LYDIS, Mariette, illustrator. Charles BAUDELAIRE. MAROT-RODDE (Louise MAROT), binder. ~ Les Fleurs du Mal. Paris: G. Govone, 1927 and 1935.
Folio (325 × 245 mm), pp. [8], 13-337, [11] 10 etched and coloured plates signed in pencil, each with preceding title leaf, plus 33 hand-coloured lithographed plates. Some pale and dispersed spotting to some text leaves. Wrappers preserved. Contemporary full red morocco, gilt to an ‘irradiant’ design by Marot Rodde (signed on the box).
A superb copy of first editions of both Mariette Lydis’s suites of illustrations for Les Fleurs du Mal. The 1928 set as copy B (one of 15 on vieux japon) of a total edition of 353 copies, with an original watercolour and 10 etched and coloured plates (in three states, including artist’s proofs often coloured in wash or crayon, signed/annotated in pencil) plus the 1935 set with 33 handcoloured lithographs issued in 11 cahiers. The 1935 plates and watercolour are bound with the text and the 1928 plates are bound after. The 1928 sequence, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne that year is probably one of Mariette Lydis’s best works, while the more extensive 1935 sequences illustrates her evolving style and was exhibited by Lydis in New York.
Govone issued his large-format Baudelaire in 1928, together with just 125 copies of the accompanying suite of etched plates by Lydis. It was the first joint production of this important partnership. Though both partners were resolutely bisexual, Lydis married Count Giuseppe Govone (her third husband) in 1934. The two remained married until his death in Milan in 1948 despite Mariette Lydis flight to Buenos Aires before the Second World War. In 1935 Lydis prepared a new suite of plates.
Both suites are bound here, preserving wrappers in a superb contemporary binding by one of the most celebrated binders of the Art Deco era, Louise Marot, who together with her daughter Suzanne Rodde created a series of bindings of exceptional refinement in the 1930s, before Louise’s untimely death in 1938 and the closure of the Marot-Rodde workshop. Their design for Les Fleurs du Mal is an exquisite and technically astonishing floral motif (evoking both the poppy and the rose) to both covers of this large volume. It is especially interesting as an early example of the ‘irradiante’ style, with sinuous lines creating the illusion of both movement and an undulating surface, usually associated with the binder Paul Bonet in subsequent decades. Bonet was experimenting with the earliest of these radiant designs at precisely the time Marot-Rodde created this one (ie. between 1935 and 1938). One has to wonder which way the influence flowed. Discussing the works of women binders in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, Duncan and De Barta comment: ‘Many of the works of these women have an exquisite delicacy and flow absent from the more formal compositions of their male counterparts. Examination of Marot-Rodde’s abstract floral designs, for example, reveals a preciosity and sensuality that male binders did not achieve.’ Duncan & De Barta, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding (1989), pp. 20 and 194; Tidcombe, Women Bookbinders 1880-1920 (1996), p. 189.