Three years after La belle Allemande Tzolakis was commissioned to illustrate the first volume of Charles Baudelaire’s Œuvres poétiques for the Nouvelle Librairie de France, part of a three-volume set whose remaining tomes went to Philippe Bunel (Le spleen de Paris) and Pierre Tritsch (Les paradis artificiels). Her plates are watercolours, complementing Baudelaire's spiritual gravity with a mood of dissolution and atmospheric melancholy.

Tzolakis lets the pigment behave as it wants, pooling, blooming, drying with hard edges where the wash terminates, then adding the figures with a decisive line for an eye, a mouth, a curl of hair, the bone of a skull, while whole areas of paper are left untouched. A single saturated patch of colour – an orange sun, a violet hood, a bloodied red dress – often carries the emotional weight of the illustration, while the figure remains half-erased. This is a technique demanding enormous control to look this loose.

The iconography moves cleanly with Baudelaire’s six-part structure. The Spleen et idéal plates give a sequence of single female figures – a naked woman seen from behind dissolving into blue, a redheaded girl half-emerging from green wash, a seated dark-haired woman against a setting orange sun. Tableaux parisiens offers a stormy landscape with a low strip of grass, black birds, and a swollen orange sun. The wine and flowers sections present the woman in the bloodied red dress, the gathering of figures around the bottle and glass, the moth resting on a yellow ground. Révolte and La mort are represented by a cowled skull-figure with a rose, while the final plate of two pale heads against a violet wash with a skull at the foot of the page accompanies Baudelaire’s spectral deux bonnes sœurs of debauchery and death.

Compared with most twentieth-century illustrators of Les fleurs du mal, who tend to domesticate the poems into erotic vignettes or smother them in morbidity, Tzolakis trusts the poetry to carry its own iconography, and offers a sustained atmospheric reading.

The Tzolakis-illustrated Les fleurs du mal was published by the Nouvelle Librairie de France, in a limited numbered edition of 4,092 copies.