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

Pierre Louys- Poesy & Poems

Here I gather together various illustrated volumes of the ‘adult’ poetry of Pierre Louys. I have mentioned already the 1930 translation entitled Satyrs and Women, which covered his collected verse from 1890 to 1901, shortly before he ceased to publish. Much more verse was written subsequently, but little appeared until after his death.

Maddalou was once such post-mortem find, being published in Paris in 1927, two years after Louys’ had died. Its title page describes it as a poeme inedit– an unedited poem- although the text I have seen indicates it is either a short story or, perhaps, a ‘prose poem.’ It was illustrated with coloured lithographs by Edouard Degaine (1887-1967), an impressionist and modernist painter. Over his career, he painted landscapes, portraits, still lifes and mythical scenes in a surprising variety of styles: his delicate nudes in this book are very pleasing. This sole edition of Maddalou is extremely rare, having been published in a limited run of 400 boxed copies.

The book begins: “At the end of the long path which winds between the bushes, I discovered a hovel in the middle of a small garden. A hovel that no one knew, far from hamlets, far from the roads. Never a tourist, a hunter, never a passer-by had walked there.” An old woman and a young girl live there, the latter being “a very strange young girl, with rags like a savage and a body so beautiful that I felt myself go pale.” This is Maddalou, who “with such black hair, barely covers herself with a red rag which, pierced, torn, slashed, wraps over her chest, and hangs down to her slender heels.” She is content in her tattered rags, she thinks of them like lace and she lives happily with the goats and the mice.

The content of Louys’ collection of Poesies Erotiques (Erotic Verse) hardly needs to be described; the book is a collection of sixty-four explicit and obscene verses, many of them dialogues between lovers. The book first appeared in a highly limited edition of forty-four in 1927, but several illustrated versions followed.  In 1932, Marcel Vertès (1895-1961) tackled a new edition, printed in a limited run of 165 copies allegedly in Barcelona, but actually issued in Paris.  Vertès provided thirty-two engravings that fully portrayed the range of unconventional sexual tastes described in the text. In 1937, the Russian illustrator Rojan provided seventy-three explicit illustrations for a further edition of the poems, which combined the sepia drawings with a reproduction of the poet’s handwritten text.  A third regular illustrator of Louys’ works, Louis Berthommé Saint-André created drawings for a further edition in 1946.  His twenty dry-point plates are as explicit as those of his predecessors- which may be why the book claims to have been published in Chihuahua Mexico. Like its predecessors, pretending that a Parisian publisher was not involved was a way of trying to avoid censorship and prosecution.

Saint-Andre, Poëmes

In 1949 Berthomme Saint-Andre also illustrated an edition of Louys’ Poëmes, a collection that included verse from across his career, including Astarte, Iris, Aquarelles passionees, Hivernales, La Foret des Nymphes, Stances, Derniers Vers, Poëmes Divers and Fragments. The title page is illustrated at the head of the page. One of those forest nymphs is illustrated below.

Louys’ own illustrated copy of Astarte, presented to his father in law and reminding us of the author’s own artistic skills

Saint-Andre, Poëmes

Louys’ Poèmes érotiques inédits also appeared in 1945 with a preface by Georges Hugnet and twelve lithographs by Pierre Belotti. The choice of artist is extremely interesting: he is mainly associated with the illustration of spanking literature, a thriving trade in Paris, as a result of which the name we have is a pseudonym and his real identity is still unknown. Other books Belotti worked on include Cuisant noviciat (‘The Flaming Novice’ 1934)- still considered to be one of the classics of 1930s spanking literature- Moi, poupée (‘Me, The Doll,’ 1930), Jacinthe, ou les images de péché (‘Jacinthe, or the Images of Sin,’ 1934) and Gouvernante et gouvernée (The Governess and the Governed,’ 1936).  The titles make clear what you’ll find inside, which is lots of corporal punishment, especially in girls’ boarding schools, which was Belotti’s specialism.

Belotti was ideally suited to the material in Poèmes érotiques inédits, which is typical of Louys: The Little Laundry Delivery Girl is a dialogue between a male client and the errand girl, whom he’s trying to seduce; she turns out to be more than a match for him. At the State School dramatises a form teacher handing out marks for calculus: the girls all have excuses for their poor results and all of them are obscene… needless to say, Belotti’s lithographs match the text.

Camille Hilaire (1906-2004) studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the cubist artist André Lhote. He became the professor of Beaux-Arts in Nancy and then returned to teach in Paris until 1968.  As well as some lithographs of scenery, Hilaire illustrated one of the volumes of Pierre Louÿs’ collected works, providing watercolours to accompany the Poèmes Libres in 1973.  These primarily depict solo naked women and lesbian couples and are painted in a bold, colourful and impressionistic watercolours.

I will also mention here a very early work of Louys Les Memoires de Josephine, suivi de Filles de Ferme et de Paroles (The Memoires of Josephine, followed by Farm Girls and Conversations, 1894). Some of this comprises prose, but the second part of ‘Farm Girls’ is a dramatic prose poem. The entire book is a wild lesbian fantasy and, as such, has rarely been published. A 1984 reprint by Edition Originale was accompanied by half a dozen highly explicit etchings by Ginko Honjo- an artist whose name may well be a pseudonym and who does not seem to have worked on any other books. The frontispiece comprises a portrait of Louys, with a number of naked girls in the background. This echoes not just the author’s preoccupations but some of his own nude drawings, which are now published in an edition of his love poetry titled La Femme.

For more on Louys see my bibliography of his work and for further writing on the themes of his poems and prose, see my books. 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.

Custom, right & hospitality in the work of Pierre Louys

Louis Icart, Les Chansons de Bilitis, 1949

It seems clear from some of the writings of Pierre Louys that he was aware of ancient practices of hospitality that involved offering a guest a female of the household as a companion for the night. This mark of respect is not the droit de seigneur or jus primae noctis of feudal lordship or certain Middle Eastern societies, but it comes from similar deep roots and is founded in identical systems in which honour, sacrifice and a degree of subservience were fundamental to interpersonal relations. We might borrow the phraseology and term it the jus uni noctis, the right of one night, or- perhaps even better, jus hospitis noctis– the right of a guest for a night.

The clearest manifestation of this is in Louys story The House Upon the Nile, which forms part of the Twilight of the Nymphs (Crepuscule des nymphes) collection of short stories. The House is the odd one out as it is non-mythical, not being concerned with retelling various classical stories of gods and minor divinities like Leda, Byblis or Ariadne. Rather, The House Upon the Nile might be seen as related to the same interests from which the novel Aphrodite– which is set in Ptolemaic Egypt in Alexandria, near the mouth of the Nile- derived. They seem to be of the same time period.

In The House Upon the Nile, a traveller on foot, Bion, comes upon mud hut late one day. There are two girls outside; one is naked because she is still a child, the other is a little older and therefore wears dress. Their father asks the weary Bion to stay overnight and, after they have eaten, he says, “I know the duties of hospitality.  Here are my two daughters.  The youngest has not yet known a man, but she is of an age to come to you.  Go, and take your pleasure in her.”

Bion respects this custom and venerates it “as a tradition of singular virtue.  The gods often visited the earth, dressed as travellers, soldiers or shepherds, and who could distinguish a mortal from an Olympian who did not wish to reveal himself?  Bion was, perhaps, Hermes.  He knew that a refusal on his part would be taken as an insult; thus, he was neither surprised nor troubled when the elder girl bent toward him and uncovered her young breasts so that he might kiss them.”

The younger daughter is upset by her sister’s intervention and runs off into the night, dismaying her father by carrying “away forever the honour of his house.”  Bion spends the night with the older sister and leaves early in the morning.  Sometime later, he encounters the younger girl, who has been waiting along his route to waylay him.  She wants to go with the traveller, thinking herself in love.  He tells her to go home to her father, but cannot get her to see sense, nor can he shake her off.  The man therefore gets her to carry his burden for the day and, that evening, cynically sells her like a slave.

The story ends tragically, but the duties of ancient hospitality are laid out very clearly.  An examination of other works by Louys indicate that he felt that very similar responsibilities still fell upon those offering accommodation or receiving guests, even in the modern world. 

Woodcut for the House on the Nile for a 1926 edition, by Jean Saint-Paul

This duty appears most clearly in commercial situations.  So, for example, in one verse in Pybrac the poet appears to complain about those occasions when, on being unable to supply overnight ‘company’ for a guest, a hotel manageress will present herself at his room door and offer herself instead. Similar solicitude on the part of hotel staff for guest welfare may be detected in the Handbook for Young Girls, which advises the young lady traveller not to ask the hotel manager if the maid offers other entertainment to single female guests, but to approach directly herself.  So too in the Poésies Érotiques, in which one poem depicts a man enquiring from the inn keeper’s daughter the prices for a night’s stay (plus additional services). She seemingly expects this request and promptly offers a scale of charges.

We might even construe the sexual activity in Trois filles de leur mère as an extreme form of hospitality towards a new neighbour.  In the story, a young student moves into his new flat and, within the space of barely twelve hours, has been to bed with the mother and all three of her daughters- a gesture of welcome which is then hospitably continued over the ensuing days.

Illustration by Clara Tice, 1927

Arguably, in Les Aventures du Roi Pausole (1900), we see the king himself performing a similarly generous act in reverse when he is the guest of Monsieur Lebirbe.  When his eldest daughter Galatea absconds overnight, whilst the monarch is sleeping in the house, Pausole resolves to try to comfort his host and hostess by making their younger daughter, Philis, his new queen. As is so often the case with Pierre Louys, the ideas he wished to convey were couched in terms of sex and sexuality, but his idea of a hospitable welcome seems nonetheless clear.

Now, a reasonable criticism of Louys might well be that his concept of hospitality was a highly patriarchal one: the father in the House on the Nile disposes of his daughters like chattels. Of course, the author is portraying the customs of a patriarchal ancient society, albeit one he has imagined and was under no obligation to resurrect. The traveller, Bion, also behaves as if the younger daughter is a piece of property he no longer requires when he wearies of her presence. Yet, the daughters both seem to be willing to comply, presumably because they understand that it is a religious as well as a social duty: I think that Louys liked the idea that the ancient deities were constantly present in the world, and perfectly likely to turn up at your door at any moment. As for the other cases I’ve noted, hospitality is offered primarily because it is friendly, pleasing and, in addition, commercially beneficial.

The House on the Nile is a short story in one of the lesser works of the author and poet Pierre Louys. It might well not be appropriate to construct any great theory about the writer’s thinking or philosophy upon it. Nevertheless, I think it gives us some further indications as to his musings about alternative social structures and customs, a microcosm of the utopias that form such a major element in his fiction. Whether located in the distant past or on some distant island, Louys continually speculated about different forms of community and different rules for conduct. In his writing, he intertwined all kinds of ideas and influences, testing theories and playing with citations and styles from other authors. This wasn’t necessarily worked up into any sort of manifesto; instead, it was an evolving game.

If nothing else, Twilight of the Nymphs and The House Upon the Nile have provided a platform for publishers and artists to create beautiful editions of one of Louys’ most charming books. I’ve discussed the interaction of word and imagery elsewhere, but with at least ten different books by Louys being the subject of multiple editions over the last century and a quarter, readers may appreciate how they have come to constitute a major body of illustrative art, showcases for the work of many dozens of artists. The printed works of Pierre Louys therefore represent a substantial resource for art historians and a little explored gallery of genres and individual styles- as I’ve indicated in my posts on Bilitis and Aphrodite.

For more details of the writings of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography, and for more of my essays on his work, see my separate books page. A full, annotated version of this essay can be downloaded from my Academia page.

Illustration by Clara Tice, 1927

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.

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.