About the life of the Belgian artist Martin van Maele not much is known. His total production has been small, consisting mostly of book illustrations. Among collectors his 'Grande danse macabre des vifs' is best known. This 'Big danse macabre of the living' consists of four series, each containing ten prints.
Mousbit presents three series.
Van Maele worked at Brussels as well as Paris, and his best known work – consisting among other things of an illustrated edition of Paul Verlaine's poems – was published in small, clandestine editions by publisher Charles Carrington. Probably Carrington has also been the publisher of the series of the Big Danse Macabre, around 1905. It's almost sure that the edition was less than a 100 copies.
The prints are both humoristic and satirical, somtimes cynical. The realism of the 'fin de siècle' is alternated with the erotic symbolism, of which Félicien Rops was a master too. By presenting his prints with the title 'Danse Macabre' van Maele made a connection with the medieval danses macabres, in which Death shows up to fetch a mortal. In van Maele's work Death has been replaced by the more abstract notion of sexuality.
In the case of the medieval prints their meaning mostly was a Memento Mori (Remember thou willst die), but van Maele's prints seem to show the message that sexuality - in all its shapes and even excesses, in the young and the old – just like Death can't be avoided.