Not much has been written in English about Mariette Lydis and her art. She was born in Vienna in 1887, as Marietta Ronsperger, and died in Buenos Aires in 1970, having escaped to Argentina as a refugee during the Second World War. Yes, it was that kind of life – peripatetic, unconventional. Beside Lydis’s three marriages, there were relationships with both men and women, including Erica Marx, known for her Hand and Flower Press. She’s far from unknown in South America, it seems; see Maria Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, translated by Thomas Bunstead, for an Argentine novel that draws on her work.
At the heart of Lydis’s life lie the remarkable achievements of her interwar years in Paris. Here she made her name as an artist, and largely through her work in books – often erotic, always distinctive – some of which have apparently become all but impossible to collect.
This much I gather from Mariette Lydis: Dreams and destiny by Justin Croft and Cult Jones – a catalogue that goes a long way to making up for the general lack of attention Lydis has received from anglophone art critics. After a great deal of work – one item exists in an edition of six copies, of which three seem to be in institutional libraries already – Croft assembled a “comprehensive collection of her early books, prints and drawings”, and briefly put on show, last October in London (at Benjamin Spademan in Masons Yard), the “largest collection of her books ever publicly exhibited”. The catalogue is a record of that collection, which was offered en bloc for £125,000 and purchased by a British institution.
For now, then, I guess that catalogue is as close you can get to seeing this Lydis collection for yourself. I feel lucky to have seen the exhibition, too, including those sensational works by which Lydis announced herself in the French capital: the erotic Lesbiennes (Paris: [the artist], 1926), “one of the most daring and elusive books published in 1920s France”, according to Croft and Jones; and the “equally provocative” Criminelles: 24 eau-fortes (Paris: [the artist], 1927). During the ensuing decade or so, Lydis produced some significant works of illustration for others. She made, for example, what is reckoned to be the earliest published portrait of Leopold Bloom, to accompany an excerpt from Ulysses published in the first issue of the journal 900 in 1926. And besides her illustrations for Boccaccio, Colette, Pierre Louÿs, Henry de Montherlant, Paul Valéry et al, she returned repeatedly illustrating Baudelaire. The October exhibition included a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: G. Govone, 1935), inscribed by Lydis for a notable collector of Baudelaireana, and propped open at one of the pages where she has pencilled in quotations from the relevant poems: “Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse . . .” (À une passante, 1857).
All this is by way of preamble to noting Lydis’s presence in Justin Croft’s new list, just released ahead of next week’s California Book Fair (February 9–11) in San Francisco. Amid this excellent selection of fifty-seven items the bibliomaniac browser may find (among other delights) yet more Baudelaire (in an oblong folio of twenty original watercolours by Neville Lytton, 1934; $20,000), a “rather splendid “ directory of the French book trade (Annuaire des auteurs, éditeurs, agents de publicité, imprimeurs, relieurs, brocheurs, libraires, papetiers et des industries connexes . . ., Paris: Brodard et Taupin, 1936; $950) and The Gospel according to Saint John reduced to the size of a matchbox (Birmingham: for T. Groom, 1833; $1,300). And there are four more Lydis items, showing different sides of her work: the deluxe edition of Le Livre de Goha le simple by Albert Adès and Albert Josipovici (Paris: La Connaissance, 1926; $975), pictured above; L’Art d’aimer d’Ovide (Paris: [Berthou for Govone], 1931; $5,250), of which only thirty copies were produced; her Orientalisches Traumbuch (Potsdam: Müller & Co, [1925]; $1,500), an “astrological dream dictionary, complete with the moveable volvelle horoscope and striking plates printed in colours and gold”; and lastly Le Livre de Marco Polo gentilhomme venitien 1271–1295 (Paris: Taneur and Darantière for] Les Cent Une, 1932; $3,500).
That fourth book is notable for Lydis’s meticulous maps and her depiction of Marco Polo bestriding the world, as reproduced below; it is also, as an early production of Les Cent Une, the Parisian book-collecting club founded by the Princesse Schakhowskoy in 1926 in response to Les Cent (which had no female members). Les Cent Une still exists, and has issued fifty books to date.