The full – and fascinating – story of the poems which make up Pierre Louÿs’ Les chansons secrètes de Bilitis can be found here, on the page for the 1938 edition illustrated by Paul-Émile Bécat published by Marcel Lubineau in 1938. Versions of these ‘suppressed’ poems had, however, been published before 1938, notably a 1933 version illustrated with Édouard Chimot’s trademark and rather pedestrian naked women, and this much more interesting edition illustrated by Jean Berque.
What Berque achieves is striking, and unlike most other treatments of the texts. Unlike Chimot, whose anodyne young women appear to inhabit anonymous Paris studios, Berque takes the verses outdoors into sun-drenched Mediterranean light, with umbrella pines and aromatic scrub standing in for Greek hillsides. His figures descend from Maillol’s classicised nudes and from the Nabis painters under whom he had trained. The cycle traverses the three settings of Bilitis’s life – the rural Pamphylia of her youth, the young Bilitis crowned in flowers and draped on a branch; the sapphic Mytilène of her years with Mnasidika, the naked couple handled with tenderness and uninhibited openness; and the Cyprus of the Aphrodite cult, where the dancing celebrants of the final plate wear taurine masks for the orgiastic rites.
Berque’s plates combine aquatint, which gives the soft velvety modelling of skin and foliage, with drypoint for the firmer lines; both are intaglio techniques printed from copper plates. They are printed in bistre, the warm brown ink traditionally used in French illustrated books, and each copy was then finished by hand with watercolour, gouache and pastel. Hand-finishing every plate in every copy of the edition of ninety-nine sounds laborious, but it was standard practice in the Paris colouring ateliers of the 1930s, where small teams worked from a master sheet approved by the artist. Thus each version of the finished illustration varies slightly – the green wash drifting across the three graces, the blue scumble in the aerial pair, the yellow ground beneath the bull-masked dancers – with the result that no two copies are quite identical.
The Berque-illustrated Les chansons secrètes de Bilitis was published ‘Aux dépens d’un amateur’ (almost certainly a collaboration between Berque and Éditions Gonin), in a limited, numbered and boxed edition of 99 copies.
