Catalogue Preview: Introduction to Prints by Félicien Rops
Next week we will be releasing our new catalogue Prints by Félicien Rops. In the meantime, we present the introduction, a brief look at some of the themes in Rops’s work and some of the highlights to come!
The prints of Félicien Rops (1833-1898) have always been controversial and admired. An artist’s artist, he pressed hard against the moral conventions of his day (and ours still), creating highly imaginative art that remains both shocking and seductive. A technical virtuoso, his works are brought to life with tremendous skill, delicacy, and creativity, often mixing techniques to produce the precise effect he was after, making him a favourite of the leading Symbolists and Decadents of his time as well as the most discerning print collectors of our own.
Rops was born in Namur in the Wallonia region of Belgium, where a museum devoted to his work stands today. In 1851, he moved to Brussels for school, and this is where his earliest published work first appeared, in the form of lithograph caricatures published in various student journals. In 1856, Rops, along with Charles De Coster, founded L'Uylenspiegel, a weekly satirical review, to which he continued to contribute until its publication ceased in 1863.
This enterprising spirit continued throughout his life as he became a lauded member of the avant-garde in Brussels as well as in Paris. He was a founding member of Brussel’s Société Libre des Beaux-Arts (1868-1876), for which he served as vice president for many years, as well as the founder, in 1869, of that city’s Société internationale des aquafortistes (1869-1871; 1874-1877). This was part of an effort to bring the latest printmaking techniques to Belgium. Although first trained in lithography, in 1862 he had studied etching in Paris with Félix Bracquemond (1833-1914) and Jules Ferdinand Jacquemart (1837-1880), two of the greatest etchers of the nineteenth century who were largely responsible for the French etching revival. He quickly mastered the techniques and switched from lithography to intaglio that same decade. Having produced an incredible 34 frontispieces between 1864 and 1870 alone, he went on to become the highest-paid illustrator in Paris, where he settled in 1875. In 1884 he first exhibited with the major avant-garde group Les XX and in 1886 he became one of its highly select members. He was, indeed, a great success already in his day, and was awarded the Légion d'honneur, France’s highest honour, in 1889.
This amount of success may seem somewhat surprising, not for any lack of talent—as Baudelaire noted already in 1865, his talent was “as great as the pyramid of Cheops”—but because of the controversial, even scandalous nature of his work which is often highly erotic and steeped in themes of decadence and the occult. This counter-culture aspect of his oeuvre granted him something of a cult following, and while representative of his most famous works, it was not always Rops’s focus, nor does it characterize the breadth of his interests.
La Bûcheronne or La Ramasseuse de fagots (The Firewood Collector), 1874.
Etching and drypoint on thick paper with full margins. (285x190; 425x295 mm). Rouir 943 II / II. Signed in red crayon lower right.
Instead, Rops’s background in caricature and journalism is important context for approaching his work, which offers an exploration of contemporary society, albeit through myriad lenses and manners. In the 1870s, this was often performed in a realist mode, as in the beautiful Les laveuses (The Laundresses) and La Bûcheronne or La Ramasseuse de fagots (The Firewood Collector), both of 1874, and a concern with social welfare is evident in La Grève of 1876. Such interests persist throughout his career, as evinced by Maturité of 1887 and Le dernier des romantiques, this latter executed in 1891 after a lithograph illustration published in the 18 January 1856 issue of Uylenspiegel.
Le dernier des romantiques, (The Last of the Romantics), 1891.
Photogravure, soft-ground etching, drypoint and aquatint on thick paper (228x167; 315x235). Rouir 825 IV/IV.
However, the bourgeoisie became a particular source of fascination for Rops, especially as he increased the time he spent in Paris. Deeply curious about and interested in this world, of which he himself was part, he wanted especially to record the effects of what he called its “love of brutal pleasures” and financial fixations.[1] He read these “petty interests” as clearly marking the people around him, “having stuck on most faces of our contemporaries the sinister mask of the instinct of perversity of which Edgar Poe speaks.” As an artist keen to represent his own time, he felt it was important to represent all of this, to capture “above all the passions, the character of the physiognomies, the scenes of manners, the moral feeling and the psychological impression of his century, before the costumes and the accessories of this century.”[2]
Perhaps this “before” is part of the impulse for the gradual shedding of clothes performed by many of his female protagonists over the 1870s, a development aptly heralded by Derrière le rideau of 1876. From the 1880s until his death in 1898, his work is often highly sexual in nature, sometimes frankly pornographic, as in Les Cousines de la Colonelle, or the first and third Transformisme Darwinique, wherein an anthropoid ape is seen performing cunnilingus on a naked woman, a surprisingly common theme in the pornographic response to Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution.
Transformisme n.3, or Troisième darwinique, le prédécesseur, 1890 ca.
Drypoint and aquatint on papier japon with wide margins (111x170; 273x350). Rouir 427 II/II.
More often, however, the nakedness of Rops’s women “uncovers” the contemporary obsession with the femme fatal. Women, according to this view, were pernicious and cruel, “the germs of disease and death” who “captivat[ed] men in order to lead them to their own destruction.”[3] These are the women that populate Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils), first published in 1874. A second edition was published in 1882, for which Rops produced nine exquisite etchings that are considered to be, as Robert L. Delevoy notes, “some of the best illustrative work ever done.”[4] Four of these are included the catalogue: La Femme et la folie dominant le monde (Woman and Madness Rule the World); Le Rideau Cramoisi (The Crimson Curtain); Le plus bel amour de Don Juan (The Greatest Love of Don Juan); and À un dîner d’athées (At a Dinner of Atheists).
Sex, death, and satanism, the hallmarks of a beautifully diseased modernity, were interests Rops shared with Charles Baudelaire. Rops had met Baudelaire’s printer-publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis (1825-1878) in 1862; the artist and the poet met two years later, in 1864, when Baudelaire went to Brussels to give a series of lectures and to evade his creditors. Baudelaire spent the last two years of his life there, during which time the two men formed a close friendship that no doubt relied on their similar artistic perspectives.
They were especially fascinated by makeup and masks as symbols of societal decay, along with a “love for the primary crystallographic form,” as Rops explained to Poulet-Malassis, that is, “the passion for the skeleton.”[5] In 1866, Rops produced the frontispiece for Les Épaves, a collection of Baudelaire’s poems that included the six works censored from Les Fleurs du mal when it was published in France in 1857, and he appropriately created a skeleton-based image for the volume. A more sophisticated and haunting iteration of the theme returns in La Mort au bal masque (Death at the masked ball) which shows a skeleton dressed as a woman and recalls Baudelaire’s “Danse macabre” of his seminal Decadent work. The skeleton returns again in Rops’s frontispiece for Villiers de L'Isle Adam’s Chez les passants (1890), while the notion of masks is given centre stage in his title image for Félicien Champsaur’s Masques Modernes (1889).
Holocauste, (Holocaust), 1895.
Photogravure and drypoint on papier japon. (238x156; 290x205). Rouir 843 III/IV.
While many of Rops’s images of women seem to us problematic, they are certainly of their time, and it is worth taking a moment to highlight a certain level of ambiguity that runs through them. For while women are undoubtedly positioned as the connection between sex, lust, death, and decay, the downfall of man and society in general, they are also the figure by which Rops (and indeed a great many Decadent and Symbolist writers and artists) pushed against established Bourgeois norms, particularly in relation to sex and religion, the repression of lust and instinct and the categorizations of depravity. As Rops writes on the pediment in Holocauste (1895), upon which stands a beautiful woman with her dress around her knees, “Naturalia non sunt turpia”—What is natural is not dirty.
Indeed, one of the things that makes Rops so remarkable, beyond his extraordinary creative production, is the way he truly practiced what he preached. As he wrote to Edmond Deman in 1893, “In my time, I have often walked with or without a shirt, and sometimes totally naked, without turning around, knowing that what the curious could see was of ‘fine bearing’, and of an appearance of which I had nothing to be ashamed. And in my letters as in my drawings, I…have always called a spade a spade!”[6] Well aware of the perceived blasphemies of his work and, indeed, of his life (which is also still scandalous by today’s standards), he lived by a motto that proclaimed the validity of his own truth: “Can't be virtuous, won't deign to be a hypocrite, Rops I am.”[7]
The selection offered in the upcoming catalogue testifies to this great counter-cultural spirit, the creativity of his imagery as well as the ingenuity of his printmaking.
[1] Letter by Félicien Rops to Henri Liesse, March 1872. Cited in Edith Hoffmann, “Rops: Peintre de la femme moderne,” The Burlington Magazine 126, no. 974 (May 1984), 260.
[2] Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Réserve, “Pièces, MS de Rops,” p. 20 of “Notes et lettres,” cited in Edith Hoffmann, “Rops: Peintre de la femme moderne,” The Burlington Magazine 126, no. 974 (May 1984), 261.
[3] Bernadette Bonnier and Véronique Leblanc, Félicien Rops: Life and Work (Bruges: Stichting Kunstboek, 1997), 46.
[4] Robert L. Delevoy, Symbolists and Symbolism (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), 208.
[5] Letter by Félicien Rops to Auguste Poulet-Malassis, s.l., s.d. PU/LE/001. www.ropslettres.be, edition no. 3490.
[6] Letter by Félicien Rops to [Edmond] Deman. Corbeil-Essonnes, 31 October 1893. Province de Namur, Musée Félicien Rops, LEpr/132. www.ropslettres.be, edition no. 105.
[7] Draft letter by Félicien Rops to Émile Leclercq. Paris, s.d. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, III/215/2/12a and III/215/2/12b. www.ropslettres.be, edition no. 564. See also “Rops Erotic Works,” Musée Félicien Rops, www.museerops.be/rops-erotique.