The legacies of Louys

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

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hesitate fully to endorse this statement, as the most erotic of Pierre Louys work only emerged after his death when his unpublished and unknown manuscripts began to emerge.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

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

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

Book Illustration

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

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

Painters

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

Homage to Pierre Louys

Levy-Dhurmer, Bilitis, 1900

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

Auriol, Bilitis a la japonaise

Stanisław Eleszkiewicz, study for Bilitis

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

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

Conclusions

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

Pierre & Marie from Curiosa, 2019

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

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

Illustrators, artists and the Parisian book trade

Mermaid, 1921, Cheri Herouard

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

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

Publishing & censorship

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

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

Paris- city of culture

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

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

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

Magazines

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

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

Georges Pichard, cartoon, 1950s

Graphic Novels

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

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

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

Children’s Books

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

René Ranson, ‘Hello sailor’

Commercial Art

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

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

Raymond Brenot

French Literature

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

Georges Barbier, advert in Vogue, December 1st 1920

‘Three daughters and their mother’- scandal and complexity from Pierre Louys

Teresa & family by Edouard Chimot

During the last decade and a half of his career, Pierre Louys completed three major works- the Handbook of Manners for Young Ladies, which was a parody of deportment manuals; the novel Trois Filles de leur mere, and the poetry collection Pybrac. It is arguable, in fact, Pybrac was never actually completed, in the sense that Louys added continually to the quatrains that comprise it and the published versions of the book only include a fraction of the total known number of verses. There were, in addition, several unfinished works: the novels Toinon and L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve and the mock-travelogue/ novel L’Ile aux dames. These texts all have a number of themes in common: Louys’ encyclopaedic literary knowledge coupled with a tendency to mock those books; his filthy sense of humour; the utopian strand to his writing, and his liking for erotica.

Here, I focus on Trois Filles de leur mere (Three Daughters of Their Mother), arguably one of the most difficult books by Louys. This considerable difficulty for readers arises from the tension between the surface content of the text- some of his obscenest erotica- and the deeper purposes of his writing.

Louys had a number of aims and targets in writing Trois Filles. He felt a deep antipathy for the stifling morals and conventions of the Catholic church within which he’d been raised (hence his regular recreations of the pagan faith of classical Greek and Roman seen in several of his works) and it’s clear that the book is, in part, an assault upon many of the sacraments and concepts of the faith: the story features sex in a church, a vicious parody of communion, and a perverse immaculate conception, for example. One of the three daughters, Charlotte, is something of a martyr-figure, and it’s even arguable, I think, that the mother, Teresa, stands as a satanic temptress figure for her trinity of girls. Amongst the other targets for Louys’ derision, alongside casual piety, were French wine snobbery and the general bourgeois mood of propriety.

In addition, the book is deeply literary. There are repeated references to classical and Renaissance and later French authors, such as Clement Marot (1496-1544) or La Fontaine, which readers are expected, implicitly, to know. Some of these sources are quoted, some are parodied and mocked. An obscene passage is attributed to the Humanist scholar Erasmus, which I’m sure he never wrote (although I’ll confess I’ve not checked all 86 volumes of his collected works). One contemporary French writer is condemned as merely deadly dull (just as was the case with the moralist Guy du Faur in Pybrac): after a rather overstimulating session with the mother, Teresa, the student narrator concludes “I took from my library a ‘heady’ novel by Henri Bourdeaux that I had purchased especially for the purpose of calming myself down when I was in a worked-up state.” Bourdeaux (1870-1963) was a lawyer and author known for his traditional Catholic morality and his very correct French style.

Besides citing classical authors, Louys borrowed themes from them just as he modelled parts of his plot on the Bible. Hence, we find traces of Leda, Pasiphae and Europa in some of the incidents described.

René Ranson’s title page

The book is also ‘metatextual’ before that term was invented. It is repeatedly aware that it is a story, pretending to be a memoire. For example, the student narrator addresses us, as readers, explaining “I would have taken much more pleasure in inventing a story where I could give myself (so easily) a more sympathetic role” or “That’s the trouble with memoires: they get monotonous. In a novel, this kind of repetition can never be excused, but in life it has to be accepted.” When a play is acted out in the final chapters of the book, the artificiality of that make-believe within the wider pretence of the story-telling is continually highlighted, the use of dramatic jargon constantly reminding us that it is all invented and staged: for example “Teresa probably did not know that she had introduced a prosopopoeia into her speech, but there is no need to know the figures of rhetoric to put them… at the service of persuasion. Was it the apostrophe, the hypothesis, the exhortation or the prosopopoeia that won? I do not know…” Very evidently, this sort of passage is not part of standard work of pornography.

The text can be understood at several levels simultaneously, I would argue. The basic plot concerns a student who moves into a new flat next door to Teresa and her three daughters and discovers that all four are sex workers. A few weeks of uninhibited sensual indulgence with the entire family follows, before they suddenly disappear. The novel may be interpreted as a condemnation of the sex trade and its malign impact upon the women trapped within it. At the same time, though, there are elements of the narrative which celebrate female sexual autonomy and women’s right to control over their bodies and their pleasures. Teresa is proud of her physical prowess; she comes over as a powerful and determined woman- except that the downside of her assertiveness is the fact that she dominates her family and is involved in damaging incestuous relationships with all of them. Then again- as he often did- Louys seems to suggest that self-sufficient lesbian households may represent some sort of social utopia– an ideal of independence and happiness. Yet he also interrogates lesbian or bisexual identity, perhaps ultimately tending towards a position that sexual fluidity is a more accurate way of understanding individuals.

On its face, Trois Filles may appear outrageously, shockingly pornographic, but I think it’s plain that any text that casually mentions Jesuit preacher Louis Bourdaloue, Roman poet Tibullus, the Greek playwright Aeschylus, Alexander the Great, Melisandre, and the painter Ingres, has depths and intentions that are not instantly obvious. The complex and multi-faceted nature of Trois Filles means that we are constantly left unbalanced by it, not quite sure of Louys’ meaning, uncertain whether he is playing a game and always returning to the text to uncover new layers of significance.

As ever, I find the novel’s bibliology as fascinating as the book itself. Illustrated editions proved extremely popular with publishers and several artists whom we’ve already encountered before, because of their work on texts by Louys, were commissioned to provide imagery. The first edition of Trois Filles was released by Pascal Pia in 1926, with twenty plates by Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre. Further illustrated editions followed in due course: in 1930, with plates by Andre Collot; in 1935, illustrated with sixteen etchings by Marcel Vertes and in 1936, with 34 watercolours by René Ranson (1891-1977). Ranson was one of the most important designers at work during the interwar heyday of the Parisian music hall, working for the Folies Bergère between 1924 and 1932. Renowned for his draughtsmanship, he was a painter, illustrator and costume designer as well. Ranson also supplied designs to the Paris Opera, and for several film studios, including Fox, Pathé and Paramount. Over and above his theatrical work, Ranson painted glamour or pin-up nudes and provided plates for works such as Baudelaire’s Fleur du mal. In past posts I’ve remarked on the frequency with which cartoonists and caricaturists found work as illustrators- and, for that matter, how often the skills acquired in illustrating children’s books might be transferred to the distinctly adult content of the works of Pierre Louys. René Ranson demonstrates how theatrical and costume designers might find additional work in book illustration; other examples I’ve noted previously include George Barbier, Louis Touchagues and Andre Dignimont. All of them surely deserve our respect for their multi-talented ability to turn their hands to almost any artistic commission offered to them.

After the end of the Second World War, further editions of Trois Filles followed: Jean Berque provided sixteen plates for an issue in 1955 and, late that same year, Edouard Chimot also illustrated an edition with a dozen plates (see head of page for the family in their best ‘New Look’ dresses). Then, in 1960, an edition illustrated by Rojan was published. Finally, as I have mentioned several times, a version illustrated by graphic novel artist Georges Pichard appeared in 1980. In all these cases, the illustrators were faithful after their own style to the text they were commissioned to work upon, meaning that in most cases the plates are not really suitable for publication on WordPress. This explicitness can- as I’ve suggested- have its own implications for the text that the images accompany. Pichard, used to multiple frames in cartoon strips, designed an impressive fifty-three plates to go with Louys’ book. The sheer number of these, coupled with his graphic style of strongly drawn images, has the effect of underlining the more bleak and depraved aspects of the book. His monochrome plates emphasise the elements of tragedy and desperation in the narrative- something that Chimot’s and Ranson’s very pretty coloured illustrations definitely do not do.

This post is a simplified version of a longer, fully annotated essay on the novel that can be downloaded from my Academia page. I have also written there in detail on Louys’ attitudes towards religion. For readers who are interested, several translations of the book are readily available, the most recent being Her Three Daughters, available from Black Scat books (published December 2022). See as well my Louys bibliography and details of my other writing on the author.

The cover of Pichard’s edition

How Not to Behave: ‘The Handbook for Young Ladies’ by Pierre Louys

Rojan, 1926

Published in 1926, soon after the author’s death, Pierre Louys’ Handbook for Young Ladies (Manuel de civilite pour les petites filles a l’usage des maisons d’education) is very typical of much of his later output: it is also very accessible for readers- short and ridiculously, scandalously funny.

In his broadly contemporary verse collection Pybrac, Louys savaged the moralising verse of the Guy du Faur, seigneur de Pibrac (1529-84). He had written a series of pious but pompous quatrains, giving worthy advice to his readers. These texts became required reading for generations of French schoolchildren and, as such, were a clear target for loathing and mockery.

The Handbook was, in this context, merely a modernised version of the same project, attacking manuals of deportment and good manners written for the daughters of bourgeois families. There were plenty of these to satirise- a small selection of examples includes a snappily titled work by Stéphanie Félicité Genlis, Dictionnaire critique et raisonné des étiquettes de la cour, des usages du monde, des amusemens, des modes, des moeurs, etc: ou, L’esprit des etiquettes et des usuages anciens, compares aux modernes (1818), as well as the Manuel complet de la bonne compagnie, ou, Guide de la politesse, et de la bienséance, dédié à la société française et à la jeunesse des deux sexes, by Elisabeth Celnart (1834), Manuel de l’homme et de la femme comme il faut, by Eugène Chapus (1855), Cham’s Nouvelles lecons de civilité, puérile et honnête (1859), La civilité puérile et honnête by Eugène Plon and Louis Maurice Boutet de Monvel (first published 1887) and Paul Burani’s Guide-manuel de la civilité française; ou, Nouveau code de la politesse et du savoirvivre (1890). Burani, for instance, advises that:

“The carriage of the head is especially a study to be done in the young girl ‘s early years. A leaning, languorous expression, an impudent and disdainful expression are also unsuitable and later become unfortunate habits.”

“Spouses must avoid overly familiar caresses in front of their children, in front of servants and in front of strangers. The mysteries of marriage, to retain all their attraction, must not be revealed.”

Guide-manuel de la civilité française

In the Handbook, over just sixty pages, Louys purported to give advice on the correct behaviour for young ladies in a range of social situations: when dining in company, at a ball, at school, at church, when visiting a museum, at the theatre, when travelling, when being introduced to the president of the republic- and many other circumstances. Almost none of this advice ought to be followed: “Get this truth into your head: every person around you, regardless of their age or sex, has a secret desire for you- but most of them will never dare to say so;” “If you pass an attractive man in the street, do not proposition him yourself; have your maid do this for you,” or “If your mother accompanies you to your lover’s home, let her go to bed with him first. That is the proper way to do things.”

Many recommendations are probably still valid, even so: at the dining table, for example, do not arrange a banana above a pair of tangerines on the tablecloth; do not slide asparagus in and out of your mouth whilst regarding the young man you find attractive; if you are doing an arithmetic lesson at school and the solution to your calculation is 69, do not roll around laughing like an idiot, or, if you are in a compromising situation with the elderly gentleman and he drops dead, rearrange his clothes and make him decent before calling for help…

As regular readers will know, I am as interested in the publishing history of Louys’ many works as in the texts themselves; most of the artists commissioned to illustrate successive editions of the Handbook will be familiar to readers who have read my earlier posts. The first edition was published in 1926 in Paris by Simon Kra, but within just a few months the publisher released an illustrated edition containing six etchings by Louys-regular Rojan. Strangely, the next year Simon Kra reissued the same text, but this time featuring twelve coloured etchings by Leon Courbouleix. He was an artist and occasional author who illustrated cheap erotic books for the Parisian book publishing trade, along with providing plates for more literary erotica, such as Restif de la Bretonne.

Illustration by Schem 1948

A further edition of the Handbook followed in 1930 (although- as was common- the title page claimed it had been published in Brussels in 1919). Twelve plates by Martin van Maele were provided, but these were not original works, being taken from La Grande danse macabre des vifs which he had illustrated in 1909. Nevertheless, those images were readily transferrable and highly suitable for the new text. Van Maele (a pseudonym of artist Maurice Martin, 1863-1926) had been widely employed in illustrating literary erotica (Laclos, Gautier, Verlaine) as well as in providing images for the thriving trade in spanking novels.

After World War II two more editions of the Handbook followed. 1948 saw an edition with twelve ‘pouchoir’ plates, designed by the illustrator and printmaker Schem (Raoul Serres, 1881-1971). In 1950 a further version, with eighteen line drawings, some hand-coloured, by Nicolas Sternberg was published. Most of these are not really suitable for publication here- as the CD cover reproduced below says: “Interdit aux moins de dix-huit ans.”

The cover of the Sternberg edition

The Handbook is ribald and irreverent; it’s no guide at all to correct comportment, although it might well function as a catalogue of all the things one should never do in polite company. It is, in microcosm, an epitome of Pierre Louys’ parallel reality- a vision of contemporary Parisian society that existed only in his imagination.

A longer, fully annotated essay on Pybrac can be downloaded from my Academia page. A couple of recent English translations of the Handbook have been published: one, The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners for Use in Educational Establishments by Wakefield Press (2010) and the second, A Handbook of Manners for the Good Girls of France by Black Scat Books (2022).

The cover of a CD of the Handbook

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.

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 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.

John Yunge-Bateman- illustrator

John Yunge-Bateman (1897-1971) was a British illustrator who worked extensively from the late 1940s into the early 1960s and illustrated a lot of school- and children’s- books, such as The Bumble Bee (1946), A Girl’s Hobby Book (1950) and Let’s Look at Cats (1964).

Yunge, Rubaiyat

Yunge-Bateman’s life and career details have been rather obscure, but the Bear Alley blog has done a lot of research into the artist’s background and has offered these details. J. E. Yunge-Bateman seems to have been born in Folkestone, Kent, in 1897. As a youth, he joined the Royal Naval College at Osborne in January 1910 as a cadet and eventually retired from the navy as a Lieutenant-Commander in 1926. It’s also reported that Yunge-Bateman was head of a British naval camouflage section during World War II. This last detail may be a partial explanation of the otherwise unlikely connection between John Yunge-Bateman the artist and the naval officer. That they are one and the same is confirmed by several documents: on note on his naval records records him as being a ” wood engraver, book illustrator and author who worked for Golden Cockerel Press in its declining years, in a style reminiscent of John Buckland Wright.” In addition we have the following pictures- one from the Imperial War Museum, in which military and surrealism are surprisingly combined, and the second an illustration of an ‘Invocation Addressed to a new Wartime Goddess’ which appeared in The Sketch on 11 September 1940: camouflage is again the subject.

Yunge-Bateman, The Outside Viewing Tank: Directorate of Camouflage, Naval Section, 1943, IWM

Yunge, Pygmalion from Ovid

Besides the junior and educational materials (rather like the artist Rojan), Yunge-Bateman also worked on some rather more adult texts, including various works by Shakespeare, the Metamorphoses by Ovid and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (both 1958) and, of course, on an edition of Pierre Louys. His illustrations to the Rubaiyat are notably erotic- like those produced by another artist we’ve encountered before, John Buckland Wright.

Buckland Wright, Rubaiyat

Yunnge was commissioned by Butterworth and Company in 1935 to illustrate an edition of an English translation of Louys’ Woman and Puppet. This same version was reissued the next year in New York by Macaulay. As another researcher into Yunge’s life, Bob Forrest, has written, “though he certainly had a penchant for depicting naked women, there is more to him than that.” His designs are finely detailed with a dramatic use of light and shade.

Conchita torments Mateo

Conchita dances in Cadiz

Two Less Well Known Illustrators of Pierre Louys

Vertès, Blond Girl

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

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

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

Harper’s Bazaar, October 1940

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

Vertès, Three Girls

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

Harper’s Bazaar, October 1944

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

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

Reynard the Fox

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentin Serov, The Rape of Europa, 1910

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

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

Masson, Pasiphae, 1942

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

Jackson Pollock, Pasiphaë, 1943

Labisse, Strange Leda, 1950

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

Rojan

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

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

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

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

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

For more information, see my recommended reading page.

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

Rojan- from nudes to baby bunnies

Rojan, Scaf the Seal, 1936

Feodor Stepanovich Rojankovsky (1891-1970), also known as Rojan, was a Russian émigré illustrator. He is best known both for his children’s book illustration but also for his erotic art from the 1930s. Rojan was born in Mitava, in the Kurland Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Latvia) in 1891. After his father’s death in 1897, the family moved to St. Petersburg to be closer to an older married sister. The artist later recalled how he once was taken to the zoo and that then, his imagination excited, he was given a set of coloured crayons with which he immediately began to draw the animals he’d seen. As a result, the boy’s interest in natural history picture books and illustrated classics developed whilst he honed his artistic skills by copying his elder brothers’ school drawings and paintings. These interests led to him to enrol for two years at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. However, these studies were interrupted by military service during the First World War, but his first works (patriotic battle scenes) were published in a magazine in May 1915.

After the war, Rojan joined siblings in Ukraine where he worked as an artist for the local council, illustrating school books. Further military service followed during the Russian Civil War and he became a prisoner of war in Poland. After the war, the artist stayed in Poland designing book covers and illustrations for the bookseller and publisher Rudolf Wegner. Unable to return to USSR after his service with the anti-communist White Army, Rojan moved to France in 1925, where he found work again as an illustrator of children’s books.

from Frog Went a Courting, 1956

In Paris, Rojan supplemented his income by designing plates for a considerable amount of erotica. Allen and Polly Irving’s biography of the artist describes these “naughty books [as] a minor but noteworthy aspect of the illustrator’s long and varied career [which] round out the picture of a man in and of his time and place. The drawings are best viewed in the cultural setting of Paris in the 1930s and, in the much harsher world of today, appreciated for their gentle period style and what they reveal of our social and cultural history…. This small and generally amusing body of work has long been known, valued, and collected; Rojankovsky lavished his best draughtsmanship and colour work on these illustrations and they are among his most accomplished work” (from Feodor Rojankovsky: The Children’s Books and Other Illustration Art, 2013). Rojan was an incredibly productive designer and his illustrations are “distinctive, brightly-coloured, spirited and stylish,” generally painted in watercolours.

Rojan is noted for the portfolio Idylle Printaniere of 1936 which consists of 30 lithographs wordlessly telling the story of the chance meeting of a man and a woman on a train and thence to a hotel room. His work on titles by Pierre Lous included 105 plates for the Manuel de civilité pour les petites filles (The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners, 1926), Pybrac (1927), 75 illustrations for the Poèsies erotiques (1937) and, lastly, Trois filles de leur mère (1940). He also worked on titles including Jeux d’Enfants (1930), Memoires of Casanova (1931), Théophile Gautier’s Poésies libertines (1935), Raymond Radiguet’s Vers libre (1937), Vicomtesse de Saint Luc’s Liqueurs féminines, parfums sexuels (1940) and Jean Spaddy, Dévergondages (Wantonness, 1948). Rojan also designed illustrations for Le petit chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) and for Guillaume Apollinaire’s Cortège priapique, which were unpublished. His attractive and light-hearted style was plainly well-suited to children’s books, so it can be quite strange to see it applied to very explicit adult scenes, which frequently involve a wide diversity of couples engaged in a range of practices.

from Casanova

In 1941, Rojan moved to the US to work there with his former French publisher. He was able to continue his career illustrating large number of children’s’ books featuring either history or animals and the natural world. He wrote and illustrated seventeen books of his own and provided plates for four dozen books by authors including Rudyard Kipling, Rose Fyleman and Algernon Blackwood.

from Radiguet’s Vers Libres

After leaving Paris, Rojan produced no more erotic work- perhaps understandably given that his name was now associated by the public with titles such as Our Puppy, by Elsa Ruth Nast (1948), Baby Wild Animals, John Wallace Purcell (1958) and The White Bunny and His Magic Nose, Lily Duplaix (1957). For more information on Pierre Louys see my bibliography for the author and for details of interwar book illustrations, see my books page.

From Le théâtre érotique de la Rue de la Santé, 1932

Statuesque Aphrodite- art and passion

Charles Joseph Watelet, Nude Before Garden Statue

“He embraced the cold statue- and by his touch, it grew into youth, health and beauty” (Baron Yelverton, On Blackstone)

Readers may be familiar with the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved and who then prayed that Aphrodite would bring her to life to be his lover. The legend is recounted by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (Book 10).

Pygmalion was a sculptor and, in some accounts, king of Cyprus. The artist apparently became a misogynist, “detesting the faults beyond measure which nature has given to women” having witnessed the immoral behaviour of the daughters of King Propoetus of Amathus on Cyprus. Ovid tells us that they “dared to deny that Venus was the goddess. For this, because of her divine anger, they are said to have been the first to prostitute their bodies and their reputations in public, and, losing all sense of shame, they lost the power to blush, as the blood hardened in their cheeks, and only a small change turned them into hard flints.” This story is puzzling because Amathus was one of the shrines to Aphrodite where temple prostitutes served visitors; it would therefore seem a little strange for her to punish their disbelief by making them provide sexual services when that was seen as an honourable and sacred activity.

Anyway, Pygmalion determined to remain celibate and to occupy himself solely with his art. He created a statue of a woman that he found so perfect that he fell in love with it. Pygmalion would kiss and fondle the sculpture, bring it gifts, and even made it a bed. In due course, on one of the feast days to the goddess, the sculptor made offerings at her altar. Too scared to admit his true desire, he quietly wished for a bride who would be “the living likeness of my ivory girl”. When he returned home, he kissed the statue as was his habit, but this time felt its lips to be warm. He kissed it again, and found that the ivory had lost its hardness. Aphrodite had granted Pygmalion’s wish and turned his statue into a woman. The sculptor married his living creation and they had a daughter, Paphos, after whom the city on the south-west coast of Cyprus is named.

The Godhead Fires, from the ‘Pygmalion and the Image’ series (1868-70) painted by Sir Edward Burne-Jones

“And the cold marble leapt to life, a god” Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868), ‘The Belvedere Apollo’

This famous legend has inspired painters and poets ever since; as we’ll see in another post, it seemed to manifest itself in real life in the case of sculptor Sir John Gibson and his ‘Tinted Venus‘ statue. The story also highlights for us a curious interconnection that appears between Aphrodite (and other Greek divinities) and statues. For example, Pierre Louys seems to have been inspired by Pygmalion in his book Aphrodite, for the character, Demetrios, a sculptor, is required to make a statue for the goddess’ shrine in the likeness of his lover, the queen Berenice- who is descended through the Ptolemies from Astarte. Having created the image, his “statue became the object of his passion. He adored it only, and madly divorced from the flesh the supreme idea of the goddess, all the more immaterial because he had attached it to life.”

Images of Aphrodite can be more than cold marble and ivory and can inspire carnal responses in her worshippers. This was especially true of the statue created for the goddess’ shrine at Knidos on Cyprus. The figure was crafted by Praxiteles of Athens around the 4th century BCE (using as his model a famous courtesan called Phryne) and was one of the first life-sized representations of the nude female body. Praxiteles showed Aphrodite just after bathing, reaching for a robe or towel whilst modestly covering her groin. The original no longer exists, but the image (and its pose) were copied repeatedly by later Greek and Roman sculptors. It is widely believed that the statue’s nudity was consciously intended to excite sexual responses- and that the attendants at the Knidos shrine encouraged this amongst worshippers. Certainly, the statue would have been painted to make it look more lifelike- something we tend to forget today. According to the Roman Lucian (Erotes, 15) one young man was so aroused by seeing the image that he broke into the temple at night and attempted to have sex with it, leaving a stain on the marble. When he was discovered in the act, he was so ashamed that he hurled himself over a cliff near the temple.

Aphrodite of Knidos (copy)

This tradition has continued into more recent times. In his novel, Venus in Furs, Sader Masoch describes how his leading character, Severin, has become obsessed with stone statue of Venus in a meadow: “It is sufficient to say that this Venus is beautiful. I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. I literally adore her… Often I visit that cold, cruel mistress of mine by night and lie on my knees before her, with the face pressed against the cold pedestal on which her feet rest, and my prayers go up to her.” Severin imagines that the statute comes to life:

“From the marble shoulders of the goddess a large dark fur flows down to her heels. I stand dumbfounded and stare at her in amazement; again an indescribable fear seizes hold of me and I take flight.

I hasten my steps, and notice that I have missed the main path. As I am about to turn aside into one of the green walks I see Venus sitting before me on a stone bench, not the beautiful woman of marble, but the goddess of love herself with warm blood and throbbing pulses. She has actually come to life for me, like the statue that began to breathe for her creator. Indeed, the miracle is only half completed. Her white hair seems still to be of stone, and her white gown shimmers like moonlight, or is it satin? From her shoulders the dark fur flows. But her lips are already reddening and her cheeks begin to take color. Two diabolical green rays out of her eyes fall upon me, and now she laughs.

Her laughter is very mysterious, very—I don’t know. It cannot be described, it takes my breath away. I flee further, and after every few steps I have to pause to take breath. The mocking laughter pursues me through the dark leafy paths, across light open spaces, through the thicket where only single moonbeams can pierce. I can no longer find my way, I wander about utterly confused, with cold drops of perspiration on the forehead.”

Soon after this fantasy, he meets a widow called Wanda, who looks to him just like the statue of Venus. He develops a passion for her in turn, and manages to persuade her to dominate him as her slave.

Praxiteles, Resting faun or satyr

Classical Greek sculpture was, needless to say, a triumph of art in the realistic representation of the nude human form. It is inevitable that viewers may react with feelings of physical admiration and desire. Praxiteles was a master of this craft and other works of his have been credited with similar realism. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1860 novel, The Marble Faun, the figure by this name carved by Praxiteles is seen by three American artists visiting Rome and they become convinced that a new acquaintance of theirs, Donatello, Count of Monte Beni, bears such a strong resemblance to the statue that he must himself be descended from an ancestral faun. As I have described in my book, The Great God Pan, the older tradition of male nudes in Greek sculpture fed into a gay undertone common to stories of Pan in late Victorian and Edwardian times. In Forrest Reid’s The Garden God- A Tale of Two Boys (1906), two fifteen-year-old school friends, Harold and Graham, spend a summer holiday together before returning to school. Graham admires Harold’s “shapely body,” having him pose naked after swimming like “A Faun! A young woodland Faun!… [but] You are far nicer than the statue.”

Rojan, illustration for Louys, Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners

Our last word on the blurred boundaries between sculpture and reality will come from the ever dependable controversialist, Pierre Louys. In his satirical and scandalously rude Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners, he offers young ladies advice on how to comport themselves when at a museum.

“Do not climb onto the pedestals of ancient statues to use their virile organs. You should not touch exposed objects, be it with your hand or your bum.

Do not scribble black curls on the pubes of nude Venuses. If the artist represents the goddess without public hair, it is because Venus shaved her bush.

Do not ask the attendant why the Hermaphrodite has balls and tits. It’s not his job to know this sort of thing.”

Schem, illustration for Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners, 1927 edition

There’s plenty of further discussion of Aphrodite in art in my recent book about the goddess.