Illustrators, artists and the Parisian book trade

Mermaid, 1921, Cheri Herouard

The poems and novels of Pierre Louys were always destined for publication in illustrated editions.  The writer himself was a decent draughtsman and photographer, whose images of his lovers were clear complements to his verse.  His authorial imagination was such that he conceived of his works as a succession of ‘scenes,’ whether those might be imagined as theatrical or pictorial. What’s more, from the outset, his published work was quickly reissued in illustrated volumes, as commercial publishers appreciated how ideally suited they were to such editions.  The text offered episodes readily translatable to visual form whilst the erotic content had an instant appeal to buyers.  As I’ve argued before, the illustrated editions of Pierre Louys’ various books constitute a major literary corpus that also has considerable art historical significance: sixteen different works were illustrated by in excess of one hundred and thirty different artists and were issued in a total of over one hundred different editions. 

The foregoing figures are impressive, but in concentrating upon them the danger is that the wider context within which such remarkable productivity was possible is taken for granted.  We risk making the mistake of simply accepting that the publishers, artists- and market- were all available, but in reality a major contributing factor to the sheer wealth of artistic creativity that enhanced the writer’s own literary originality lies in the special circumstances of the book trade and visual arts in Paris during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 

Publishing & censorship

Perhaps the foremost facilitating factor was the relatively relaxed attitude of the French authorities towards the erotic book trade.  Explicit depictions of sexual activity tended to be risky- which is not to say that out and out porn was not produced (but it was frequently undertaken covertly), nor that depictions of sexual contact were avoided where they could be defended as being ‘artistically justified.’  Editions of several of the more explicit works by literary authors included explicit plates- such as Guillaume Apollinaire’s Onze Milles Vierges (1942) and an edition of Paul Verlaine’s pansexual Oeuvres libres published by Jean Fort in Paris but which claimed to originate “À Eleuthéropolis” (near Hebron in Palestine).  This attribution was a blatant attempt to pretend that the book was nothing to do with a French publishing house- one which was plainly still hedging its bets.

Many of the most explicitly erotic works of Pierre Louys were published following his death in 1925, and were accompanied by suitably graphic illustrations.  Once again, these texts commonly alleged that they had been published outside France.  For example, the 1929 edition of Bilitis apparently came from the Greek island Mytilene, where the heroine of the story lived, and the 1940 edition of Douze douzains de dialogues originated “A Cythère” (at Cythera, one of Aphrodite’s islands).  The 1935 edition of the verse collection, Poésies Érotiques, claimed it came from Chihuahua, Mexico; the 1934 edition of Trois filles de leur mère alleged that it came from Martinique.  These foreign publishers all sound highly improbable, and it’s surely likely that the authorities had a pretty good idea that they had really been produced in Paris. These stratagems aside, the book trade thrived for the first five decades of the twentieth century and, in its turn, encouraged a rich aesthetic community to complement it.

Paris- city of culture

Paris had been a centre of artistic excellence for several hundred years.  In the recent past, of course, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Surrealism and other movements had been particularly linked with the city and, as a result, it had become a magnet for artists nationally and internationally, drawn by its schools, ateliers, salons, dealers and galleries. 

A good example of the city’s draw for, and impact upon, painters may be the Bulgarian-born Jules Pascin (1885-1930).  After studying and working in Vienna and Munich, he moved to Paris in 1905 and became immediately involved with the bohemian artistic and literary circles of Montparnasse, where he got to know painters and writers including Hemingway and Picasso.  He enrolled at the academy run by Matisse and, on that painter’s recommendation, regularly visited the Louvre, where he copied the works of such eighteenth-century masters Greuze, Boucher, Van Loo, Watteau and Fragonard.  Pascin’s own taste for erotica and nudes was doubtless reinforced by seeing these earlier painters’ canvases.  Whilst Pascin was never commissioned to work on a book by Louys, he did produce a painting based upon Roi Pausole and, in the tight knit artistic community of the French capital, he knew illustrators such as Andre Dignimont and Marcel Vertès.

The artistic community of Paris was close-knit and somewhat incestuous and doubtless artists passed around news of possible commissions to illustrate books when they were drinking in Montmartre bars. The artistic capital of the world fostered talent in other ways, too: Auguste Brouet, who illustrated Louys’ Roi Gonzalve in 1933, earned money early in his career by producing cheap reproductions of paintings by other, much better-known artists- another good way of honing one’s skills and the instinct for what makes a good composition.

Magazines

A great deal of explicit material (written and visual) was tolerated by the French authorities and plainly contributed to a European perception that Paris was a uniquely ‘naughty’ place.  Such an impression of ‘sauciness’ was doubtless further bolstered by the large number of magazines, such as La Vie Parisienne and Fantasio, in which suggestive images of glamorous nudes habitually appeared.  The artist Chéri Hérouard is very typical of this genre.  A good example of his output is a cartoon of a mermaid that appeared in Fantasio in 1921.  The mermaid is seated, naked of course, on the sea floor, looking up at the bottom half of a woman in a bathing costume swimming above her.  The image surely has a double entendre: the sea creature marvels amusingly at the strange behaviour of terrestrial beings, but at the same time we may enjoy the frisson of wondering if she is tempted by the shapely thighs and lower torso passing within touching distance.  Topless or thinly veiled mermaids and nymphs regularly graced Herouard’s work, as did young beauties bound, or being either spanked or whipped, which were also popular with the artist. See too my post on the work of Georges Redon.

The importance of these magazines is not just what they tell us about the generally permissive mood in Paris, but also what they demonstrate about the artistic community working there.  There was very evidently a pool of graphic artists with considerable skills in draughtsmanship and effective composition, upon whom the journal publishers could draw for cartoons, satirical sketches and other illustrations.  Artists who worked on comic books or drew cartoons for newspapers and magazines included Jacques Touchet and Georges Beuville (both of whom worked on editions of Louys’ Roi Pausole), whilst Maurice Julhès, Pierre Lissac, André-Edouard Marty, Lucien Metivet and Maurice Leroy all illustrated Bilitis as well as drawing humorous sketches. 

Georges Pichard, cartoon, 1950s

Graphic Novels

More recently, as I have described before, graphic novelists have been commissioned to work on Louys’ texts: Georges Pichard used his stark monochrome style to bring out the bleak depravity of Trois Filles in 1980 and Kris de Roover leavened the incest of Roi Gonzalve by means of bright colour blocks in 1990. Both these artists worked in established traditions, with Pichard drawing upon the inspiration of Robert Crumb and de Roover designing in the Belgian graphic style of ligne claire, initiated by Tintin’s creator Hergé. A close friend of Hergé was another Belgian, Marcel Stobbaerts, whose primary coloured and cartoonish illustrations of Pibrac from 1933- in which sexual explicitness and ribald humour combine- would seem to be another source of inspiration for de Roover.

Even more recently, the British artist, Robin Ray (born 1924), who uses the pseudonym Erich von Götha, illustrated an edition of a play by Louys, La Sentiment de la famille. Ray is known for the erotic and sadomasochist content of his illustrations and comic books. His most famous work is the series The Troubles of Janice, set in the time of the Marquis de Sade. The emergence of adult ‘comix’ (with an emphasis on the ‘x’) has provided a new medium for the presentation of Louys’ works to a modern audience.

The design of pin-up images is also something for which quite a few of the illustrators of Louys have been known. Early in his career, Georges Pichard honed his characteristic female character in such images (see above). The same is true of René Ranson (Trois Filles, 1936) and Raymond Brenot (an edition of Sanguines, 1961)- their partially nude figures were often incorporated into adverts and calendars for products such as motor oil (see commercial art later).

Children’s Books

A form of illustration related to comics and cartoons is that of children’s books, and the list of artists who provided plates for these- but who also worked on texts by Louys- includes Pierre Lissac, both Pierre and Maurice Leroy, Rojan, Maurice Julhès, Pierre Rousseau and Renée Ringel.  Although there was an obvious gulf between the books’ contents, those artists working in the junior, as well as adult, markets had very valuable skills and were plainly in demand.  Publishers appreciated that they could instantly capture the essence of a scene in a concise and attractive image- one that could not just complement but enhance and propel forward the narrative beside which it was printed.

René Ranson, ‘Hello sailor’

Commercial Art

Another branch of commercial art that also provided employment for talented draughtsmen was found in the continual demand for posters and advertisements and many significant painters and illustrators also made (or supplemented) a living by such work.  Amongst the artists who undertook commercial design work (as well as illustrating works by Louys) were Nathan Iasevich Altman and Jean Berque (Bilitis, 1932 and 1935 respectively), Pierre Bonnard (Crepuscule des nymphes, 1946), André Dignimont (Bilitis, 1947) and Maurice Leroy (Bilitis, 1948) in addition to which there were those artists who were illustrators of multiple works by Louys- such as André Collot and André-Edouard Marty.  Amongst the many multitalented and adaptable artists whose commissions included illustrations for magazines as well as Louys’ books were Georges Barbier, Luc Lafnet, Rojan and Louis Icart.

Finally, theatrical design was another source of income for jobbing artists, and illustrators who earned additional money creating sets and costumes included René Ranson and Georges Barbier.  Barbier also designed jewellery whilst the painter and illustrator Pierre Bonnard made furniture.

Raymond Brenot

French Literature

Furthermore, Pierre Louys did not write in an artistic vacuum, neither literary or pictorial.  His period saw not just an outpouring of cheap porn paperbacks alongside frank, sexually themed poetry and novels from authors like Collette, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Apollinaire; there were also regular reissues of earlier texts- for instance, new editions of eighteenth-century work by Casanova, Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereux) and, of course, the rediscovered and newly popularised Marquis de Sade.  Very many of these volumes were illustrated- very frequently by the same artists who worked on titles by Louys. 

Independent of literary erotica, and the illustrations that accompanied those works, it’s important to notice that artists were also producing their own freestanding portfolios of adult imagery.  The Austrian Franz von Bayros (1866-1924) is particularly significant in this genre, but French/ Belgian artists André Collot and Martin van Maele, and Russian émigré Rojan, deserve mention because all three also provided plates for books by Louys.  Van Maele and von Bayros shared a distinctly gothic or grotesque taste; all of them explored the complex but controversial interplay between sex, sexuality, perversion and various degrees of force and violence (see too Jules Pascin’s pen drawings and his 1933 portfolio Erotikon or the Sade-inspired portfolios of Fameni Leporini).

What these conjunctions emphasise is the fact that the illustrators just mentioned didn’t only respond to the content of the texts by Louys upon which they were commissioned to work. Their independent collections demonstrate that those books were merely reflective of wider interests and obsessions in European society at that time.  However, the purely visual representation of these themes in the portfolios brings these themes more starkly and unavoidably to our attention.  Decadence and Bohemianism were not just meaningless labels- in the books and etchings we are often witnessing the first stirrings of sexual liberation and a permissive society.  Louys- along with many others- was a harbinger of these shifts in social attitudes, although he may have felt that his promotion of Greek social values and an openness to greater diversity and freedom of personal expression fell on deaf ears in his time.

Summary

In conclusion, the illustrated editions of the many novels and poetry collections of Pierre Louys stand as a remarkable body of collaborative creativity, a literary and artistic legacy deserving of much wider critical study and popular appreciation.  These joint productions underline the degree to which individual artists depend upon the work of others.  Pierre Louys’ achievements arose upon the foundations of previous writers, painters and illustrators, who had created an aesthetic and intellectual environment within which he could develop his own particular vision.  As for the craftsmen and women whose images enhanced his words, this brief review repeatedly demonstrates how multi-talented they were, able to produce memorable designs in a wide range of media.

A longer, fully annotated version of this essay can be downloaded from my Academia page.

Georges Barbier, advert in Vogue, December 1st 1920

The depiction of women in the illustrated works of Pierre Louys

by Paul Gervais

The illustrated novels of Pierre Louys are instructive in many ways. Primarily, of course, they reveal evolving artistic responses to the author’s prose and verse, thereby not just illustrating his personal vision but demonstrating- indirectly- what book purchasers were understood to want, and what publishers and their commissioned artists believed they could offer them, within the parameters of law and public decency. In other words, the nature of illustrations can be a record of changes in society- in attitudes to sexuality, gender and the status and rights of women.

Louys’ first books appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century, notably Les Chansons de Bilitis in 1894 and Aphrodite in 1896. The earliest illustrated editions are distinctly reflective of their era, tacitly articulating contemporary attitudes towards the female gender and the position of women in society. Librairie Borel‘s 1899 edition of Aphrodite, illustrated by Antoine Calbet, is a case in point: his depictions of Chrysis reflect the Academic tradition of life studies, derived from the classical artistic tradition since the Renaissance, and the young Galilean courtesan is depicted very much in the style of Greek statues of Aphrodite and paintings of Venus by Botticelli, Tiziano Vecelli and others thereafter.

The title pages of the Calbet edition

Likewise, when Georges Rochegrosse provided plates for an edition of Ariadne in 1904, what he supplied was a very revealing reflection of the period’s conceptions of bacchantes- frenzied women. In the plate illustrated below, they are seen wreathed in ivy and flowers and leopard skin, about to tear apart the helpless Ariadne. Elsewhere in the same volume, Greek ladies were presented as sedate, respectable, elegant, graceful and beautiful- as in the illustration that accompanied the preamble to The House on the Nile by Paul Gervais, which is seen at the head of this post.

As I have described in other posts, numerous further illustrated editions of the various books written by Louys were to follow, both before and after his decease in 1925. A constant feature of these was women in greater or lesser states of undress, plates that faithfully responded to the text but also very consciously appealed to the primarily male collectors of fine art limited editions of books. Amongst these many examples, the most interesting are probably those designed by women. Those volumes worked on by Suzanne Ballivet, Mariette Lydis and Clara Tice are notable for the quality of their work and for the fact that the latter two were lesbian and brought their own sense of eroticism to their reactions to the texts. So, for example, in her plates for the 1934 edition of Les Chansons de Bilitis, Lydis’ vision of female lovers was far more intimate and subtly sensual than most of the works produced by male contemporaries- such as J A Bresval (see below). Other women who worked on the various titles by Louys included Renee Ringel (Aphrodite, 1944), Yna Majeska (Psyche, 1928), Guily Joffrin (Psyche, 1972) and editions of Bilitis illustrated by Jeanne Mammen, Genia Minache (1950), Carola Andries (1962) and Monique Rouver (1967). The frequency with which female illustrators were employed as the century passed is noticeable, although I hesitate to identify a distinctly feminine style.

Maritte Lydis, plate for Bilitis, 1934

Post-war, new editions of Louys introduced us to new conceptions of his female characters. J. A. Bresval illustrated an edition of Bilitis in 1957, his figures being very much inspired by contemporary film stars like Gina Lollobrigida and Brigitte Bardot. The women have a dark-haired fulsomeness typical of the period; the eroticism is rather cliched, such as the frontispiece to the book, which shows Bilitis with a lover: the latter kneels before her partner, embracing her waist and kissing her stomach; the standing woman cups her breasts in her hands and throws back her head in a highly stereotypical soft-porn rendering of female ecstasy.

However, by 1961 and Raymond Brenot’s watercolours for a new edition of Sanguines, we see a new aesthetic of the female body beginning to emerge: the bosoms may be just as fantastical, but there is a slenderness and, in some of the clothes, a sense of a more liberated and relaxed mood. Pierre-Laurent (Raymond) Brenot (1913-98) was a painter who was also very much in demand to design record sleeves, advertisements and fashion plates (for such couturiers as Dior, Balenciaga, Ricci and Lanvin). More tellingly, he is known as the ‘father of the French pin-up’- consider, for example, his advert for lingerie manufacturer Jessos- “Comme maman, je porte un Jessos” declares a young teen with pigtails, seated with her blouse unbuttoned to reveal her bra (“just like my mum’s”); I have discussed this style of marketing in another post. Brenot’s poster designs, for consumer goods, holiday destinations and films and theatres, regularly featured glamorous young women and, when this work declined during the later 1960s, he returned to painting, producing many young female nudes.

Brenot, Parrhasius in ‘The Wearer of Purple’ from Sanguines

What has to be observed, though, is that most of the nudity portrayed by Brenot was not justified by the actual stories in Sanguines. There are some naked slaves in The Wearer of Purple (see below), and Callisto in A New Sensation does share a bed with the narrator, but most of the rest of the stories are really quite respectable and sex-free (by the standards of Louys), being more concerned with psychology than sexuality. What we see, therefore, is evidence for the tendency to treat the works of Louys as a platform for erotic illustration. Frequently, this was a distinct element in the author’s stories, but it seems that he had acquired a reputation for sexiness which was then applied more liberally, presumably in the knowledge that the name would sell. The same criticism can, in truth, be made of Georges Rochegrosse’s depiction of the bacchae in the 1904 edition of Ariadne (see earlier): what he depicted might perhaps be implied in the text, but what Louys wrote doesn’t wholly warrant the nudity that we see:

“They wore fox skins tied over their left shoulders. Their hands waved tree branches and shook garlands of ivy. Their hair was so heavy with flowers that their necks bent backwards; the folds of their breasts streamed with sweat, the reflections on their thighs were setting suns, and their howls were speckled with drool.”

Ariadne, c.2

Brenot, Callisto in ‘A New Sensation’ from Sanguines

The men who feature in Brenot’s illustrations often seem hesitant, ill at ease or, even, embarrassed at being discovered with the women in their company- his take on the ‘satyrs’ with nymph in a scene from ‘The Wearer of Purple’ is a case in point. In Louys’ story, this is an incident involving a slave girl being assaulted by two other servants so as to create a titillating composition for the the artist Parrhasius to paint. As we can see in the reproduction below, the satyrs appear afraid of the young woman, having lost all their accustomed priapism, whilst she strikes me as indifferent to their presence and in fully control of the situation. Given Brenot’s later output, it’s almost certainly overstating things to say that these plates reflect shifts in social attitudes.

Brenot, two satyrs & a nymph in ‘The Wearer of Purple’ in Sanguines

Coming right up to date, the 1999 edition of Aphrodite demonstrates how visions of women may have developed and advanced (or not). The book was issued in three volumes, the first two being illustrated by two male comic book artists, Milo Manara and Georges Bess respectively. Both have distinctly erotic styles and the results strike me as being, in essence, highly accomplished and artistic reproductions of glamour photography and lesbian porn; for example, George Bess’ picture of the reclining woman, which faces the start of Book 2, chapter 1 of the story, seems to me to be drawn in a style very much influenced by Mucha or Georges du Feure: the streaming hair and the encroaching, twisting foliage all have the hallmarks of Art Nouveau (which is of course highly appropriate given the publication date of the original book). In the modern version, Chrysis is regularly depicted in intimate scenes alone, with her maid Djala or with the two girls Rhodis and Myrtocleia. With their tousled hair, pouting lips and pneumatic breasts, these women are very much the late twentieth century ideal. Most of the time, they are presented as being more interested in each other than in any of the male characters in the story, but my response is that there are really rather high-quality examples of fairly standard pornographic obsessions. When we look at them, it’s worth recalling Pierre Louys’ own description of his heroine, when he wrote to the painter Albert Besnard asking to paint her:

“Chrysis, as womanly as possible- tall, not skinny, a very ‘beautiful girl.’ Nothing vague or elusive in the forms. All parts of her body have their own expression, apart from their participation in the beauty of the whole. Hair golden brown, almost Venetian; very lively and eventful, not at all like a river. Of primary importance in the type of Chrysis, the mouth having all the appetites, thick and moist- but interesting […] Painted lips, nipples and nails. Depilated armpits. Twenty years old; but twenty years in Africa.”

Aphrodite, chapter 1, Milo Manara, 1999

Bess, plate for Aphrodite, 1999, Book 2, c.1, ‘The Garden of the Goddess’

A fascinating contrast to the the first two volumes of the 1999 edition is to be found in the third, illustrated by Claire Wendling (born 1967). She is a French author of comic books and her response to the text is interesting because it is so much darker and less obviously ‘sexy’ than that of her male collaborators. The plates are, literally, dark in tone and, although they tend to focus on solo female nudes, rather than lascivious eroticism is there is a mood of mental and physical suffering entirely appropriate to the final section of the book, in which Chrysis is arrested, sentenced to death, executed and buried. Her cover image evokes- for me- thoughts of Gustav Klimt in its decoration, but the twisted, crouched posture of the woman doesn’t look seductive- rather she’s supplicatory or, possibly, predatory.

At the start of this post I proposed that the book illustrations published with successive editions of the works of Pierre Louys can be a record of changes in society- in attitudes to sexuality, gender and the status and rights of women. I think that this is true, but that the evidence does not necessarily reveal huge steps forward in those areas. Far more women are involved now in commercial art, and the works of Louys provide vehicles for the expression of lesbian desire on their own terms: albeit in the service of illustrating books written by a man in which his sympathetic views of same-sex attraction compete with heterosexual masculine eroticism. Art styles have evolved, but the attitudes expressed by what’s depicted have not necessarily developed at the same pace.

Icons of Aphrodite: Some More Illustrators of Pierre Louys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rousseau, Aphrodite, showing Chrysis with Rhodis & Myrtocleia

Firmin Maglin, 1899

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

from Aphrodite: Chrysis at the party, by Maglin

Frontispiece of the 1931 edition by Ray

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

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

Ray- Chrysis, Rhodis & Myrtocleia

Cover of the 1931 edition- woodcut by Moro-Ruffe

A E Marty

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

A E Marty

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

Renée Ringel’s edition, 1944

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

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