Felicien Rops- The Devil, Death & Desire

Pornokrates

The Belgian Symbolist artist Felicien Rops (1833-98) has endured a declining reputation over the century and a quarter since his death. Karl Joris Huysmans said, in Certains, his study of various artists of the period, that Rops possessed the “soul of an inverted primitive” having “penetrated Satanism and summarised it in admirable prints which are, as inventions, as symbols, as examples of incisive and vigorous art, truly unique.” Freud even praised Rops’ Temptation of St Anthony (1878) as a perfect representation of the repression of sexual feelings in saints and penitents (Delirium & Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ 1907).

Woman on a rocking horse, 1870

Not all contemporaries were as keen, though. The artist Gustave Moreau hated Rops’ sadism and his “crazy mixture of mysticism, the beer hall [and] of boulevard pornography” (Moreau, A Propos de Rodin). Modern critics have generally been equally unkind and unenthusiastic. Edward Lucie Smith (in Symbolist Art, 1972, 173) saw Rops as representative of “everything that is most fundamentally opportunistic and tedious about the Symbolist movement.” The artist had- Lucie Smith felt- “a facility in making vulgar versions of eighteenth century art and an equal, but more praiseworthy skill in the depiction of contemporary low life” (I’m guessing that Lucie Smith refers here to artists like Greuze, Clodion and Fragonard). Other critics have found the Belgian “merely rhetorical, where all is explained but nothing felt” (J. Pierre, Symbolism, 1979), have seen Rops as the creator of “prurient eroticism [more] than moral significance” (Mathieu, The Symbolist Generation, 1990, 125) or as being the exploiter of “some of the commonplaces of the Symbolist repertoire with detachment of theatrical skill… [meaning that] he seized the drift of the cliches of his times and played upon them in masterly fashion” (Gibson, Symbolism, 2006, 87-88). Rops was, perhaps, too clever for his own good.

Foire aux amours

Felicien Rops was an established artist before Symbolism emerged, having originally been a satirical and humorous caricaturist. However, he was praised in 1868 for his eloquence in “depicting the cruel aspect of contemporary woman, her steely glance, her malevolence towards man… not hidden, not disguised, but evident in her whole person.” The artist was drawn to the poet Baudelaire because they shared a “strange love for the skeleton” (witness L’agonie and Sentimental Initiation illustrated below). In return, Baudelaire said that Rops’ talent “was as high as the pyramid of Cheops” and regarded him as the only true artist in Belgium at the time. Both men were licentious and anti-clerical, with Baudelaire claiming that obscene books transported the reader towards mystical experiences. The arch-Symbolist Joséphin Péladan praised the way in which “the intense Felicien Rops closes the cabalistic triangle of great art,” and compared him with as esteemed a figure as Albrecht Durer.

The Sentimental Initiation, 1887

Parallelism

Rops had a substantial reputation as an illustrator, esepcially of erotic texts (such as Barby D’Aurevilly’s Diaboliques and Péladan’s Vice Supreme). His key themes were woman, death and the devil. The hostility towards women just alluded to seemed to draw him towards Satanism. Huysmans said that Rops “celebrated the spirituality of Lust, which is to say Satanism;” he painted, with great skill, “the supernatural aspects of perversity; the otherworld of Evil.”

L’agonie

Rops’ illustrations to Les Sataniques (1882) were “deliberately blasphemous… less a monument to evil than one to vulgarity.” They verge on the caricature, but are perverse and erotic. Contemporaries saw his work as exposing sexual and religious hypocrisies. Hence, he illustrated a collection of Baudelaire’s banned poems (Epaves, 1866) and produced a rare painting based upon the poet’s Danse Macabre (1866-75). Rops was an atheist, but was familiar with religious iconography, which he subverted. He was a misogynist who desired women at the same time as despising them as inferior. These contradictions and the underlying tensions that they created may explain why his buxom females are often also dead, tortured or threatening. Critic Octave Mirbeau described how Rops “constantly strips man down to the skeleton and upon this macabre form knots his tortured muscles, twists his flesh, which is gouged by the claws of the chimaera and whipped by furious passions.” He was infamous at the time as a leading exponent of so-called ‘Black Symbolism.’ He has been called a “talented but sick” artist, who just about rescued himself “from dismal obscenity” by his skill and by the “sheer horror of his illustrations” (P. Jullian, The Symbolists, 1973, 15 & 52). Certainly, Rops repeatedly combines sex with death and corruption in a pairing that seemingly speaks of his own fear and anxiety.

One of Rops’ best known works is Pornokrates. The Belgian novelist Edmond Picard, who owned the picture, saw it as an image of “the feminine being who dominates our age and is so amazingly different from her ancestors.” Clearly, both men shared a fear, as well as a desire, for women, especially sexualised individuals like prostitutes, who might simultaneously serve and dominate. The presence of the pig, as is also seen in The Temptation of St Anthony (below), seems to stand as an emblem of our animal natures- always alert with greed. The woman he portrays in Pornokrates (taking the pig out on a leash, but also perhaps being led by that pig) is a kind of heartless dominatrix who, he likes to believe, teases and punishes men whilst giving free rein to her own powerful urges. The swine in this painting is likely to refer as well to the sorcerer Circe of Greek myth. She used magic potions to drug men and change them into pigs; understanding the female figure as having this additional power over male victims, to malignly enchant them, adds significantly to the potency of this image.

The sense of woman playing with man is emphasised by the mannikin held by both the Woman on a Rocking Horse (above) and by the wanton figure in Modern Masks (below). These two females (as with many he depicted) seem to be at the same time frivolous and playful, yet physically distant, self-contained and taunting. Indeed, Rops’ own sense of frustrated helplessness in the face of women comes over most evidently in his Document on the Impotence of Love (below), where the margin includes sketches of more ordinary women who are still unattainable for him.

Modern Masks, 1889

A Document on the Impotence of Love, 1894

Symbolism was a style that placed an emphasis upon human frailty and lusts. Rops epitomised this, portraying some of the most powerful but least attractive aspects of our nature with a cruel pleasure. His contempt for human kind as weak, trapped children and apes, driven by instincts and appetites, is pitiless; his images waver between the obscene, the trite and the inspired. They might also be considered confessional, in a highly Freudian way.

The Temptation of St Anthony

For more on the themes and problems of late nineteenth sexuality, and their manifestations in art, see in particular Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 1986.