Between 1878 and 1882, Félicien Rops worked passionately on drawings that today count among his masterpieces, including the famous Pornocratès. During this period, he created an album of 114 drawings entitled Les Cent légers croquis sans prétention pour réjouir les honnêtes gens. In this work, Rops humorously depicted his vision of the amorous mores of the society of his time.
At the same time, he designed a diabolical album illustrating the power of the femme fatale. Rops wrote: ‘Continue this half-nude in the Album du Diable by adding the nude, as I did again in the Temptation of St Anthony, all this pagan mythology that is so beautiful, so frankly nude & amorous, & that no one has ever dared to do. I believe I will bring to it a completely new way of interpreting it’. In 1881, he announced that he had produced sixty-five drawings for this Album du Diable, which never saw the light of day. Most of these works remain unknown.
In 1878, Rops mentioned: ‘I am finishing a very curious Temptation of St Anthony. The devil has taken Christ off the cross to offend St Anthony and has stuck a naked woman on it. St Anthony, prey to libidinous desires, rushes to his prie-Dieu and recoils in horror. The pig is stunned. Based on this drawing, the exhibition explores various themes dear to Rops: the presence of the Devil, animality, the book as an object of perversion, facetious putti and skeletons. A focus on the series initially entitled Les Démoniaques, renamed Les Sataniques (1882), highlights the artistic techniques used to describe the Devil’s possession of women. Rops commented: ‘Above all, you have to get people’s minds off any idea of an attack on religion, or of “eroticism”. Nudes are not erotic. As for religion, it is not under attack’.
It is on the basis of the unfinished project of the Album du Diable and La Tentation de saint Antoine that the Rops museum wishes to (re)discover the satanic aspect of this controversial artistic production. Works from the Royal Library of Belgium, the Musée Marmottan-Monet (Paris) and prestigious private collections will enrich the collections of the Musée Rops, to the delight of art lovers. As Joséphin Péladan wrote about the world of Rops: ‘The man is the woman’s puppet, the woman the devil’s puppet’.
Musée Félicien Rops. Province de Namur, Rue Fumal, Namur, Belgique
