This month marks the 159th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire’s symbolist French poetry masterpiece, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). T.S. Eliot called it the greatest example of modern poetry in any language. The six poems about death and sex stunned the literary world, and the work was put on trial by the Sûreté Publique (Public Safety) section of the Ministry of the Interior. From the New York Review of Books:
Les Fleurs du mal is so disturbing a book, so spectacular and so patchy, so atrocious as Baudelaire himself said, that readers have always been tempted to avert their eyes from it—to prefer the prose poems, for example, or the intimate journals, or to bury themselves in the wretched, posturing letters in which Baudelaire, early and late, tried to persuade his mother that he really was the little boy she had always wanted, ‘that he was working hard,’ as F. W. J. Hemmings nicely puts it, ‘and would shortly be at the top of the class.’
Baudelaire’s provocative poems also produced some of the most stunning book cover designs and illustrations, which we revisit in our gallery.
Henri Matisse, rejected cover design for Les fleurs du mal, 1946
Les Fleurs du Mal Illustrations par Hallman Charles Baudelaire Published in 1946 by the Continental Book Co., Stockholm Book Baudelaire Collection Vanderbilt University Central Library’s W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies This Fleurs is illustrated by Adolf Reinhold Hallman (1893-1968), a Swedish illustrator of books, magazines and newspapers. His “elegant, cosmopolitan-influenced style” is characteristic of his book illustrations. He also illustrated Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif (1941) and Voltaire’s Candide (1946).
Armand Seguin, 1892
Carlos Schwabe
Edouard Goerg
Carlo Farneti, 1935
Armand Rassenfosse, 1899
