Reading the Multimedia Book: the Case of Les Fleurs du Mal

Abstract

Contemporary book illustrators have often experimented with mixed media. Roger Bezombes’ collage illustrations for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (Strasbourg: Less Bibliophiles de l’Est, 1985) exemplifies this experimentation at its best. The artist’s appropriation and juxtaposition of often disparate images from ancient to present day iconography shows the diversity of the text’s potential and points to the universality of Baudelaire’s poetic gesture. In his articulation of a new architecture for the book, Bezombes provides a robust visual plane whose intersections with the verbal register foster novel conjugations for reader/viewer reception and frame them within unprecedented paradigms of image-text inquiry.