Madcap Erotic Scenes from La Grande Danse Macabre des Vifs by Martin van Maële, 1905

C’est l’olive pâmée, et la flûte câline,
C’est le tube où descend la céleste praline:
Chanaan féminin dans les moiteurs enclos!

– L’Idole, Sonnet du trou du cul by Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, 1871

 

 

Martin van Maële drew erotica – a lot of it. His sex scenes of naked women in the throes of passion often feature a penis working alone or in herds, wielded as a massive weapon or being inflated by a hand pump. At other times, his subjects engage in flagellation and bondage, and he has a thing for young women and nuns (it’s always the erotic nuns) being squired by randy monks, satyrs, demons, other nuns and depraved older men caught in the act by their wives.

His work, much of it satirical, such as his riff on Michelin tyres (below), rivals those of his contemporaries, Felician Rops, Luc Lafnet, Joseph Apoux (do see his challenging erotic alphabet) and Aubrey Beardsley’s gigantic knobs and knockers. There’s also a nod to Kawanabe Kyôsai’s penis contests.

Here we look at some of this 40 plates for La Grande Danse Macabre des Vifs (The Great Strange Dance of Life), arguably his best work, published in 1905.

 

 

Martin van Maële was born Maurice François Alfred Martin van Maële in the commune of Boulogne sur Seine, near Paris, France, to Flemish mother Virginie Mathilde Jeanne van Maële and French father Louis Alfred Martin, an engraver and teacher at the Beaux-Arts school in Geneva. He also used the pseudonym A. Van Troizem. He married Marie Françoise Genet; the couple had no children.

 

 

Aside from his erotic work, van Maële created memorable illustrations for H. G. Wells‘ Les Premiers Hommes dans la Lune (The First Men in the Moon) in 1901. The following year, van Maële worked as an illustrator for Félix Juven’s French translations of the Sherlock Holmes series.

In September of 1893, Van Maele’s first known risqué drawing appeared in a two-page spread of the magazine La Vie Parisienne. His first known (semi) nude woman is found in Dix Contes d’Edgar Poe, c.1897.

About four years later, in 1901, he was discovered by publisher Charles Carrington who hired him to illustrate Thais and Flagellation des Femmes en Allemagne, two of the many BDSM novels Van Maele would come to illustrate. Their partnership lasted until Carrington was exiled from France in 1907.

He continued with publishers Roberts et Dardaillon and Jules Chevrel until about 1920, when he primarily began illustrating works issued by publisher Jean Fort.

 

 

A note on his life and death appears in this excerpt from the preface of an edition of Dialogues de Pietro Aretino:

Martin Van Maele est mort le crayon à la main, pour ainsi dire, et il avait dû laisser inachevée l’illustration du présent ouvrage: les deux frontispices, en effet, étaient encore à faire. Nous avons eu la bonne fortune de pouvoir les faire exécuter par un jeune dessinateur graveur dont il faut retenir le nom, Viset, car il comptera très rapidement parmi les artistes dont les œuvres seront recherchées des bibliophiles et des amateurs de beaux livres illustrés.

(Martin Van Maele died pencil in hand, so to speak, and he had to leave the illustration of this work unfinished: the two frontispieces, in fact, were still to be done. We had the good fortune to be able to have them executed by a young draftsman-engraver whose name, Viset, should be remembered, because he will very quickly be among the artists whose works will be sought after by bibliophiles and lovers of fine illustrated books.)