September 2014 – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

Pierre-Yves Trémois’s Fleur du Mal

A couple of works by Pierre-Yves Trémois appeared in one of the very first posts here back in 2006 as part of the feature that began the long-running Recurrent Pose series. I like Tremois’s work a great deal so it’s good to find these pages from his 1971 edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. There were ten illustrations in all, some of them in the clear-line etching style familiar from his many prints. The Tremois edition is unusual in having some (all?) the poems written out by the artist. He’s also one of the few illustrators to do justice to Baudelaire’s scandalous lesbian verses by showing women who actually seem attracted to one another. Earlier illustrators—if they depicted the theme at all—were much more coy.

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Victor Delhez’s Fleurs du Mal

Another illustrated Baudelaire. Two editions that I might have featured in this series have already been posted in quality scans at 50 Watts: the 1935 Fleurs du Mal by Carlo Farnetti, and a 1947 edition by Beresford Egan, the latter being a good example of a well-matched artist and author.

The illustrations here are woodcuts once again, the artist being Victor Delhez (1902–1985), a Belgian who moved to South America. The 1950 Fleurs du Mal which featured these plates contained 20 illustrations in all but these are the only ones online. I hadn’t come across Delhez before but he was a prodigiously talented artist, as can be seen from the print collection at William P. Carl Fine Prints.

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Raphaël Drouart’s Fleurs du Mal

It seems to be Fleurs du Mal Week here. Raphaël Drouart (1884–1972) was another French artist who specialised in woodcut illustrations. The pictures here are from a 1923 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal found on an auction site.

Despite (or because of) the scandalous nature of Baudelaire’s poetry, there are many illustrated editions of this particular collection, not all of them by artists suited to the material. This is often a common fate of those books whose popularity makes them a magnet for illustrators. One thing the various editions do have in common is the portrait of the poet as a frontispiece, although even there the author of Spleen can be made to look dopey or silly. By contrast, Raphaël Drouart captures the familiar scowl well enough, and also fares better than many when it comes to the poems. The combination of woodcuts and skeletons is reminiscent of Posada’s calaveras.

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Tony George-Roux’s Fleurs du Mal

More illustrated Baudelaire. This edition of Les Fleurs du Mal dates from 1917 but the illustrations by Tony George-Roux have a distinctly Symbolist quality even though Symbolism as an art movement was pretty much over by this point. Baudelaire died twenty years before the first Symbolist manifesto was published but that manifesto named him as one of the leading poets of the movement so the connection is a fitting one. There’s a touch of Félicien Rops in some of these plates.

Tony George-Roux (1894–1928) was French, and if he produced more work along these lines I’ve yet to find it. The illustrations, engraved for this edition by Charles Clement, aren’t the best reproductions so I’ve added an additional plate at the end found on another site.

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Percy Walter Wolff’s Die Vorhölle

Another name to add to the long list of Beardsley followers, Percy Walter Wolff is so obscure as to be almost completely absent from web records. This suggests that Die Vorhölle: Eine Lyrische Nachlese (1911), a Baudelaire collection, may be the only book he illustrated. The drawings make me wonder what Beardsley himself—who put a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal on a shelf in Salomé—might have done with the same subject.

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