George Barbier’s work has been a regular visitor to these pages. Falbalas et Fanfreluches was a series of pochoir print portfolios published from 1922–1926, a catalogue of various liaisons and amours with a mildly erotic tone. There’s also some sly humour in the examples below, such as the tiny dogs menacing a dandy in L’Agression, and the eyes of the woman in Romance sans paroles wandering to the trim backside of the posing sailor (who doesn’t seem so interested in her).
In addition to being beautiful drawings, Barbier’s title has solved for me a minor conundrum: Falbalas et Fanfreluches means “Ruffles and Frills”, and the Abbé Fanfreluche is a suitably ruffled and frilled character in Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished erotic novel Under the Hill.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vaslav Nijinsky by Paul Iribe
• The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932
• The Decorative Age
• Images of Nijinsky
Fantastic stuff. I saw an exhibition of Barbier’s work in the Fortuny Museum in Venice a few years ago – the only time I’ve seen his stuff ‘in the flesh’, as it were, rather than online or in books and postcards. It was stunning. I’d love to see a similar show of Gerda Wegener’s stuff.