Customer Reviews

L'amour bleu

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This hefty coffee table tome traces the history of what Oscar Wilde termed, "the love that dare not speak its name" as it relates to the history of civilization. The beautiful examples of art and literature coupled with historical data make this a great read as well as a great reference volume for anyone's bookshelf.

L'Amour Bleu is a collection of art and literature held together with a chronological commentary. From the Greeks and then the Romans and on through history to the present day (1978), Cecile Beurdeley has assembled a wide selection of quotations from historical records, social commentary and creative literature along with numerous examples from the world of art, ceramics, sculptures, drawings, paintings and photography all of which centre on the theme of homosexuality. Mythological, fictional and real historical characters feature in both the written word and the artwork.

This is a generous production, very large on format, 35 cm x 27.5 cm (13.75" x10.75") with 304 pages of very substantial stock, and illustrated profusely throughout with 250 images of which 40 are in full colour. The book is divided into seven chronological periods, and includes a selected bibliography but no index.

It is a fascinating collection, the quotations embrace a wild field: Aristophanes, Plato, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe, Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Proust, Cocteau, Gide; and artwork from Greek sculpture to Michelangelo to Beardsley to Charles Demut and many many more.

However there are a few shortcomings. With a few exceptions there is often no direct connection between text and illustrations, and very little comment relating to the latter. The vast majority of the captions to the illustrations are lacking a date, this seems a gross oversight as often the illustrations while relevant to the subject of the text alongside which they appear are often from a different time. The lack of an index seriously hampers any meaningful research. Of course it would have been good to have more pictures in colour, and the black and white pictures suffer from dense areas of dark typical of the books of the era. The design of the book is lacking in any meaningful thought resulting in a variable and rather haphazard page layout.

On the plus side it is nonetheless very informative, and with its large format many of the illustrations are of a good size.