{"id":28185,"date":"2025-06-18T16:30:19","date_gmt":"2025-06-18T15:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=28185"},"modified":"2025-06-18T16:04:52","modified_gmt":"2025-06-18T15:04:52","slug":"armand-rassenfosses-fleurs-du-mal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2025\/06\/18\/armand-rassenfosses-fleurs-du-mal\/","title":{"rendered":"Armand Rassenfosse’s Fleurs du Mal"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It’s been a while since I found another illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s poems but there are still more of them out there. This surprises me a little considering the nature of Baudelaire’s writing, you can’t imagine Anglophone fin-de-si\u00e8cle<\/em> publishers lavishing such attention on poems which are morbid and erotic to this degree. Beresford Egan<\/a> illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal<\/em> but this was published in 1929 by which time Continental decadence was regarded in a more favourable light.<\/p>\n

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Armand Rassenfosse (1862\u20131934) was a Belgian artist whose 1899 edition of Baudelaire is what the French would call the artist’s chef d’oeuvre<\/em>, a limited reprint of Les Fleurs du Mal<\/em><\/a> illustrated with colour etchings on nearly every page. Rassenfosse’s approach is much more Symbolist in tone than the near pornography of Manuel Orazi<\/a>, presenting a succession of idealised figures (naked women for the most part) in nebulous spaces. I was hoping he might have produced more in this style but his other work tends to be poster design and painted studies of female dancers in various states of undress.<\/p>\n

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Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Manuel Orazi\u2019s Fleurs du Mal<\/a>
\n\u2022 Pierre-Yves Tr\u00e9mois\u2019s Fleurs du Mal<\/a>
\n\u2022 Victor Delhez\u2019s Fleurs du Mal<\/a>
\n\u2022 Rapha\u00ebl Drouart\u2019s Fleurs du Mal<\/a>
\n\u2022 Tony George-Roux\u2019s Fleurs du Mal<\/a>
\n\u2022 Percy Walter Wolff\u2019s Die Vorh\u00f6lle<\/a>
\n\u2022 The art of Mario Laboccetta<\/a>
\n\u2022 Carlos Schwabe\u2019s Fleurs du Mal<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since I found another illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s poems but there are still more of them out there. This surprises me a little considering the nature of Baudelaire’s writing, you can’t imagine Anglophone fin-de-si\u00e8cle publishers lavishing such attention on poems which are morbid and erotic to this degree. Beresford Egan illustrated … Continue reading “Armand Rassenfosse’s Fleurs du Mal”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Armand Rassenfosse's Fleurs du Mal","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,48],"tags":[14029,3963,2346,1208],"class_list":["post-28185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-illustrators","tag-armand-rassenfosse","tag-beresford-egan","tag-charles-baudelaire","tag-manuel-orazi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-7kB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}