to find that there are maybe twenty illustrated versions of de Sade’s key works (Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom and 120 Days of Sodom), not an insignificant number, perhaps, but dwarfed by the total of illustrated editions of Louys, which exceed one hundred and twenty on my latest reckoning. In the case of Sade’s most notorious title, 120 Days of Sodom, this may partially be explained by the fact that the manuscript of the text was only rediscovered and published by the poet Apollinaire and then by the surrealist Maurice Heine in the late 1920s. In point of fact, though, most of the editions of de Sade post-date the 1960s, suggesting that it was only in more recent decades that publishers felt that it would be acceptable to issue his works without the risk of public complaints and criminal proceedings.

Philippe Cavell, 1983

I suspect that one of the first artists to respond to the works of Sade, since Bornet had illustrated the original editions of La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette in 1797, was the rather obscure French artist Fameni Leporini, probably in the 1930s. As others have observed, it seems very clear that the artist was working to a text (or texts), for otherwise some scenes make little sense to the viewer- their context is obviously lacking, as if they were meant to illustrate a narrative that is now absent. Personally, I regard his portfolios not as illustrations of specific titles, but rather as interpretations of the themes and scenes also addressed by de Sade (most obviously, I would suggest, Part Two of The One Hundred & Twenty Days of Sodom); this would seem to be confirmed by the inclusion of monks in a few prints as well as some images that show eighteenth century dress. Leporini was very capable of representing intense mutual passion between lovers, but he also reflected the violence and abuse of power that could be present in Sade’s works, meaning that he depicted not shared pleasure but dominance, distress and shame- an acknowledgment that male control and exploitation have often had the potential to distort interpersonal relationships.

In rather the same way, in the 1960s the German born surrealist Hans Bellmer produced a series of darkly erotic drawings and etchings inspired by the writer. These were interpretations of Juliette, Justine and 120 Days, but the works were unconnected to any edition of those books. The first was the drawing Life & Death (For de Sade) of 1946, A Sade from 1961 and culminating with the Petit traité de morale (A Little Moral Treatise) in 1968. Bellmer’s baroque images elaborate his figures’ anatomy in unreal ways that tend to dehumanise the subjects and distance the viewers. The results can be violent and disturbing, resembling dissection drawings, stressing that corporeality is close to decay and that lust verges on cruelty.

Blaine, Justine

New illustrated editions of Sade began to be published during the 1930s. In 1931 Heine’s transcription of 120 Days, with 16 lithographs by Andre Collot, appeared. In the manner typical of Collot, the images were as explicit as this violent and pornographic text demanded. They recognised, nonetheless, that the pain and humiliation is shared in de Sade’s book, with seducers as likely to be whipped or degraded as their victims.

One of Sade’s most popular books has always been Justine- or the Misfortunes of Virtue. There was a German edition in 1900, with colour illustrations in eighteenth century style by an unknown author. These imitate Bornet’s plates from 1797, notably his tendency to pile up figures in improbable pyramids, and like their models the plates they are highly explicit. The book- probably consequentially- appeared in a very small print run. However, in 1931, the same year as Collot’s 120 Days, an English translation of Justine was published in New York, with 27 “spirited illustrations by Mahlon Blaine.” Blaine was a colourful character who liked to claim that he had been born on Easter Island. One dealer has described his work as walking “the razor’s edge between the grotesque and beautiful.” He was a self-taught illustrator notable for his darkly erotic images, which are to be found in books which also include Flaubert’s Salammbo (1927) and William Beckford’s Vathek (1928). As will be seen, there’s considerable vigour in his designs, as in the representation of Justine’s death seen below.

In 1932, the Czech surrealist Toyen (whom we have encountered before in discussing her illustrations for Pierre Louys’ Pybrac) provided plates for an edition of Justine. These match the rather abstract style of her work on Pybrac that same year. Toyen’s husband, Jindřich Štyrský (1899-1942) who was a surrealist painter, poet, editor, photographer and graphic artist, also designed a photographic cover for an edition of de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, as well as writing a study of the Marquis’ work.

Jindřich Štyrský’s cover image for de Sade

A pause in publications followed until near the end of the war, when in 1944 a new edition of Juliette, illustrated by another Surrealist artist, the Argentinian Leonor Fini, appeared. The curator of a 2018 exhibition in New York on ‘Fini and the Theatre of Desire’ described how, for the artist, life was to be lived as an “investigation in the human psyche and, for her, gender and sexuality were the greatest ways to perform those kind of experiments, both on the canvas and in real time.” Fini illustrated about fifty books during her career, choosing authors and titles that coincided with her own interests. These included the Satyricon and works by Verlaine, Jean Genet and Charles Baudelaire. Fini’s twenty-two plates for Sade’s book responded in particular to the macabre elements in the text, emphasising skeletons and decay as much as erotica. This emphasis on mortality, I think, was her way of representing those aspects of de Sade’s work where carnal desire slips into cruelty and the reader/ viewer becomes uncomfortable and alienated.

Fini, Juliette, 1944

Two years later another female illustrator, Lilian Gourari, provided twenty one plates for a new edition of Justine, ou Les Infortunes de la Vertu. I’ve been unable to find out much about Gourari (or Gourary), other than she illustrated only a few books- amongst them children’s books such as Les Neufs Lutins de la Montaigne (The Nine Gnomes of the Mountain). Her work on de Sade appears to be the most significant. She didn’t flinch from depicting the various misfortunes inflicted upon the hapless Justine.

Gourari, 1947

A slowly accelerating flow of editions of de Sade had begun. In 1948 an edition of Eugenie de Franval (a story of incest and its punishment) appeared, with eight plates by Valentine Hugo (1887-1968). She was a writer and painter, best known for her work with Jean Cocteau and the Ballet Russes and her close association with the Surrealists (including an affair with Andre Breton). Her illustrations included editions of the Surrealist’s favourite, the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1933) as well as the surrealist Paul Éluard’s Les Animaux et leurs hommes (1937) and Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Poètes de sept ans (1938).

Eugenie de Franval, Valentine Hugo

Another version of Justine, this time illustrated by Schem, appeared in 1949. His twenty three coloured lithographs are typical of the sweet delicacy of his attractive illustrative work, featuring a good deal of nudity but nothing really shocking.

Schem

Eberhard Schlotter

A hiatus followed during the 1950s, perhaps because the market seemed well supplied, but interest in de Sade revived in the ’60s with three new illustrated editions of his work. Curiously, all of these featured the work of young German artists. The eldest was Eberhard Schlotter (1921-2014) who worked as a painter in Spain and Germany. In 1967 he designed a set of sixteen etchings depicting episodes from Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. The following year, the Polish-German Arwed Gorella (1937-2002) created 13 etchings for the second volume of Sade’s collected works (in German). The images- mostly portrait busts- remind me of those faces constructed from vegetables and fruit created in by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-93)- except that Gorella (naturally) used naked bodies. Uwe Bremer worked on volume three of the same edition, using a radically different style but yet- like Gorella- capturing the same anatomical aspect of Sade’s work that so many other illustrators had identified.

Gorella

Bremer

In 1972 Johannes Vennekamp (b. 1935), the German artist and colleague of Uwe Bremer, produced a portfolio of thirteen etchings based on 120 Days. He too opted for a kind of diagrammatic graphic approach, in contrast to which was the refreshingly cartoonish work of caricaturist and illustrator Albert Dubout (1905-76), who illustrated Justine in 1976 with some exuberant and exaggerated images. Dubout (who was married to illustrator of Pierre Louys Suzanne Ballivet) worked on satirical magazines such as Le Rire and illustrated numerous books, including Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel; perhaps this background helped him to locate the humour in de Sade, finding his extreme situations so over the top as to be laughable rather than shocking. In 1979 Guido Crepax took the next logical step and rewrote Justine as an exquisitely illustrated graphic novel (see image earlier). A graphic novel version of Juliette, by Philippe Cavell, followed in 1983 (see cover image earlier). His other illustrated work includes an edition of Fanny Hill and various erotic novels such as Petites alliees by Clary F and Nini Tapioca by Beatrice Tessica.

Johannes Vennekamp

Further illustrated editions have followed in the last few decades: these include (amongst others) Justine and Juliette by Martina Kugler (1945-2017) in 1991 and by Lisa Zirner in 2014. The former opted for simple pen drawings in an unusual ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ style, the latter for fifteen cheerful, bright, almost cartoonish illustrations which are notable for the joy and pleasure that she depicted amongst the participants. Interestingly, perhaps, in 1985 and 2006 respectively, both women had previously illustrated Histoire de l’œil by Georges Bataille, intellectual, philosopher and early associate of the Surrealists. The History is a 1928 novella that details the increasingly bizarre sexual perversions of a pair of teenage lovers. Bataille was heavily influenced by de Sade, making the separate publications quite closely linked.

Javier Gil (born 1961) created a series highly explicit pastels based on Philosophy in the Bedroom in 1996 whilst Alexander Pavlenko, who was born in Russian in 1963 but who now lives in Germany, has produced another portfolio of Sadean inspired works entitled A Sade- rather like several earlier German artists. Pavlenko’s approach was to produce rather exaggerated erotic images. Most recently, in 2014, the French illustrator Yves Milet-Desfougeres (1934-2022) created a series of quite crude-looking pen sketches to go with another edition of Philosophy; he too had also worked on Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil, in 2010.

Lastly, in 2000 a lavishly produced edition of Justine, with twenty designs by Cyriaque de Saint-Aignan, was published. These are impressive female nude studies, although not perhaps fully reflective of the book; the ‘glamour’ style of the pictures, most notably the frontispiece, which renders the virtuous and innocent Justine as a Carmen-like figure, seem at odds with the story.

What many of the illustrators of de Sade have confronted in the author’s texts is the risk that carnality can tip over into depersonalising cruelty, that a sense of the individual, consent and volition can be lost. This sets this body of work apart from many of the books I have previously discussed. Nevertheless, as I’ve proposed before, we see how the provision of illustrations with text can amplify the written word, reinforcing its impact as well as making the reader focus more closely upon what is being described or discussed. This can have an especially powerful effect with work such as de Sade’s.

Living in the past?- shaping a classical future in writings of Pierre Louys

Henri Gerbault, Jeunes Trottins

In several previous posts I have talked about what’s been labelled the ‘Romantic‘ view of childhood by art and cultural historians. My feeling is that the French author Pierre Louys cannot be said to have been in sympathy with that- in part because he was not in sympathy with many of the wider themes in Romanticism either, such as the key idea of the relationship between humans and the natural world. He would not have sympathised either with their rejection of classicism nor with the notion of artistic creation ‘ex nihilo‘ without the example of previous works. Citation, imitation and- even- parody of earlier literature were a very important aspect of Louys’ writing technique, as I’ve described before. I’ll say more about his relationship to the classical past shortly, but so far as youth and growing up were concerned, I feel he was probably unconvinced by the Romantic notion of a separate state of childhood- and this because the world he depicted in his work was a harshly practical one. Those works of Louys that were set in contemporary France- mainly his poetry- describe a tough world in which livings had to be earned from an early age. His verse is populated with actresses, dancers, apprentices and the so-called trottins (trotters)- errand girls who worked for seamstresses and milliners. These girls worked hard, long hours to scrape an income together and the poet represented their lives honestly and unromantically. His classical world, especially the story Aphrodite, reflects the same economic exigencies, with its peripatetic entertainers and temple courtesans.

Pierre Louys was not, it seems to me, a man at home in the modern world of late nineteenth and early twentieth century France. His first two novels, Aphrodite and Les Chansons de Bilitis, of course were recreations of a classical Hellenic past that may never have existed, and much of his subsequent work similarly sought to remove itself from the contemporary world: The Twilight of the Nymphs and numerous of his other short stories chose classical and Egyptian settings (The Wearer of Purple and Dialogue at Sunset in Sanguines are examples and in A New Sensation, Callisto actually intrudes into a modern Parisian apartment). His major novel Les Aventures du Roi Pausole (1900) is set in a pagan land that borders modern France but shares none of its customs or morality; what’s more, the book is one of Louys’ most ostentatiously literary works, being replete with epigraphs drawn principally from French authors of the seventeenth century and earlier- as well as from classical writers- and many of the story’s names and ideas are classically derived. The unpublished novels L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve and L’Ile aux dames are both set in imaginary lands; Gonzalve may ostensibly be Christian, but none of his behaviour is, whilst his utopian Ile aux dames (like Pausole’s realm of Trypheme) exists outside familiar moral codes.

As for Louys himself, after about 1910 he retreated more and more from publishing and engagement with social life, becoming an almost total recluse behind drawn curtains in his last years. The horrors of the Great War might well have accelerated this withdrawal from a monstrous contemporary reality. 

Trottins in the street

Louys created for himself worlds in which the rules for conduct imposed upon him by religion and state simply didn’t apply. He proposed societies in sexualities were entirely liberated, so that preferences such same-sex attractions or incest were unremarkable and entirely acceptable- just as in Greek myth they were addressed dispassionately and unremarkably. I feel sure, as well, that Louys drew upon the philosophical arguments of the Marqus de Sade in doing this. In Philosophy dans le Boudoir and his many other works (such as Justine and Juliette), de Sade appealed to ‘Nature’ as the source of right behaviour and the measure of what was good. He contended that, if Nature had created the desire and ability to enjoy a certain pleasure, it could not therefore be wrong or unnatural. This argument, flawed as it frequently was, justified for the Marquis almost any sexual preference and nearly all forms of conduct. Louys did not pursue de Sade to the extremes to which his reasoning led- that only one’s personal pleasure counted and that anything done in pursuit of it was justified. Equally, rather than being guided by a self-defined notion of ‘Nature,’ Louys preferred to rely upon a reconstruction of ancient Greek paganism, but within this framework, he could endorse a considerable degree of liberalism- and even libertinism. Another major difference between Louys and de Sade is that the former shared none of the political interests of the Marquis. De Sade was a passionate pacifist and played a role in the French Revolution: Louys was very much a product of aestheticism and decadence. His focus was physical sensation alone so that, whilst he shared certain sensual tastes with de Sade, Pierre Louys restricted himself to these. I have described his utopias before; what is notable about them is the fact that all we learn of their laws and customs is concerned with personal relationships. Louys was almost entirely uninterested in looking beyond these subjects to broader social structures or issues of power and control.

Steinlen, Les deux trottins, 1902

The freedom and self-expression that Louys described and championed can seem far ahead of its time (although arguably it’s achieved by looking backwards into a past that, as I’ve said, may never have existed). Quite often, the results can seem refreshingly free of guilt and repression; sometimes, however, they can verge on the unpleasant extremities to which de Sade tended. King Gonzalve’s uninhibited indulgence of malign plans for his twelve daughters is not only monotonous but calculating, callous and repellent. He is a character with whom it’s virtually impossible to sympathise or identify and, whilst it may be possible to regard the princesses as liberated, they might might more properly be viewed as abused and depraved by an exploitative upbringing. Certainly, Louys has the situation backfire upon the self-centred monarch, a circumstance which can scarcely be regarded as endorsement of his conduct.

Arguably, Louys created a fantasy world in his fiction in which his personal obsessions could be acted out. Because those tastes and inclinations often clashed with the prevailing ideas of the society in which he lived, he chose to imagine societies in which the preconceptions and judgments he disliked had no place; he rejected not just certain moral presumptions but the entire philosophical and theological framework that supported them. In essence (just like de Sade) Louys appear to have felt that whatever gave pleasure was, by definition, good and permissible. Beyond that, all rules and limits were to him artificial.

Pierre Bonnard, Trottins, 1927

I think that all the indications of his writing are that Louys felt little sympathy for the mores of his era and consciously adopted a ‘pre-modern’ view of society. Instead, the writer chose a classical, pagan past as the forum for his imaginings for a variety of reasons. There were various existing precedents for doing so. One was the neo-classical revival in art that had occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Artists such as Lord Leighton, Lorenz Alma-Tadema and Sir Edward Poynter recreated the Greek and Roman worlds on canvas, using them as settings within which contemporary problems might be addressed examined obliquely. Secondly, as Louys knew very well, many of the ideas and attitudes that he espoused found expression- if not support- in ancient texts. There were clearly erotic sources, such as the Satyricon, but scattered across numerous authors and forms (plays, epigrams, poems) there were multiple other source materials that could be mined. An example occurs in Les Chansons de Bilitis in which Louys elaborated upon a slight remark by Dionysius the Sophist. He had composed a short verse “Little vendor of roses, you are as fair as your flowers. But what are you selling- yourself, or your roses, or both?” Song 129 of Bilitis developed this brief scene: the girl and her sister are asked the question by a group of young men. Just like the Parisian trottins mentioned earlier, the girls need to earn an income to avoid a beating from their mother, so they go with the men. The woman describing this incident tells Bilitis that the sisters “didn’t even know how to smile.” What I understand her to say here is that they had not yet learned to feign delight and passion with every customer, regardless of their own wishes and feelings. This was Louys’ primary judgment on the scenario. What is striking for me is how he drew frequently upon his comprehensive knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics to find a text to spoke to contemporary concerns as he saw them in the world around him. This could provide a distance to discuss current problems whilst still remaining connected and engaged.

In the imaginary worlds of Pierre Louys, brought to life time after time in his poetry and prose, matters of gender, generation or consanguinity were treated as being of little consequence; rather he envisaged a continuum of experiences in which financial necessity contended with personal circumstances, societal expectations and church (and state) rules that seemed detached from the realities of many lives. For more detail on the writing of Louys and for further commentary upon this, see my separate pages. A full, annotated version of this essay can be downloaded from my Academia page.

A trottin making deliveries for a milliner

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

On First Looking Into Pierre Louys’ ‘Pybrac’

Toyen, A Girl Sleeping Under the Stars, 1944

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

with profuse apologies to John Keats

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

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

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

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

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

Toyen, Two Girls with Flowers, 1932

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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