La Fleur du marécage (1885) by Odilon Redon
In 1885, Odilon Redon depicts a Pierrot entitled La Fleur du marécage and commented with “La fleur du marécage, une tête. humaine et triste.” The engraving is is reminiscent of the fantastic plants of Edward Lear. Marécage is French for swamp, so the title translates as The flower of the swamp, a head. Human and sad.
The Big Penis Book is a 2008 book by Taschen on big penises and the men they belong to. The book, like its predecessor The Big Book of Breasts, was edited by Dian Hanson.
From a nobrow perspective it’s interesting that one of the earliest researchers on the subject was Caribbean author and theorist Frantz Fanon who covers this subject in some detail in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) tended towards the view that the supposed positive correlation between penis size and African ancestry is erroneous.
See penis size.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawa85d_bJY]
Red Road trailer
I watched the 2006 British film Red Road yesterday evening. The film felt like reading a nouveau roman: no interior nor exterior monologue whatsoever (by that I mean an almost wholly depersonalized narration), the story is revealed through images and short pieces of dialog and benefits from having no prior information of the plot. The film is very reminiscent of that other little gem, Intimacy , but also of Haneke’s Caché because of its intense claustrophobia and manic voyeurism.
As far as my interest in prurience goes, Red Road had everything I had found lacking in Lust, Caution.
Michael Dwyer notes:
Red Road is World Cinema Classic #52, Caché #53 and Intimacy #54.
French blog Au carrefour étrange has ceased its activities for the time being and started a new blog called French book covers [1] which is illustrated with a chic cover photo [2] by the Italian designer and photographer Carlo Mollino. Its author, who goes by the pseudo of Losfeld, has a very extensive collection of books, running the gamut from surrealist theory to sleazy paperbacks, what I like to call nobrow.
A recent post[3] at this new blog featured cover art by French publishing house La Brigandine, for which Jahsonic regular Jean-Pierre Bouyxou has written novels under the pseudonym Georges Le Gloupier before that name was appropriated by the entarteur Noël Godin, a highschool buddy of Bouyxou. One particular of those novels is called Les Accidents de l’amer (Eng: Accidents of the Sea, or accidents of Bitterness, depending on where you place the apostrophe or blank space) and has one of the sexiest covers[4] I’ve seen in some time, due to the particular areola shape of the woman depicted.
I cannot pinpoint (or haven’t tried) the date of these publications, but I would gather mid to late 1970s.
From various Flickr members.
Colette Calascione (born in 1971) is an American artist. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California. Her work has been shown at St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as in many galleries, most notably in the San Francisco area.
Sometimes her work reeks just a bit too much of the lowbrow art movement on which I am not always too keen (exceptions such as Mark Ryden notwithstanding), but the work above is steeped in art history, yet feels fresh.
This painting (title: Persephone, 2002) constitutes Icon of Erotic Art number 26.
Making fake ancient artworks in his garden shed [1] by Paul Rumsey.
See aura, authenticity, Shaun Greenhalgh, art forgery, originality, simulacrum
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.
Clemente Susini’s wax Venus
“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:
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
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?
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