Rare Erotic Tableaux of Eric Vogel, the Hungarian Toulouse-Lautrec

Eric Vogel was fond of women. All his drawings, his incomparably light lines, the sultry eroticism of his watercolors, his costume collections celebrating the female body, all testify to this. 

Military Parade

The Hungarian artist, who was a set, costume designer and graphic designer, newspaper illustrator and painter, was born in 1907 in Budapest, under the name Imre Vogel. The Vogel family were living in Elemér utca 40 (today Marek József utca) and his father, the chamber painter and plasterer Vogel Izidor, wanted him to continue the family business, but his son had other plans. When he was not admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts, he trained at the painting school of Adolf Fényes and Herman Lipót, then in 1925 he studied interior design as a student at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, while working in the office of the architect Sándor Ferenczy to earn a living. His reportage of the military parade in Vienna was published on the front page of the Illustrierte Wiener Extrablatt. 

Fig.1. Eric Vogel in 1927 and 1987 (photo montage)

Female Thighs

He got his stage name "Eric" from the famous operette-composer Imre Kálmán in Vienna, during his student years. His design name "eric" can be found in almost all of his drawings and paintings. It has become a trademark of his designer's watermark, "Eric", shaped from female thighs in fishnet stockings.

The Theater Life

Eric Vogel drew the events of human life, always in a different way: sometimes in their drama, sometimes as he wanted to see them. The pencil and canvas accompanied him throughout his life. Until the end of the 1920s, he worked simultaneously in Vienna and Budapest. He illustrated the short stories and sequel novels published in the weekly newspaper A Színházi Élet (The Theater Life).

Fig.2. Costume design for the operetta Maya. Buda Park Stage, 1967

The Csardass Princess

In 1927, his first success in Budapest was the show Páros cszillag (Hungarian march) presented at the Capital Operetta Theatre, in which he designed the costumes of Sári Fedák, Gyula Hegedűs, Jenő Törzs and Gyula Kabos. From 1932, he also participated in the design of the interiors and sets of the Arizona Mulató. He is credited with a series of visual designs for operettas, most often - seven times - he designed the costumes for The Csardass Princess. This was his last work at the Szigliget Theater in Szolnok.

Fig.3. Le Chat Noir - Affiche van Théophile (1896) by Alexandre Steinlen

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Vogel also painted the scenery of Itala Békés's musical cabaret and the tableaux evoking the streets of Paris, and he also designed the costumes and made them largely with the help of the workshop of the theater in Veszprém. The performance and its scenery conjured up Le Chat Noir (Fig.3), the first French artist cabaret, the haunt of writers and visual artists. Evoking the Montmartre cabaret as a location and visual element was of particular importance in the life of the designer, as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whom he deeply respected, was a regular guest of  Le Chat Noir. Among the drawings depicting cats that decorated the walls of the entertainment establishment, there was also the work of the famous French painter. The visual designer, Eric Vogel, was called the Hungarian Toulouse-Lautrec by his admirers and critics alike. He passed away in 1996.

The cheerful erotic watercolors by Vogel (Fig.4 to 8) come from an untitled set of ten...

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Fig.9. Whorehouse In the Ó Street II 

In Premium more of Vogel's erotica including more of the untitled set above and some of his amusing "phallus" drawings.

Click HERE for the Neoclassicist nudes of the Hungarian artist Béla Czene

Sources: filmkultura.hu, oszmi.hu