Christa Giles

225
but despite the studiously provocative themes the prints
are usually to be interpreted on a moral plane. For unlike
Beardsley’s work, Rops’ prints do not create their own
autonomous artificial world with the occasional parodic
reference or dig at contemporary society. Rather, Rops
vitriolically castigates his contemporaries. For instance, in
˝Hypocrisy,˝ a woman’s naked buttocks are covered by a
mask creating a concrete visual image of the title. His work
would obviously hold appeal for Huysmans given Rops’
use of the erotic and satanic within an essentially literary
framework (he illustrated D’Aurevilly’s Les Sataniques, for
example, which Huysmans describes in great detail).
Moreover, Rops’ appeal is to the intellect despite the use of
images associated with the erotic or the Satanic. In
Huysmans’ article on Rops he extends his analysis of the
artist into an assessment of the erotic in the arts with, as
might be expected, particular emphasis upon the
psychological motivations of the artist. The artist ˝va
mentalement, dans son rêve éveillé, jusqu’au bout du délire
orgiaque,˝ 566 and yet these ideas remain,˝des idées érotiques
isolées, sans correspondance matérielle, sans besoin d’une
suite animale qui les apaise.˝ 567
This ˝erethism of the brain˝ permits the artist to
transmute a reality which is ˝banal˝ into an ideal, an ideal,