Lynch’s oeuvre in 10 tropes:
the eternal dwarf – dreams and lesbian fantasies – doubles and alter egos – film/theatre within film – red curtains – unusual (long pause) conversations – sound effects – bizarre characters – kinky sex – mysterious titles
INLAND EMPIRE, the new Lynch that runs almost three hours, in a Belgian cinema starting Wednesday. Speaking of Belgian cinema, I’m quite enjoying the film writing of Dave Mestdach in Focus Knack (and Focus Knack in general).
Via Griseldaonline, some high quality scans of erotic art.
Gorgon and the Heroes (1897) – Giulio Aristide Sartorio
Image sourced here.
A Francisco Goya, La maya desnuda, 1789-1805 Madrid Museo del Prado
B Jean Honore Fragonard, I fortunati casi dell’altalena, 1766 Londra Wallace Collection
C Jean Ingres, La grande odalisca, 1814 Parigi Louvre
D Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 Parigi Museo d’Orsay
E Pierre Puvis de Chevannes, Ragazze al mare, 1879 Parigi Museo d’Orsay
F Gustav Klimt, I pesci rossi, 1901-1902 Soleure Museo di Belle Arti
G Henri Matisse, Odalisca con le magnolie, 1924 Coll. privata
2 IL CORPO “ALTRO”
A Caravaggio, Testa di Medusa, 1590-1600 Firenze Galleria degli Uffizi
B Jusepe de Ribera, Lo storpio, 1642 Parigi Louvre
C William Blake, Nabucodonosor, 1795 Londra Tate Gallery
D Francisco Goya, Due vecchi che mangiano, 1820-23 Madrid Museo del Prado
E Joseph W. Turner, La morte su di un cavallo pallido, 1830 Londra Tate Gallery
F Odilon Redon, Il ciclope, 1895-1900 Otterlo Rijksmuseum Kroller Muller
G Giulio Aristide Sartorio, La Gorgone e gli eroi, 1897 Roma Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna
H Alberto Savinio, L’annunciazione, 1932 Coll.privata
3 IL CORPO MISTICO
A Jan Van Eyck, Madonna del cancelliere Rolin, 1439 Parigi Louvre
B Alessandro Botticelli, Paradiso, Canto VI, 1490-95
C Michelangelo Buonarroti, Crocifissione con Maria e San Giovanni, Parigi Louvre
D Stefano Maderno, Santa Cecilia, 1600
E William Blake, Pietà, 1795 Londra Tate Gallery
F Caspar David Friedrich, Monaco in riva al mare, 1810 Berlino Nationalgalerie
G Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1850 Londra Tate Gallery
4 IL CORPO VIOLATO
A Francisco Goya, La fucilazione del 3 maggio 1808, 1814 Madrid Museo del Prado
B Theodore Gericault, La Zattera della medusa, 1819 Parigi Louvre
C Francisco Goya, Saturno, 1820-23 Madrid Museo del Prado
D Amos Nattini, Inferno, Canto III, 1919-30
E Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937 Madrid Museo Reina Sofia
5 IL CORPO E L’ANIMA
A Edward Munch, L’urlo, 1893 Oslo Munchmuseet
B Giovanni Segantini, Le cattive madri, 1894 Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum
D Hans Bellmer, Donna dalle braccia articolate, 1965 Roma Studio d’arte
E Paul Delvaux, La nascita del giorno, 1937 Venezia Collezione Peggy Guggenheim
F Rene Magritte, Luce polare, 1927 Roma Collezione Ponti Loren
6 IL CORPO DEGLI ANTICHI
A Diadoumenos, Atene Museo Nazionale
B Alessandro Botticelli, Venere, 1482 circa Galleria Sabauda
C Antonio Canova, Psiche rianimata dal bacio di amore, 1793 Parigi Louvre
D Edward Burne Jones, La ruota della fortuna, 1875-83 Parigi Museo d’Orsay
Pierre Renoir, father of Jean Renoir [1] said:
“Naked woman rises either from the sea or from the bed; she is called Venus or Nini, there is no better name for her…”
P. S. : I know I’ve quoted the same a couple of posts back, but I wanted Renoir père’s slightly strange photograph to accompany his quote.
The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006) – Timothy J. Clark [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
How much death and terror can nature contain and still be posited as a value — as a world that human beings reach for, steadying themselves. (p. 174)
Via a review of Bart Verschaffel in De Witte Raaf 125, see also this post at This Space. More on the art critic — and former member of the British SI — here, more on horror in the visual arts here.
Danae (1907-08) – Gustav Klimt
“We want to declare war on sterile routine, on rigid Byzantinism, on all forms of bad taste… Our Secession is not a fight of modern artists against old ones, but a fight for the advancement of artists as against hawkers who call themselves artists and yet have a commercial interest in hindering the flowering of art.”
This declaration by Hermann Bahr, the spiritual father of the Secessionists, may serve as the motto for the foundation in 1897 of the Vienna Secession, with Klimt as its leading spirit and president. The artists of the younger generation were no longer willing to accept the tutelage imposed by Academicism; they demanded to exhibit their work in a fitting place, free from “market forces”. They wanted to end the cultural isolation of Vienna, to invite artists from abroad to the city and to make the works of their own members known in other countries. The Secession’s programme was clearly not only an “aesthetic” contest, but also a fight for the “fight to artistic creativity”, for art itself; it was a matter of combatting the distinction between “great art” and “subordinate genres”, between “art for the rich and art for the poor” in brief, between “Venus” and “Nini”. In painting and in the applied arts, the Vienna Secession had a central role in developing and disseminating Art Nouveau as a counter-force to official Academicism and bourgeois conservatism. –Gilles Néret, 1993
P. S. The concept of “Venus” and “Nini” are the most intriguing part of these last posts on the book by Néret on Klimt I’ve been reading, and I want to add that it is unjust and unfair to direct the Nini page to “prostitution in art”. The woman who is impartial to casual sex and/or wants to lead an independent life is not a prostitute but is easily perceived as one. Most generally this dichotomy is labeled the mother/whore or Madonna/whore complex. If anyone knows of a very good exploration of this theme (apart from The Mother and the Whore (1973) – Jean Eustache and the work by Camille Paglia), please let me know.
Nuda Veritas (1899) – Gustav Klimt
“Klimt certainly wasn’t the first to paint naked women,” Ruiz says. “But he also showed pubic hair, pregnant bellies, and old men and women with sagging flesh — nuda veritas! –Ruiz via [1]
..“What is interesting about Klimt (played here by John Malkovich) is that in the short space of a lifetime, he evolved from a Raphael to a Van Gogh. In Romania, where he got his first big job — and his first syphilis — he was a painter of the court, like Velazquez. Then he moved on to the painter of the Austrian Empire, paid by the state. Then he broke away and got commissions from Vienna’s Jewish bourgeoisie and became a painter of the wealthy. Toward the end, he just painted for himself. So he became rich, but he was also generous and died without money. Too many children to support!” –Ruiz via [1]
Apparently, what shocked the Viennese bourgeoisie in the 1899 oil painting Nuda Veritas is the depiction of pubic hair. Pubic hair marks the dividing line between a Venus and a Nini (see previous post), and continues to have the power to shock in the present age. I can’t be mournful about that because if there were a world where nothing were shocking, a world where a sense of the forbidden were gone, wouldn’t that be a bore?
Klimt vs. Loos
“All art is erotic”, declared Adolf Loos in “Ornament and Crime“. Long before Expressionism and Surrealism were credited with displaying sexuality openly in art, Klimt made it his creed, and it became the leitmotif of his work. –Gilles Néret, 1993
“”The first ornament that was ever born, the cross, was erotic in origin. The first work of art, the first artistic deed which the first artist smeared on the wall in order to work off his excess. A horizontal line: recumbent woman. A vertical line: man penetrating her … But man of our time, following an inner compulsion to smear the walls with erotic symbols, is criminal or degenerate … Since ornament is no longer a coherent organic part of our culture, it can no longer be an expression of our culture.” Thus wrote Adolf Loos in his article “Ornament and Crime”, which begins with the famous sentence: “All art is erotic”. The intention behind the article was to stigmatise the “erotic insalubrity” of Klimt and the other artists of the Wienner Werkstätten.” –Gilles Néret, 1993
Coolness and reserve mark this lady, while not yet a femme fatale, but as one of Freud’s castrating women. –Gilles Néret, 1993
Madame Heymann (c. 1894) – Gustav Klimt
Upon display Medicine was immediately attacked by critics who disagreed with the theme of the powerlessness of medicine in a time when Vienna was leading the world in medical research. The painting was also under the normal attack of pornography which Klimt often faced. A public prosecutor was called in and the issue even reached parliament, the first time that a cultural debate had ever been raised there, but in the end no action was taken. Only the education minister defended him, and when he was elected to be a professor at the academy in 1901 the government refused to ratify it. He was never offered another teaching position. [1]
Medicine (1907) – Gustav Klimt
I’ve been reading Gilles Néret’s 1993 Klimt study for Taschen. Since I am partial towards the human interest factor in art criticism I was a bit disappointed by the lack thereof. Otherwise the study is excellent.
Especially since his work is infused with the tropes of male castration anxiety and the femme fatale, I find it astonishing that little is mentioned on his personal life. Néret’s work reminds me of the shift in an erotic sensibility that Mario Praz describes in Romantic Agony, the shift from female masochism towards male masochism that occurred somewhere in mid-19th century.
In fact searching for Klimt’s personal life only brings up one page:
Though the book touches only lightly on Klimt’s personal life, the scandalous nature of his work, his illegitimate children and the haremlike working conditions of his studio, it provides a detailed portrait of the changes and inconsistencies that defined Vienna at the time, when Secessionist principles of freedom from artistic judgment met simultaneous demands for high standards and the “parallel pursuit of collectivity and individuality.” –quoted from a review of Rainer Metzger’s Gustav Klimt.
Perhaps the 2006 film Klimt starring John Malkovich would provide answers to my questions. This biopic was directed by Raoul Ruiz (Time Regained, 1999) .
Aha! Here is quite a bit on Klimt’s personal life:
He remained a bachelor and was being obviously terrified by the thought of entering into a permanent relationship; his attitude to women was highly ambivalent. For many years, Emilie Flöge (played here by Veronica Ferres), whose sister Helene had married Klimt’s brother Ernst, was his companion and he felt a deep affection for her; nevertheless the relationship is assumed to have been purely platonic. His desire was aroused by the sweet Viennese girls from the suburbs who were neither intelligent nor self-assured, by the many models who were his companions for short periods. The fact that he did not disdain sexual love is evidenced by the great number of his illegitimate children. There are records which establish that he had at least 14 children. It is true that he spent many summers with Emilie Flöge and her family in her house at Kammer on the Attersee, but she remained the woman he always worshipped from afar and only called to his deathbed.
On the Venus vs the Nini:
Néret’s book on the art of Gustav Klimt (1993) differentiates between two types of nudes and calls them Venus and Nini. His argument revolves around artistic pretexts:
In Plato’s “Symposium” one encounters two types of Venus, the celestial and the vulgar. Renoir makes the same distinction: “Naked woman rises either from the sea or from the bed; she is called Venus or Nini, there is no better name for her…” The academic, idealised nude is applauded by society, particularly when a historical message can be discerned, but an everyday naked woman ready for love causes a scandal. Before Klimt, Edouard Manet’s Olympia had aroused hatred and criticism. She likewise was a Nini — like the courtesan on the next street corner — rather than a Venus in the style of Titian’s idealised mistresses, disguised as mythical goddesses. Neither in Manet’s Olympia nor in Klimt’s Vienna was it permissible for such idols to be drawn from life.
In answer to my recently asked question regarding the publishers of 20th century counterculture Taschen came to mind, an international publishing powerhouse with its roots in 1980s Germany. Taschen started out by publishing Benedikt Taschen’s extensive comic book collection and then basically conquered the world with its ‘coffeetablishness’.
Taschen is the best alternative to countless hours of internet browsing and a much better reading experience than the web itself, but buying the books remains more expensive than the internet.
Taschen also illustrates the lack of political subversion in contemporary culture. Countercultural publishers such as Grove in the 1960s also published pamphlet-like tracts. Taschen does not have a politics section; however I like to think that Benedikt and Laure have opinionated views on these matters.
“If I had you in bed with me, twenty times in a row I would prove my passion to you. That the eleven thousand virgins punish me if I lie.”
The Eleven Thousand Rods (1907) – Guillaume Apollinaire
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The Eleven Thousand Rods (French: Les Onze Milles Verges) is a 1907 erotic novel by Apollinaire. The title is a pun on the legend of Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand handmaidens. The pun works better in French where vierge means virgin and verge means rod. The painting on the cover of the French edition shown above looks like something by Ingres, but is it?
Bizarre magazine was started by French publisher Eric Losfeld in 1955 and then handed over to Pauvert after the former had edited only two issues. For a bit more info, check this previous post.
![[1]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Galette-Renoir.jpg){kind=link}
