Category Archives: European culture

Your doctor will look into your mouth …

Lazarillo de Tormes (1808-12) by Francisco de Goya

Lazarillo de Tormes (1808–12) by Francisco de Goya

Your doctor will look into your mouth to see if your throat is red and your tonsils are swollen and covered with white or yellow spots. He or she will also look for small red spots on the roof of your mouth.

Are anyone of you familiar with Lazarillo de Tormes and able to tell me what this scene is about and why Goya decided to paint it? The painting, which I found today, has a strange attraction. It is as something forbidden is going on. The man looking into the mouth of the kid is not a physician, I gather.

Update: found the explanation of the painting. The man is a blind man and the guardian of Lazarillo, he suspects that the Lazarillo has stolen food and wants to inspect it. Lazarillo‘s can’t stand the feeling of the man’s nose stuck in his throat and throws up in his face.

If Hitler Had Been a Hippy

If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy we Would Be[1][2] is a 2008 series of paintings by Jake and Dinos Chapman which deface orginal paintings by Adolf Hitler. The Chapmans previously used a similar ploy on work by Goya (Insult to Injury).

At the end of May 2008 the White Cube Gallery exhibited the 20 authenticated watercolours and oils painted by Adolf Hitler, which the brothers have defaced with hippie motifs. Jake Chapman described most of the dictator’s works as ‘awful landscapes‘ which they had ‘prettified‘.

On a general level, if Rome was the art world capital from the Renaissance to the 1850s, Paris from the 1850s until WWII, a title which Paris lost to New York after the war; could it possibly be that London, with artists such as Emin, Hirst and the Chapmans, is the current art world capital? I don’t see any other country but the UK coming with consistently exciting work.

WMC#42: To shake memories into the air

This post rhymes with air

She threw back her hair
Like I wasn’t there
And she sipped on a julep.
Her shoulders were bare
And I tried not to stare

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYHEBa6Xx48&]

“Summer (The First Time)” (1973) by Bobby Goldsboro

A Hemisphere in Your Hair (French: Un hémisphère dans une chevelure) is a poem by Baudelaire collected in Paris Spleen.

Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux, y plonger tout mon visage, comme un homme altéré dans l’eau d’une source, et les agiter avec ma main comme un mouchoir odorant, pour secouer des souvenirs dans l’air.
Long let me inhale, the odour of your hair,
into it plunge the whole of my face, like a thirsty man
into the waters of a spring and wave it in my fingers like a scented handkerchief,
to shake memories into the air.

In the film Withnail & I Richard Griffith’s character recites the line “Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux” (Eng: Long let me inhale, the odour of your hair).

Playa Bianca

Charles Petit is the director of this superb video clip to the musical composition “Playa Bianca” with sweet parlando vocals by French writer Michel Houellebecq.

In the words of the director:

“Michel Houellebecq released an album five years ago on the French label Tricatel. The lyrics was from his poems, the music was from Bertrand Burgalat, and I was the director of the video.”

The CD’s title is Présence humaine, and it was released on Bertrand Burgalat’s Tricatel label in 2000.

The track reminds us of “Sea, Sex and Sun“[1] by Gainsbourg, but also (and the link is more oblique here) of Deleuze reciting Nietzsche on Richard Pinhas‘s Le Voyageur composition.

“Playa Bianca” means “white beach”.

Tip of the hat to De Papieren Man.

Les téléclitoridiennes

Princess Marie Bonaparte

The story of Princess Marie Bonaparte is as least as strange as that of her contemporary, Serge Voronoff who grafted monkey testicle tissue on to the testicles of men while working in France in the 1920s and 1930s.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlJG_Qct-mY]

Princesse Marie directed by Benoît Jacquot

Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962) was a French psychoanalyst, closely linked with Sigmund Freud. Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis, and enabled Freud’s escape from Nazi Germany.

According to the 2008 book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach, Marie first consulted Sigmund Freud for treatment of what she described as her frigidity, which was later described as a failure to have orgasms during missionary position intercourse. After conducting research on women’s orgasms, she concluded the reason was the distance between clitoris and vagina. She called those, like herself, the “téléclitoridiennes” — “she of the distant clitoris.” She then attempted to “cure” her own failure to orgasm by having her clitoris moved, surgically, closer to her vagina; although the removal worked, the reattachment was not successful. It was to Marie Bonaparte that Sigmund Freud remarked, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”.

Her story of her relationship with Sigmund Freud and how she helped his family escape into exile was made into a television film, released in 2004. Princesse Marie YouTube was directed by Benoît Jacquot and starred Catherine Deneuve as Marie Bonaparte, and Heinz Bennent as Sigmund Freud.

IoEA #25: man’s most honest organ

“Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is man’s most honest organ.” —Thy Neighbor’s Wife, (1981), Gay Talese.

It’s time for the 25th installment in our series of mini-articles on icons of erotic art. Today’s item is an unabashed tribute to man’s most honest organ, that wonderful extension to the human male’s groin, the wondrous complex of bulging blood vessels, the source of pride of alpha through zeta males: the penis. Here represented by Le Dieu Priape[1] (ca. 1779 – 1795) by French visionary architect and draughtsman Jean-Jacques Lequeu, it shows a large, elegant and powerful phallus. Calling it a phallus, makes it clear that the penis is erect, because let’s face it, in a flaccid state our pride is pretty preposterous.

Staying on the subject of penises, most recently Trevor Brown showed eyeing[2][3] instances of the male and female anatomy by the 21st century fantaste Paul Rumsey.

P.S. The quote of Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese came my way via a Dutch translation of Louise Kaplan’s recently acquired Female Perversions, from the first cursory reading, a very good study of female sexual behavior and its representation in psychoanalytic theory and western literature and Emma Bovary in particular.

Icons of erotic art #24, or a pale, tender rose-tint almost like that of her cheeks

Clemente Susini

Clemente Susini’s wax Venus

Venus spied upon

“Venus (or a Nymph) Spied On by Satyrs” by Poussin

In a recent post [1], on a perceived likeness between a Poussin painting and a wax anatomical model, Evan, a friend of Morbid Anatomy notes:

“I was taking in the wonderful “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions[2],” exhibition currently up at the Metropolitan Museum, when I was struck by his famous “Venus (or a Nymph) Spied On by Satyrs”. The falling of the drapery, the hand gesture, and the blatantly revelatory pose – all very, very reminiscent of [ Clemente Susini‘s ] wax Venus models found at La Specola, the Josephinum, and beyond.” .

To me, the painting in question was reminiscent of both the 1937 novel Blue of Noon (published in 1957) by Georges Bataille and the 1838 novella One of Cleopatra’s Nights by Théophile Gautier. The latter includes a fantastic—and an undisguisedly fetishistic—description of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra‘s body post-mortem:

“Her sole vestment was the linen shroud that had covered her upon her state bed, and the folds of which she drew over her bosom as if she were ashamed of being so little clothed, but her small hand could not manage it. It was so white that the colour of the drapery was confounded with that of the flesh under the pale light of the lamp. Enveloped in the delicate tissue which revealed all the contours of her body, she resembled an antique marble statue of a bather…Dead or living, statue or woman, shadow or body, her beauty was still the same; only the green gleam of her eyes was some what dulled, and her mouth, so purple of yore, had now only a pale, tender rose-tint almost like that of her cheeks.”

The Poussin painting is Icon of erotic art #24

World cinema classics #48

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWHOhoFgs84&]

Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) by Marco Ferreri [off-line]

I’ve been waiting quite a long time to be able to show a clip of Tales of Ordinary Madness by Marco Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe), one of the most devastatingly beautiful films to have crossed my retina when I saw it about 5 years ago.

Memorable scenes include Ornella Muti putting an oversized safety pin to some rather startling uses, and a listful cat and mouse game between Ben Gazzara and Susan Tyrrell which results in Gazarra’s arrest when you least expect it. Some hold the Ornella Muti scenes as some of the most erotic ever confided to celluloid, I’ll take the Tyrrell/Gazzara encounter any day.

The film’s title and subject matter are based on the works and the person of US poet Charles Bukowski.

See also WMC#13.

Update: a few hours after I posted the clip, it was taken down by the “user.”

She knows

Girl with a cup (1850), by Danish painter Constantin Hansen

It’s one of those paintings one finds on the web, they talk to you, you find them 2 weeks ago, they compel you to write about them two weeks later.

A little of Vermeer, Chirico and Balthus in this painting of a girl drinking from a cup. Her gaze is half interrogation and half wonder, but a defiant gaze nevertheless, as if she knows more than she’s willing to admit, and more too, than you would expect her to. There is quite a bit of sadness too, sadness not so much of a girl, but of a grown woman trapped in the body of a girl. As with many interesting 19th century works, it’s hard to tell, is it a kitschy guilty pleasure or just a good painting?