Erotic/Pornographic art/prints and illustrations [merged]

[deepsepia]

-- Waite is an "emerging artist" -- meaning she's only recently had her first gallery show.
Some of her material is pretty arousing to me, other bits are "arty" and not that interesting from an erotica perspective

Lives in Los Angeles, I think, I found this comment by her in an interview which describes some of what she's about

Q. What attracts you to draw sexual imagery, and why do you think that these images resonate so deeply with others?

A. The core of it is that this is just my language. I guess I’ve always felt intimacy and the bedroom to be a sort of epicenter for a whole parade of emotions and power dynamics. Intimacy is a group/partner activity that, in many ways, we experience alone despite our proximity to each other. The spaces in which we touch each other and wish to be touched- I keep coming back to that. I am always trying to make a drawing that fits it all.

[kelio]

Previous posts here and here

[deepsepia]

This guy has a real edge to him. He's from the same style of draftsmanship as artists like Manara and Serpieri, but he's more "punk"-- there's a bit of a Lou Reed rough trade feel to his 'roided up character "Rank xerox", and a lot of the sex looks like it will leave bruises. He's got a lot of talent to work "pretty" if he wants to, but overall his work has an aggressive vibe.

Talented and while not exactly prolific, he's been working for years, done a lot of album covers, perhaps the most notable Frank Zappa's "The Man from Utopia"

[deepsepia]

Back in 2014 Christies auction house sold a truly fantastic library of erotica, which had belonged to Tony Fekete. Fekete is a book dealer and collector-- he has a substantial amount of vintage erotica still for sale at "Collectorism"

https://collectorism.com/profile/125

Here I'm going to go through some of the more interesting lots in the 2014 sale, which have very useful catalog entries.

One of the big prices was £23,000 (against an estimate of £2500-3500) for an
"AN ALBUM OF EROTIC WATERCOLOURS, painted on card, England, mid-19th century"

Two of the 34 watercolors were illustrated

Folio (240 x 181 mm). 34 watercolours, many captioned, depicting a variety of playful, witty and fantastical scenes. (Marginal spotting throughout.) 19th-century black half roan binding (edges rubbed and scuffed).

An eclectic album of erotic and tongue-in-cheek scenes unified by a certain jovial light-heartedness. There are different artists at work, but their inspiration can evidently be found in the satirical caricatures of James Gillray (1756-1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827). The vignettes range from the solitary erect man tugging away in resigned desperation in 'It's better than nothing at all' to the phallus-headed ostrich chasing the naked large-bosomed native in 'The Bird o' Freedom'; the fat man standing before the mirror in 'Though lost to sight, to memory dear' and the Lilliputians clambering over Gulliver's gargantuan member in an unexpected depiction of Gulliver's travels.

Lot 37
[BOYER d'ARGENS, Jean-Baptiste (1703-1771), attributed to.] Thérèse philosophe, ou Mémoires Pour servir à l’Histoire de D. Dirrag, & de Mademoiselle Éradice. The Hague [Liege:] [Montigny, 1748]

[BOYER d'ARGENS, Jean-Baptiste (1703-1771), attributed to.] Thérèse philosophe, ou Mémoires Pour servir à l’Histoire de D. Dirrag, & de Mademoiselle Éradice. The Hague [Liege:] [Montigny, 1748].

Two volumes in one, octavo (186 x 123 mm). 17 engraved plates, including the frontispiece, 9 of these folding. (Folding plates with some creasing and some tears at the folds, some of these repaired, plate 9 trimmed in the bottom margin, occasional light soiling and light spotting.) Contemporary mottled calf, flat spine gilt in compartments, red morocco label gilt, edges red, marbled endpapers (extremities rubbed, spine scuffed).

VERY RARE FIRST EDITION OF THIS ICON OF LIBERTINISM. AE and ABPC record no copy of this edition at auction. Thérèse Philosophe is, with Le Portier de Chartreux, one of the earliest pornographic novels in any European language, and a work of enduring relevance: the text is inspired by the notorious Girard-Cadière scandal, a subject reprised by Huxley in his The Devils of Loudun, and the inspiration for Ken Russell’s The Devils. In the notes for his unfinished last novel, The Story of a Great Sinner, Dostoevsky writes that Thérèse is the book which caused his hero to go astray. The printing history of the early editions of Thérèse is notoriously tangled: in order to baffle censors all early editions bear an undated The Hague imprint. The present copy conforms to Dutel’s description of the true first edition, most of which was quickly seized and destroyed, copperplates included, by the authorities. According to Apollinaire, the copy in the Bibliothèque nationale de France lacks all the plates. This copy bound with an ‘explication des seize estampes’ between pages 140 and 141 not noted by Dutel. Apollinaire Enfer, 403; Dutel A-1071; cf. Eros invaincu 27.

[mysterybadger]

This is Lamothe-Phyne a French artist from the 1950s. There's a lot of his stuff on Abebooks and some more further back in the thread

I'll post some more when I work out the technical details.

[mysterybadger]

This looks like a "Tijuana Bible"--there's a lot of them on the web, but I haven;t seen this one before

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by mysterybadger

This is Lamothe-Phyne a French artist from the 1950s. There's a lot of his stuff on Abebooks and some more further back in the thread

I'll post some more when I work out the technical details.

Originally Posted by mysterybadger

This looks like a "Tijuana Bible"--there's a lot of them on the web, but I haven;t seen this one before

Mystery Badger, you're referring to posts pages ago, which have already been identified. I've already posted a discussion of "Phyne Lamothe" -- that's how its usually presented, not "Lamothe Phyne". I discussed this identification, here:

Originally Posted by deepsepia

I've said before . . . mac1, wherever you are we miss you!

some years ago on this thread he posted the work of "Phyne Lamothe" (a pseudonym), for example here:
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...postcount=1418
and here
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...&postcount=779

. . .he's an artist of the 1950s, not the same as your other post; who copied the styles of the early 1900s for his work, Baignades Fin de Siècle. which looks a lot like your images, but they're not the same. He's also known for other titles like Débauche au pensionnat and La Luxurieuse notairesse.

I've been fooled before by people working in similar styles, but I think this is him

Similarly, I've already posted several times on Tijuana Bibles, just a few posts up, as here:

Originally Posted by deepsepia

As I noted above, the "Susie" comic is called "Jean Harloe [sic] in Hot Nuts", published circa 1932. It clearly is a "Tijuana Bible" -- the subject matter, the format, and spoofing a popular movie star, that's the format of these.

A good chunk of the Adelson book is on this thread, way back, post #933, 934, and 935
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...&postcount=933

{snip}

You needn't bother duplicating what's already posted, and when you do post, it does help to identify just which images you're talking about.

[deepsepia]

The Tony Fekete sale had a remarkable variety of things I've never seen before. Here are three illustrations done by the surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902-75) as illustrations, two of the three are for works of George Bataille, the third (farthest to the right, below) is for the Petit traité de morale. Paris: Georges Visat [1968], which the catalog characterizes as having been described as " 'ONE OF THE FINEST EXPRESSIONS OF EROTICISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART'

This work comes from a set of 20, so that means that the obsessive catalogers among us have 19 more to find




Catalog source is at

https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/bellmer-hans-petit-traite-de-morale-5840653-details.aspx?from=salesummery&intobjectid=5840653&sid=97b4e669-ccd0-4496-82e0-17ec56893b41

Back in post #1248, onehourplus posted a bunch of Bellmer images:
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...postcount=1248
but I'm not sure what they're from

Bellmer is described as
Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 24 February 1975) was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s [there was one of these in the Fekete sale, but I thought better to leave out here]. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.

Quite an interesting bio on Wikipedia:

Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany.[1] Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925).

Bellmer's doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life. Hans Bellmer takes credit for provoking a physical crisis in his father and brings his own artistic creativity into association with childhood insubordination and resentment toward a severe and humorless paternal authority. Perhaps this is one reason for the nearly universal, unquestioning acceptance in the literature of Bellmer's promotion of his art as a struggle against his father, the police, and ultimately, fascism and the state. Events of his personal life also including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys

Oh . . . that's not sounding so good . . . but it gets better

Bellmer's 1934 anonymous book, The Doll (Die Puppe), produced and published privately in Germany, contains 10 black-and-white photographs of Bellmer's first doll arranged in a series of "tableaux vivants" (living pictures). The book was not credited to him, as he worked in isolation, and his photographs remained almost unknown in Germany. Yet Bellmer's work was eventually declared "degenerate" by the Nazi Party, and he was forced to flee Germany to France in 1938, where Bellmer's work was welcomed by the Surrealists around André Breton.[5]

He aided the French Resistance during the war by making fake passports.[6] He was imprisoned in the Camp des Milles prison at Aix-en-Provence, a brickworks camp for German nationals, from September 1939 until the end of the Phoney War in May 1940.[7]

After the war, Bellmer lived the rest of his life in Paris.[6] Bellmer gave up doll-making and spent the following decades creating erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints

It seems to me that he may be the force behind the "ball joint doll" fetish-- you see it mostly in Japan.

[deepsepia]

This one was a real rarity. Anyone reading this thread will be familiar with the femdom SM illustrations of Montorgueil, but i've never seen an original edition or even a high quality reproduction.

The Fekete sale included this terrific entry, which sold for £30,000. They only reproduced two images out of these books, but notice how much higher the image quality is than any of the reproductions floating around the web.

Lot 134
[MONTORGUEIL, Bernard (dates unknown), pseudonym.] Four manuscript books with original drawings: Dressage, Une Brune piquante, Une Après-midi de Barbara, and Les Quat’ jeudis. France, 1920s-1930s.

MONTORGUEIL, Bernard (dates unknown), pseudonym.] Four manuscript books with original drawings: Dressage, Une Brune piquante, Une Après-midi de Barbara, and Les Quat’ jeudis. France, 1920s-1930s.

Four works in four volumes, quarto (278 x 244 mm), comprising a total of 115 pages of manuscript text in black ink with initials and titles in red, and 59 full-page pencil drawings with touches of colour; or, vol. 1: 41pp of text and 29pp of drawings; vol. 2: 8pp text and 7pp of drawings; vol. 3: 27pp text and 12pp of drawings; vol. 4: 39pp of text and 11pp of drawings. (Occasional light soiling.) 20th-century cloth, respectively blue, green, maroon, and white, the spines titled in gilt (corners rubbed, light soiling).

ORIGINAL ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS OF HIS MOST IMPORTANT WORKS BY ONE OF THE MASTERS OF SM EROTICA. Montorgueil’s work celebrates the dominant woman, his drawings showing tender young men as willing playthings in a dizzying variety of scenarios. The present manuscripts are the source for the Belrose edition of 1970, and the many subsequent reprints by Leroy which introduced Montorgueil to a much wider audience. Little is known of the author, whose work was produced between the wars, but began to circulate clandestinely in the 1950s. The Nordmann collection held a smaller group by this leading 20th century erotic illustrator (sold, Christie’s Paris, 14-15 December 2006, lot 382).

[deepsepia]

Kelio has already posted a nice set of Rojan, here:
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...&postcount=232

as has mac1, here:
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...postcount=1308

There were a couple of Rojan pieces in the Fekete sale:




Next was Gerda Wegener who with her husband Einar made a most bohemian couple. According to the catalog, Einar was the first man to have gender reassignment surgery! Wegener is an interesting character. "myusername56" posted a few of these some years ago, here:
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...postcount=1415

WEGENER, Gerda (1885-1940) -- [PERCEAU, Louis (1883-1942) writing as:] VÉRINEAU, Alexandre de. Douze Sonnets lascifs pour accompagner la suite d'aquarelles intitulée Les Délassements d'Éros. Erotopolis [Paris]: A l'Enseigne du Faune [Maurice Duflou], 1925.

Quarto (255 x 195 mm). 12 engraved plates by Wegener coloured by pochoir, all on Arches paper. (Some plates with marginal spotting, some marginal soiling, half-title and index leaf browned.) Original white cloth-backed printed boards, upper side with title printed within a decorative frame, lined with blue paper printed with a pattern in black and gold (lacking ties, extremities rubbed, some soiling).

WEGENER'S CELEBRATED SUITE OF POCHOIR PLATES. The first edition with Perceau's erotic sonnets. Duflou had first started issuing Wegener's designs on their own from 1917 but these met with little demand until he repackaged them with his friend Perceau's sonnets. Gerda Wegener had moved to Paris from Denmark in 1912 with her husband Einar to a life of luxuriant bohemianism. Einar, in female guise as Lily Elbe, was Gerda's favourite model, especially for her mainstream fashion illustrations. Einar Wegener later became the first man to undergo a gender reassignment operation. Dutel 1356; Pia Enfer, 389.