in a Lysistrata mood... Beardsley's 1896 version

LYSISTRATA..Illustrations by Norman Lindsay

Aristophanes' Lysistrata

translated from the Greek and with a

foreword by Jack Lindsay

"Lysistrata" is the greatest work by Aristophanes. This blank and rash statement is made that it may be rejected. But first let it be understood that I do not mean it is a better written work than the "Birds" or the "Frogs", or that (to descend to the scale of values that will be naturally imputed to me) it has any more appeal to the collectors of "curious literature" than the "Ecclesiazusae" or the "Thesmophoriazusae". On the mere grounds of taste I can see an at least equally good case made out for the "Birds". That brightly plumaged fantasy has an aerial wit and colour all its own. But there are certain works in which a man finds himself at an angle of vision where there is an especially felicitous union of the aesthetic and emotional elements which constitute the basic qualities of his uniqueness. We recognize these works as being welded into a strange unity, as having a homogeneous texture of ecstasy over them that surpasses any aesthetic surface of harmonic colour, though that harmony also is understood by the deeper welling of imagery from the core of creative exaltation. And I think that this occurs in "Lysistrata". The intellectual and spiritual tendrils of the poem are more truly interwoven, the operation of their centres more nearly unified; and so the work goes deeper into life. It is his greatest play because of this, because it holds an intimate perfume of femininity and gives the finest sense of the charm of a cluster of girls, the sweet sense of their chatter, and the contact of their bodies, that is to be found before Shakespeare, because that mocking gaiety we call Aristophanies reaches here its most positive acclamation of life, vitalizing sex with a deep delight, a rare happiness of the spirit.

Lysistrata

Sergei Sergeivich Solomko...

Sergei Sergeivich Solomko (1867-1928), a prominent book illustrator and watercolor painter, graduated from the Moscow School of Painting and St. Petersburg Academy of Art; a fashionable artist of the early 1900s whose watercolors were reproduced in huge numbers on postal cards of the period.

Ghislaine de Menten de Horne...... La jeune Parque

A little known Belgian artist Ghislaine de Menten de Horne and heroine of the Belgian Resistance, illustrations for an edition of La jeune Parque (The young Fate) published in 1935.

Spoken by a young woman, La jeune Parque is concerned with the battle between body and spirit; and between being and knowing.

She was born Marie Cécile Armande Ghislaine de Menten de Horne, into anaristocratic Belgian family. She attended the Académie Julian, andstudied printmaking in the studio of the engraver Paul Bornet.Subsequently she continued her artistic studies at the Académie Royaledes Beaux Arts in Brussels.

She first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1931. The thirtieswere marked by her friendships with the philosopher Marie-Anne Cochetand the writer Paul Valéry, and by her work on La jeune Parque and theunpublished Album de vers anciens. In 1942 she exhibited in the Toisond’Or and Breughel galleries in Brussels. Swept into the maelstrom ofWWII, her work with the Luc-Marc Resistance network and the romance ofher relationship with Max Londot, she did not exhibit again until 1966,with shows at the Mont des Arts and La Licorne in Brussels. Regular shows followed in her remaining years, mostly in various Brusselsgalleries, with a posthumous exhibition in the Veilingshuis“Vanderkindere” in 1996, the year after her death. Her artistic estatewas auctioned in aid of Médecins sans frontiers.