Category Archives: art

Icons of erotic art #5

Today I present the 2006 painting Rotterdam by American artist John Currin.

As I’ve explained before, most works of erotic art aren’t really erotic at all in the strictest sense. The strictest sense being that the works actually sexually arouse you. Today’s work is truly erotic. This also and inevitably means that it borders on the pornographic. It is then not a coincidence that this painting is from a series by John Currin based on late 20th century Scandinavian pornographic photos. A good French language analysis is over at lemateurdart.

Notes

Hans_Baldung_Grien_The_Young_Woman_and_Death_Dornai

Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives) died, so did Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead) a couple of days ago. Above is an image by Grien celebrating one of my favorite themes: death and the maiden. The painting is probably a detail of a larger – unidentified – piece. I had never seen a painting with a blindfolded baby. Tip of the hat for the painting: Morbid Anatomy.

No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.

–Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles

Introducing Opicino de Canistris

Canistris

 Via a re-reading of Gordon Rattray Taylor‘s Freudian interpretation of history Sex in History (1954) chapter on Renaissance sexual morality, titled “Fay ce que vouldras” (“Do what thou wilt”, the motto from Rabelais) comes the work of Opicino de Canistris. With only 659 Google hits, this 13th century Italian writer appears to be a relative rarity. Canistris would have been a perfect entry for the late blog Il Giornale Nuovo.

See also Canistris’s Google gallery

Icons of erotic art #4

Pornokrates (1879) – Félicien Rops

Few things are sexier than a blindfolded woman. I was 20 or 21, I was in Brussels with Ilse and her friends. We were — I think — in the Agora galleries. Suddenly I spotted this painting on a poster on a shop door. I was stunned. The blindfold, the stockings, the shoes, the pig, the gloves. As I mentioned in my previous post, few works of erotic art can be used for masturbatory purposes. Neither can this painting, but its theatricality sets a mood, engenders expectations and hints at hidden desires. Painted 128 years ago, this work set standards which few other paintings will transgress.

Rops in a letter to a friend:

“My Pornocratie is complete. This drawing delights me. I would like to show you this beautiful naked girl, clad only in black shoes and gloves in silk, leather and velvet, her hair styled. Wearing a blindfold she walks on a marble stage, guided by a pig with a “golden tail” across a blue sky. Three loves – ancient loves – vanish in tears (…) I did this in four days in a room of blue satin, in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction”. –Letter from Rops to Henri Liesse, 1879.

Previous entries here, and in a Wiki format here.

Icons of erotic art #3

There are those works of erotica — although very few, otherwise they would be classified as pornography — which are erotic, meaning arousing, and those which are not. Our third entry in this series belongs to the second category. Although not erotic, it does provide a certain a shiver, or frisson, as the French would say. I am talking about The Rape [1] (1934) by Magritte, one of the more Sadean artists of French surrealism. The painting depicts a faceless woman –her face is replaced by her torso. She is mute, her mouth replaced by her pubic hair. The painting [2] was also used for the cover of André Breton‘s pamphlet What is Surrealism?.

Digression #1: Please let me remind you of the fabulous blog lemateurdart.

Digression #2: Speaking of rape, below is a very powerful painting by Degas, titled Interior (The Rape):

Degas The Rape

Previous entries here, and in a Wiki format here.

Icons of erotic art #2

The Guitar Lesson [1] (French: La Leçon de guitare) is a 1934 painting by Balthus. It depicts a a young girl nude from the waist down and her teacher who has one breast exposed. The work was lovingly re-interpreted by Japanese photographer Naoto Kawahara in 2007 [2]. In the same vein Kawahara does a Mollinesque interpretation of Lucretia [3]. Kawahara (1971, Tokyo) recently exhibited at the Antwerp Zeno X Gallery, see zeno-x.com.

Previous entries here, and in a Wiki format here.

Bob Carlos Clarke and Allen Jones

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=791oBsaXEk4]

Via sensOtheque comes the above vintage style series of risqué photos by Bob Carlos Clarke from a version of the book Delta of Venus, set to “You Do Something To Me” by Marlene Dietrich recorded in 1939.

Bob Carlos Clarke was good friends with the artist Allen Jones. They shared the same interest in rubber fetishism and sexual objectification [1] and Clarke also re-interpreted the table sculpture of Jones’s 1969 Chair, Table and Hat Stand in 1987 with Many Nights and in 2004 with the piece Total Control.

“It was Jones who tried to put Carlos Clarke off using rubber-clad women in his photographs, as they appeared often in his own paintings. Clarke had been introduced to this rubber fetish while at college by a man known simply as the Commander, who published a quarterly magazine for devotees of rubber wear. (The Commander had developed a taste for rubber while serving as a frogman in the Royal Navy, during which time he had become very attached to his diving suit.) [2]”

Also check the Allen Jones category at the excellent blog “lemateurdart”.

To conclude, a 2002 photograph [3] of Allen Jones’s table sculpture.

Viewing ‘wrong’ films for the right reasons

Muralla by Bofill

The image above is Xanadu in Calpe, Alicante (1969-1983), a surreal structure designed by Ricardo Bofill where the action of Jess Franco‘s 1980 Sade appropriation Eugenie, historia de una perversión is set. Robert Monell remarks that “this labyrinthine structure boggles the eye and teases our sense of perspective. This interior can be seen, shot from a radically different angle, in 1973’s The Perverse Countess.” Bofill’s design for the Catalan resort of Xanadu consists of a seven-story block with cubical living spaces arranged around a central utility core. Franco used this structure several times [1], [2].

Of all the “Euro trash” exploitation directors (I’m not counting Alain Robbe-Grillet, that’s artsploitation), Jess Franco had a knack for finding good interiors and exteriors. One of his films is set in Park Guell of Gaudi, but there are undoubtedly countless other examples to be found.

Of related interest is The Wrong House exhibition, on Hitchcock and architecture, currently showing in Antwerp.

Il Giornale Nuovo quits after five years

Luigi Serafini’s book Pulcinellopedia Piccola

From Luigi Serafini s book Pulcinellopedia Piccola

Il Giornale Nuovo (2002 – 2007) was a visual arts blog. Its author wrote in praise of miscellaneity:

“I WRITE in praise of miscellaneity, and in particular of assortment and variousness in books; of motley volumes; of mixed-up, impure works which nevertheless accord with the mess & disorder of nature, of life.”

From its first post, to its last, a very inspired work. It will be sorely missed.

I’m sure he will be back.

Icons of erotic art #1

“La Prière” [1], 1930 is a black and white erotic photograph by French surrealist Man Ray. It shows the buttocks of a woman, through her legs extend her hands with which she shields her sex. Her hands are folded in the manner of a prayer, hence the title.

Google gallery of “La Prière”.

Digression #1: Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep: a macabre prayer/poem for children:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Digression #2:

Maria_Magdalene_praying by Ary Scheffer

Maria Magdalene praying by Ary Scheffer