Edouard Chimot and the Lost Girls of Montmartre

It’s a while since I posted about the master of the Art Deco nude, Édouard Chimot. Of course if Chimot were simply a depictor of the nude, there wouldn’t be much to say about him—boudoir pictures are boudoir pictures, and that’s it. But Chimot is a much more complex artist than that—one in whom the twin themes of Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, are inextricably intertwined.

Édouard Chimot, Le café-concert maudit

Colour etching with aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

Of course Love sells better than Death, so sensuous nudes inevitably predominate in Édouard Chimot’s work. But his obsession with prostitutes, drug addicts, and good girls gone bad, means that the spectre of death and destitution hovers behind and around Chimot’s nudes, turning them from decorative erotica into perverse memento mori. They are women “soumises à leurs passions mortelles et délicieuses”, as the critic André Warnod put it.

Édouard Chimot, La Mort

Etching with aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

In my previous post, The fast rise and long slow fall of Édouard Chimot, I mentioned that Chimot had apparently been commissioned in 1903 as architect of the Villa Lysis in Capri, for the dissolute Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. It seems from the current Wikipedia entry on the Villa Lysis that this is not quite the case, based on a study of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen’s correspondence with Chimot; Chimot’s role was more likely that of interior decorator. In a comment on my earlier post, Martin Stone notes that “he was also the art director of Fersen's review Akedemos (1909-1910).” The inscription above the door of the Villa Lysis, AMORI ET DOLORI SACRUM, certainly shows that Édouard Chimont and Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen were kindred spirits, for the same words could also be inscribed above Chimot’s work: A Shrine to Love and Sorrow.

Édouard Chimot, L'enfer

Etching with aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

When speaking of the art of Édouard Chimot in the context of this post, I am speaking only of the work created before the Wall Street Crash. Anything published after 1931 (allowing for projects already in the pipeline to emerge) is the work of a lesser, lighter artist. The intensity and complexity of Chimot’s work in the 1920s is completely missing.

Édouard Chimot, Ce sont les autres qui meurent

Etching with aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

All the images in this post are etchings with aquatint published between 1919 and 1922, the years when Chimot exploded onto the Paris art scene. These established him as a central figure in the world of printmaking and fine press publishing. He was the artistic director of the publications of both La Roseraie (the atelier and publishing house of Roger Lacourière) and of Les Éditions d’Art Devambez. In the latter role, especially, Chimot was crucial to the artistic development of many important artists of the twenties.

Édouard Chimot, Les Après-Midi de Montmartre

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

Édouard Chimot, Le rouge et le noir

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

The etchings that made Chimot’s name, published in 1919 as Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, are precious evidence of Chimot’s pre-war work. They were made in 1913, but publication was delayed by the Great War. You can see that the hairstyles and clothes (when worn) are quite different from the 1920s etchings. The difference in style is not huge, but in these early etchings one can still see the influence of Symbolists such as Félicien Rops, Louis Legrand, Armand Rassenfosse, and Henri Thomas. Édouard Chimot was to take the aesthetic of these artists into the twenties, and blend it seamlessly with the glittering curves of Art Deco.

Édouard Chimot, Moulin Rouge

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

Édouard Chimot, La fille et sa mère

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

The Après-Midi de Montmartre etchings were printed on a hand press by Eugène Delâtre, in an edition of 170 copies. I love the connection they make right back from the post-war world into the dying days of the Belle Époque.

Édouard Chimot, Opium

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

Édouard Chimot, Épave

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

After the war, Édouard Chimot established himself in an atelier in the rue Amphère in Montmartre. The atmosphere there is well described by Chimot’s close friend, the poet Maurice Magre, in Magre’s introduction to Chimot’s edition of Jean de Tinan’s La Petite Jeanne pâle. Magre writes, “L’atelier de Chimot est un coin de Paris où Montmartre d’aujourd’hui se condence à certaines heures, se cristallise, donne tout son comique, toute sa couleur et parfois toute sa peine. C’est toujours la pensée d’un individu qui crée et qui groupe. C’est la pensée de Chimot, son amour pour cette forme de l’existence parisienne qui a créé le miroir vivant, aux facettes varies, qui donne en tournant ces images qui ne sont jamais banales et qui toutes sont representatives.”

Édouard Chimot, Soirs d'opium

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, Est-ce celle que j'aime

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, Dans la fumée bleue

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Chimot’s “living mirror” of Bohemian life in Paris is never more truly reflective than in his etchings for Maurice Magre’s 1921 collection of poems, Les soirs d’opium. These colour etchings with aquatint were, like the similar etchings for Magre’s La montée aux enfers a year earlier, printed by Eugène Delâtre with Chimot’s assistance. Édouard Chimot was not by nature a colourist, and the wonderfully subtle tonalities of the etchings for both these projects are probably attributable to Delâtre, a master printer of colour etchings à la poupée. Certainly Chimot never achieved any colour effects like this again.

Édouard Chimot, Volupté

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, Rosaire de souvenirs

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, À une amie

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Les soirs d’opium was published in an edition of 513 copies by L’Édition (Georges Briffaut); the etchings are printed on wove paper with the watermarks MBM and J. Perrigo.

Édouard Chimot, La petite Jeanne pâle

Colour etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot, Noctambulisme

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot, Quatre heures du matin

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

La Petite Jeanne pâle, already mentioned above, was published in 1922 by Éditions Léo Delteil in an edition of 393 copies. The etchings were not printed by Delâtre, but at La Roseraie by Philippe Molinié and Eugène Monnard under the direction of the artist.

Édouard Chimot, Sa mince visage parmi l'ébouriffment des cheveux de soie frisée

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot, Les rideaux d'arbres dépouillés rétrécissent doucement l'horizon

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot only spent a very few years at peak velocity. His art is at its best in these few years after the Great War. After about 1922, Chimot’s work becomes slowly more facile and crowd-pleasing. He remains a really interesting artist right through the 1920s, with flashes of real brilliance, especially in etchings close to his heart, such as those for Maurice Magre’s Les belles de nuit in 1927. But if you are looking for the purest of the impure, look no further than the art of Édouard Chimot, 1919-1922.

The fast rise and long slow fall of Édouard Chimot

Édouard Chimot
Sous les voiles du soir
Etching and aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

The career of Édouard Chimot is a study in how a talented artist can be overtaken both by changing tastes and by outside events. Famous in the 1920s, Chimot is now almost completely forgotten.


Édouard Chimot
La montée aux enfers
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

Chimot was born in Lille on 26 November 1880, and died in Paris on 7 June 1959. He studied under Jean-Baptiste Levert and Alexis Mossa at the École des Arts décoratifs in Nice, and then under Pharaon de Winter at the Beaux-Arts, Lille. The course of his early career is unclear. He seems to have first exhibited in 1912, rather late at the age of 32, and perilously close to the outbreak of World War One, which would cause a four-year hiatus in his career, so that Chimot was 39 by the time he really made his mark on the Paris art world.


Édouard Chimot
La fille du sultan
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

Both oil paintings and drawings by Chimot do come on the market, usually depicting female nudes, but he devoted most of his energy to etching, often for fine press limited edition books. The first of these, Les après-midi de Montmartre, with a text by René Baudu, appeared in 1919, but these etchings of “petites filles perdus” were made in 1914, before the outbreak of WWI. They record the last gasp of the decadent Montmartre of Toulouse-Lautrec.


Édouard Chimot
Le café-concert maudit
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

In his art, Édouard Chimot was always to hark back to the Symbolist style that dominated the 1890s but was already superseded by Art Deco, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstraction by the time his own career was in full swing. He felt a special affinity with Decadent authors such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Pierre Louys, and those who followed in their footsteps such as Henri Barbusse, Jean de Tinan, and Maurice Magre. Chimot was particularly close to Magre, illustrating his books La montée aux enfers (1920), Les soirs d’opium (1921) and Les belles de nuit (1927). In 1924, Le Figaro rather flatteringly described Magre as “an anarchist, an individualist, a sadist, and an opium addict”, adding, perhaps less convincingly, “he is a very great writer.”


Édouard Chimot
Les rencontres dans le port vieux
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

What happened to Chimot during WWI, I do not know. Presumably he was called up to serve on the Western Front. But after the war, he hit the ground running. He already had the etchings for Les après-midi de Montmartre. These were published in 1919, followed in a whirl of activity by La montée aux enfers and Les soirs d’opium by Magre, Le fou by Aurele Partorni, L’enfer by Henri Barbusse, La petite Jeanne pâle by Jean de Tinan, and Mouki le delaisse by André Cuel, all illustrated with original etchings between 1920 and 1922. In 1921 Chimot also found the time to found a magazine, La Roseraie: Revue des Arts et des Lettres, published by the printer and publisher La Roseraie under Chimot’s artistic direction.


Édouard Chimot
La treizième année
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

The journal La Roseraie folded after a single issue, but it pointed the way to Chimot’s future career, as artistic director of Les Éditions d’Art Devambez (see my previous post on Devambez), where between 1924 and 1931 Chimot oversaw the production of a wonderful array of livres d’artiste, illustrated by artists such as Pierre Brissaud, Edgar Chahine, Alméry Lobel-Riche, and Tsuguharu Foujita. Chimot reserved some plum texts for himself, including Les chansons de Bilitis by Louys (1925), La mort de Venise by Barrès (1926), Les belles de nuit by Magre (1927), and Parallèlement by Verlaine (1931).


Édouard Chimot
La nuit
Etching and aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

During the glittering decade of the 1920s, Chimot was forming not just artistic but literary alliances, with writers such as the Surrealist Gilbert Lély, who dedicated the first publication of Ne tue ton père qu’à bon escient to Chimot in 1929. On 23 October of that year, Édouard Chimot must have felt gloriously launched on his late-started career. At the age of 49, he was a significant figure in the Paris art world, a generous patron of his fellow artists, and himself an artist with a public hungry for his late-Symbolist nudes, “soumises à leurs passions mortelles et délicieuses”, as the writer André Warnod put it.


Édouard Chimot
Devant la glace
Etching and aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

The following day came the Wall Street Crash, which wiped out the market for fancy limited editions. When the last of the books in production for Devambez, Chimot’s own edition of Parallèlement, was published in 1931, the game was up. That year a monograph on Chimot by Maurice Rat was published, with a preface by Maurice Magre, in the series Les Artistes du livre, adding the final full stop to the glory years of Édouard Chimot.


Édouard Chimot
Un hémisphère dans un chevelure
Etching and aquatint for Le Spleen de Paris, 1926

The rest of Chimot’s life seems to have been a struggle to re-establish himself, during which his art deteriorated and his reputation was eclipsed. In the 1930s he self-published a number of books in the vein of the Devambez productions, such as an edition of La Belle Carolina by Louis René Talon in 1936. The first such self-published work was the anonymous album of colour lithographs, Chats (“Pussies”), published “À l’enseigne de l’auteur qui ne veut pas dire son nom” (“At the sign of the author, who does not wish to say his name”). The 15 lithographs are all depictions of “sexes féminin”, featuring some outlandish fashions in pubic hair. It is the kind of production one can imagine some rich but vulgar connoisseur sharing with his friends over the after-dinner brandy and cigars.


Édouard Chimot
Les chants du bar
Etching and aquatint for Les belles de nuit, 1927

Chimot’s move with Chats away from the intensely-charged, almost mystical eroticism of his work in the 20s, towards the lubricious eroticism of the clandestine book market, with editions of works such as Pierre Louys’s scabrously obscene Trois filles de leur mère, heralds a real decline in his work. The effect of this was to be felt especially in the years after WWII, when almost all Chimot’s work, by this time facile and shallow, was to be aimed at collectors of erotica, with editions of texts such as Lady Chatterley, Fanny Hill, and Prelude Charnel, all published by Éditions Deux-Rives.


Édouard Chimot
Son amie
Etching and aquatint for Les belles de nuit, 1927

Chimot’s work in the last three decades of his life shows a sad falling-off from his pinnacle of activity and achievement in the 20s, though inevitably in an artist so richly talented there are flashes of grace and brilliance. In the last year of his life appeared an interesting-sounding work, which I have not seen, Les belles que voilà: mes modèles de Montmartre à Séville, a collection of 16 nudes, though whether the plates are reproductions or original prints I am unsure.


Édouard Chimot
Lady Chatterley
Dryoint for Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1950

It appears that after the Fall of Paris, Chimot took refuge in Spain, for his publications during the Second World War all appeared in Barcelona, and mostly illustrate Spanish-language texts.


Édouard Chimot
Nude
Lithograph for Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1950

There is a bibliography of Chimot’s illustrated books by J. L. Bernard, Édouard Chimot, 1880-1959: bibliographie des oeuvres illustrés, which was published in an edition of 200 copies in 1991. I have not yet seen a copy of this, but I would be surprised if its author did not share my view that the crucial decade of Chimot’s career was that between the end of WWI and the Wall Street Crash. It was during this time of frivolity and excess that Édouard Chimot created the haunting and compelling images by which his name will endure.


Édouard Chimot
Prelude Charnel
Drypoint for Prelude Charnel, 1957

Dicing with Death

Noël Bureau, Baron Samedi, 1933
Original wood engraving by Noël Bureau (active 1916-1957)

Writing my recent blog entry on Marcel Roux started me thinking about the artistic depiction of personified Death. The skeletal figure of Death was important in western art in the medieval danse macabre, but it isn’t I think until Symbolism that Death really starts dancing again. He continued to do so through Expressionism and Surrealism, right up to the present day, in pieces such as Damien Hirst’s grotesque skull embedded with gemstones.


André Villeboeuf, Danse macabre, 1944
Original etching with aquatint by André Villeboeuf (1893-1956)

One of the interesting things about the various figures of Death in my collection is their fluidity of gender. I think English speakers are probably apt to think of Death as masculine, but Anglo-Saxon had masculine, feminine, and neuter words for death, and in languages such as French, death is a feminine noun, la Mort. The elegant skeletal figure leading the little girl by the hand in Roux’s L’Enfant et la Mort is definitely female. So too is grand Madame la Mort, riding a high-stepping black palfrey in my engraving by Hervé Baille (1896-1974).


Hervé Baille, Madame la Mort, 1945
Original copper engraving

Death figures obsessively in the art of Marcel Roux, featuring in a full third of his etchings. Jean Deville (1901-1972) is another French artist much possessed by death, and my copper engravings by Deville were executed for Sonnets et stances de la Mort by the sixteenth-century metaphysical poet Jean de Sponde, published by Pierre Seghers for the group La Jeune Gravure Contemporaine. Janine Bailly-Herzberg writes of Deville in her Dictionnaire de l’Estampe et France, “Son style, dramatique et quelquefois visionnaire, où la mort est souvent présente et côtoie des personages tourmentés, ne cherche pas à plaire à un grand public.”


Jean Deville, La Mort, 1946
Original copper engraving

Jean Deville was born in Charleville in the Ardennes. He was a pupil of Maurice Denis and Georges Desvallières, and was taught how to etch in 1931 by Yves Alix and Gérard Cochet. From that point, printmaking, especially etching, was crucial to his art. All his prints, including those for Sonnets et stances de la Mort, were printed by Georges Leblanc.


Jean Deville, Et quel bien de la Mort?, 1946
Original copper engraving

Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) is I think the earliest artist in my collection to take Death as a primary subject; perhaps it’s not surprising, given his close friendship with Baudelaire, whose writings on the subject inspired quite a few of the artists whose work will follow in this blog.


Alphonse Legros, Jeune fille et la Mort, 1900
Original wood engraving by Charles de Sousy Ricketts (1866-1931) after a drawing by Alphonse Legros.

Alphonse Legros was a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Born in Dijon, Legros was apprenticed at the age of 11 to a house painter, who was also a "colourer of images". Legros studied at the Dijon Beaux-Arts, whose director was Célestine Nanteuil, and then at the atelier of Lecoq de Boisbaudran in Paris, where he became close friends with Fantin-Latour. Alphonse Legros moved to England in 1863 and was naturalized in 1880. Legros was encouraged in this move by Whistler, whom he first met in 1858. Although Legros had been one of the most active members of the French Société des Aquafortistes, a close ally of Fantin-Latour and a friend of Charles Baudelaire (for whose translation of Poe had made a series of remarkable etchings), he found it hard to make ends meet in France, and in emigrating to England he was also fleeing his creditors and escaping the threat of debtor's prison. One in London, Legros found himself the neighbour of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the friend of Swinburne, and the centre of admiration among English etchers. His "notoriété Britannique" caused a revision of opinion back in France, and Alphonse Legros had two paintings in the Salon of 1863 and a third - a portrait of his friend Manet - in the Salon des Refusés. Exhibitions at the galleries of Durand-Ruel and Samuel Bing were to follow, and after his hand-to-mouth early years Legros became a popular and successful artist. In London, he was appointed Slade Professor of Art at University College, and professor of etching and engraving at South Kensington.


Alphonse Legros, La Mort et le Bûcheron, 1876
Original etching

Édouard Chimot (1890-1959) has already featured in this blog through his role as art director for Les Éditions d’Art Devambez in the 1920s. My four Chimot etchings on the subject of death all date from just before he joined Devambez. They were made for an edition of the harrowing vision of existential nothingness that is the novel L’Enfer (Hell), by Henri Barbusse. The etchings were printed by Eugène Monnard on Chimot’s own hand-press.


Édouard Chimot, La Mort, 1921
Original etching with aquatint


Édouard Chimot, Ce sont les autres qui meurent, 1921
Original etching with aquatint


Édouard Chimot, L’Enfer, 1921
Original etching with aquatint


Édouard Chimot, Le visage humain, 1921
Original etching with aquatint

An artist working in a similar vein to Chimot at this time was the Russian émigré Serge Ivanoff (1893-1983). Ivanoff was born in Moscow, where is parents enrolled him in the Academy of Art from the age of 10. Following the Russian Revolution the family moved to St. Petersburg, where Ivanoff studied under Braz, the curator of the Hermitage. In 1922 Serge Ivanoff emigrated to France, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He became a very successful painter of society portraits, and a member of the staid Salon des Artistes Français. My etchings by Ivanoff show a younger, edgier side to his art. They are illustrations to the classic tale of erotic transgression Les Diaboliques by Barbey d'Aurevilly.


Serge Ivanoff, Death and the maiden, 1925
Original etching


Serge Ivanoff, Death, 1925
Original etching

In the same year as Ivanoff, William Malherbe (1884-1952) was illustrating his brother Henry’s war memoir, La Flamme au Poing. William Malherbe was born in Senlis, Oise. His own experiences in WWI marked him deeply; Time Magazine found him “after four years in the war, almost pathologically shy.”


William Malherbe, Le Divertissement macabre, 1925
Original copper engraving by Achille Ouvré (1872-1951) after a drawing by William Malherbe

William Malherbe’s artistic success came after he was taken up in the 1930 by the gallery Durand-Ruel, whose fortune had been made by its backing of the Impressionists. In 1939, at the age of 55, William Malherbe emigrated to the USA, where he lived on a farm in Vermont until 1948 when he returned to France. His exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery were highly successful, and his colourful post-Impressionist Vermont scenes, full of light and paint-flecked pleasure, are still highly sought-after. Some even consider William Malherbe an American artist, but his work is essentially rooted in the French post-Impressionist tradition of Bonnard and late Renoir.

David Jones (1895-1974) was, like William Malherbe, deeply marked by his experiences in the trenches in WWI, which he vividly re-imagined in his great long poem In Parenthesis. His copper engravings for an edition of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner include a classic Death and the Maiden scene, in which the maiden is literally “dicing with death”. It illustrates the point at which a skeleton ship appears:

Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a gate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman’s mate?

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.


David Jones, Life-in-Death, 1929
Original copper engraving

Jones made between 150 and 200 preparatory drawings for this, his last major series of engravings, which he executed in “simple incised lines reinforced here and there and as sparingly as possible by cross-hatched areas… I decided also that these essentially linear designs should have an undertone over the whole area of the plate.” This latter effect was achieved by not wiping the plates totally clean of ink before putting them in the press.

David Jones’ engravings for the Rime contain a lot of submerged Christian imagery, with the Ancient Mariner hanging from the mast like Christ on the cross, and the albatross equated to Christian depictions of the pelican in her piety. In the etching Calvary, executed in the dark days of 1942 by Alméry Lobel-Riche (1877-1950), the artist manages to fuse Christ and Death into one powerful image of desolation and defeat.


Alméry Lobel-Riche, Calvary, 1942
Original etching

In the interests of actually getting this post finished and up on the blog, I think I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves from now on; just ask if you want further information on any of the artists or images.


Hubert Yencesse, Love and Death, 1947
Original wood engraving by Hubert Yencesse (1900-1987)


Jacob Epstein, A Fantastic Engraving, 1940
Original lithograph by Jacob Epstein (1880-1959)


Jacob Epstein, The Two Good Sisters, 1940
Original lithograph


Mariette Lydis, Un cheval de race, 1948
Original etching with aquatint by Mariette Lydis (1887-1970)


Jean Carzou, Death with a flower, 1964
Original lithograph by Jean Carzou (1907-2000)


André Minaux, Skull, 1968
Original lithograph by André Minaux (1923-1986)


Pierre Jacquot, Death, 1980
Original lithograph by Pierre Jacquot (1929- )