Category Archives: eye candy

Icon of Erotic Art #33

Fischl Eric bad_boy by m_orfeo0111

Bad Boy (1981) by Eric Fischl

Today is Icon of Erotic Art #33 day. Remember this series is handmade, I’m not pulling this out of a list. So it was with great pleasure that I was reminded Eric Fischl‘s Bad Boy painting[1].

Bad Boy (1981) depicts a young boy looking at and older woman shown in a provocative masturbatory (a beaver shot to be precise) pose on a bed, while the subject is surreptitiously slipping his hand into the woman’s purse and presumedly stealing its contents.

The painting unites eroticism and crime, between the two is a very strong link first explored by Sade and verbally juxtaposed by Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly in Happiness in Crime, a short story first published in the 1874 collection Les Diaboliques. I hope to explore this connection later.

Bad Boy is a painting which provokes the imagination, an equal amount of events seem to be in the painting as outside of it.

I imagine the neighborhood outside the room depicted suburbian. I imagine her husband (she is married and sexually neglected) watering the garden in a David Hockney painting manner. Maybe her husband is taking a A Bigger Splash[2] in their pool. Or the same husband is entertaining his gay lover in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)[3].

Since all figurative painting involving the human figure is narrative painting a number of questions can be raised:

What is the relationship between the older woman and the boy? Is he her son? Or is she barren? Is he a neighborhood boy who entered her house without her knowing? Is the woman aware that she is being stolen from and spied upon at the same time? Is it a game they play regularly and is the boy rewarded the money afterwards? Who is to tell?

What makes European erotic films of the seventies “euro chic” variety particularly interesting …

Giulio Romano 3

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBTM-H74FjE]

Monamour, fresco footage at :10

“I had never heard of Tinto Brass until the late 1970s when I read an interview he gave to Gideon Bachmann in The London Times (Wednesday, 3 August 1977, p. 13). His remarks sufficiently intrigued me to begin a decades-long search, a search that for many years turned up almost nothing apart from tantalizing articles in trade papers. Since the autumn of 2000, though, thanks to friends in Italy, on-line overseas shopping, and eBay, I’ve been able to locate a fair number of Brass’s creations. I had been expecting at least a few of his earlier films to be excellent, but I wasn’t expecting them to be quite as good as they actually turned out to be. –RJBuffalo, a pseudonym of Ranjit Sandhu

This I read in the early 2000s when I discovered the site http://www.geocities.com/busterktn, a site hosted at Yahoo/Geocities, of which the author says it was “deleted without notice or explanation. They deleted all my email messages too.” I believe him. Yahoo did the same to my site in 2004.

Last week, I found the same site, back online, now hosted under its own domain name, http://www.rjbuffalo.com, a pleasure for the eye and the brain.

Brass is one of Jahsonic’s canonical filmmakers. Researching him today brought footage of Monamour, in which Marta visits a museum, I presume in Mantua and admires  scatological (see comment 1) frescoes by – again I presume – by Giulio Romano in – presuming further – the Palazzo del Te.

Giulio Romano

Palazzo del Te frescoes

Giulio Romano 2

Palazzo del Te fresco (detail)

As Sholem Stein has noted: “What makes European erotic films of the seventies “euro chic” variety particularly interesting is the fact that Europe has the scenery, and the best cinematic euro chic erotomaniacs (Tinto Brass, Just Jaeckin, etc…) have put it to use. There is a reason why Radley Metzger came to Europe in the seventies to film his softcore visual extravaganzas.”

Gratuitous nudity #11 and Icon of Erotic Art #32

sophie dahl by modelvancouver

Sophie Dahl, i-D, 1997

Sophie Dahl first came to my attention with her Opium (perfume) ad[1].

Today, following a link that started[2] at Trevor Brown‘s blog, which celebrated Takashi Itsuki‘s acrotomophiliac eroticism, which backlinked[3] to the new magazine Coilhouse (amazing new magazine, started as a blog in Aug 2007), I arrived at the photography of Nick Knight. On his SHOWstudio.com site, one finds this image[4] (first published in i-D, 1997), which frankly, leaves me sick with desire. Just what is it that brings on this sickness? It’s the softness of her skin, the presumed quality of her fatty tissue, the pot belly and the pear-shaped breasts. And the nails. Amen.

This is a first for my series, where an image is both an instance of gratuitous nudity and an Icon of Erotic Art.

The “pin-up girl” of the French Surrealists

Augustine, Charcot's star patient at Salpêtrière by you.

Charcot‘s Louise Augustine, later dubbed the “pin-up girl” of the French Surrealists, attempted many escapes. The hospital’s last entry concerning Augustine, dated September 9, 1880, notes that she “escaped from the Salpetriere, disguised as a man.”  [2]

Surprisingly, Les démoniaques dans l’art – Charcot et Richer[3], a book I acquired over the summer, does not feature the photograph depicted above, nor others from this set[4].

British writer Helen Kitson has written a fictionalized account of the Charcot/Augustine history here[5].

An excerpt:

‘I have named her Augustine.’
‘Named a lunatic after a saint! Well, perhaps they are much the same. The idiot, the mystic…’
‘She is not an idiot.’
She listens at the door, biting her fingernails. She needs to know what they want from her so that she can perform when asked. She has to know how mad she’s supposed to be. Satisfied, she goes back to her room where she dreams of blood and fire. Faces hidden behind shrouds. Dead men.

Visual postscript:

illustration du livre Hystéro-épilepsie de Paul Richer 1881

Audrey Vernon, gratuitous nudity and French culture

French eroticism and French culture

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrLge_qkFw8]

Audrey Vernon at Canal plus Décalé strips nude

The work of Audrey Vernon as an announcer at French channel Canal plus Décalé is stupendous. She is the next big thing after Max Headroom. Above is the notorious announcement where she strips nude, sulkingly claiming that “nobody is watching anyway.” Phil Bloom[1] is her predecessor, this Dutch model showed her naked torso on national Dutch television in 1967.

Comparing Audrey Vernon to Max Headroom[3] reminds me of the eighties with kitsch such as the 1985 “Moments in Love“[4], both previous clips produced by Trevor Horn (more on him later). The eighties was also the time of Double Dutch[5] by McLaren (and btw, when was the similarly-styled “Freestyle“[6] by Bambaataa, a play on Kraftwerk‘s “Numbers“, produced?).

But I digress.

Back to French culture.

Rhétorique et structure narratives de Fantômas par Marc Angenot by you.

Le Roman populaire. Recherches en paralittérature (1975) by Marc Angenot

Above[6] is the elegant book cover to Marc Angenot‘s Le Roman populaire. Recherches en paralittérature, a 1975 work on paraliterature and popular fiction.

Excuse this hodgepodge of a post.

P. S. Click the footnoted numbers to watch.

Genre scenes, trompe-l’œils and occasional dashes of eroticism

Checkers-1803 by Louis-Léopold BoillyUne_loge by Louis-Léopold BoillyLa Toilette intime by Louis-Léopold Boilly

Passer_payez_detail1 by Louis-Léopold BoillySlurping_Oysters_1825 by Louis-Léopold BoillyL'effet_du_mélodrame by Louis-Léopold Boilly

Via Suzanna of Wurzeltod[1] comes the work of French painter Léopold Boilly, whose work ranges from genre scenes to trompe-l’œils and occasional dashes of eroticism.

Before production of the Sade biopic Quills[2] began, costume designer Jacqueline West gave Kate Winslet a copy of Boilly’s “Woman Ironing”[3] to give her a feel for the character, which Winslet said greatly influenced her performance.

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

YouTube mashup of Quills (set to Nine Inch Nails “Closer“)

The sadly defunct arts blog Lemateurdart has one more Boilly [5] and Jahsonic previously on Quills[6][7].

Quills is WCC #59. Toilette intime[4] is IoEA #33.