Hand coloured. Number 9 of 100, signed by the artist.

L’Oracle (1932) is an etched, pochoir and hand-coloured print in the tradition of the allegorical map. It is not only a chart of the mysterious regions of female physical and psychological experience, but also a divinatory tool, with instructions written around the border such as: ‘This oracle is your best friend. Consult it in every circumstance. Its answer is infallible.’ The map will, we are told, ‘enlighten you, support you, and advise you’.
Among the regions it charts are the ‘Land of Love’, the ‘Sea of Doubts’ and the ‘River of Hope’. Its use of cartographic forms is both playful and meaningful, merging pseudo-occult, astrological and psychological languages in a way typical of the modernist and interwar avant-garde, yet marked by Lydis’s distinctively female and confessional perspective. This fortune-telling tool offers routes towards marriage, love, children, infidelity, jealousy, humiliation and liberation, with the implication that the oracle can give directions to all. Though allegorical, Lydis also invokes older cartographic traditions, including the fabled Mountains of the Moon; while her use of the female form itself as a landscape recalls H. Rider Haggard’s famous fold-out map from King Solomon’s Mines (1885).


Ex Carta

Austrian-born artist Mariette Lydis uses the visual language of cartography to chart a mysterious inner landscape, replete with occult and psychological meaning, rather than a geographical one.

Mariette Lydis (1887–1970) was an Austrian-born artist and illustrator, active in France and later Argentina. Born Marietta Ronsperger in Vienna, she was initially self-taught and developed a reputation in interwar Paris, where she moved in the city’s artistic and literary circles.

Although she worked across several media, including painting, drawing, lithography and etching, it was as an illustrator that she found her most stable success, working for French publishers on editions of authors including Maupassant, Baudelaire, and Colette. She was particularly noted for the Chinese and near-Eastern influences on her work as well as her candid exploration of themes of female sexuality. She fled France as a Jewish refugee in the 1930s and after a brief spell in England settled in Buenos Ares with her partner, the English publisher Erica Marx (1909–1969).

L’Oracle (1932) is an etched, pochoir and hand-coloured print in the tradition of the allegorical map. It is not only a chart of the mysterious regions of female physical and psychological experience, but also a divinatory tool, with instructions written around the border such as: ‘This oracle is your best friend. Consult it in every circumstance. Its answer is infallible.’ The map will, we are told, ‘enlighten you, support you, and advise you’.

Among the regions it charts are the ‘Land of Love’, the ‘Sea of Doubts’ and the ‘River of Hope’. Its use of cartographic forms is both playful and meaningful, merging pseudo-occult, astrological and psychological languages in a way typical of the modernist and interwar avant-garde, yet marked by Lydis’s distinctively female and confessional perspective. This fortune-telling tool offers routes towards marriage, love, children, infidelity, jealousy, humiliation and liberation, with the implication that the oracle can give directions to all. Though allegorical, Lydis also invokes older cartographic traditions, including the fabled Mountains of the Moon; while her use of the female form itself as a landscape recalls H. Rider Haggard’s famous fold-out map from King Solomon’s Mines (1885).

Mariette Lydis's L'Oracle