Gloves- obsession in art

The Glove: The Action

Some time ago, I posted about the depiction of women in masks by artists. The thrill and mystery that can be created by hiding your identity and being able to adopt a new persona is obvious. Masks have a role in crime and deception, but they also have a strong erotic aspect. Here, I turn to gloves; perhaps more strongly, but less explicably, these garments have acquired a persistent sensual charge. They are no longer items of everyday dress yet (or perhaps because of this) they retain their mystique and allure. When their fabric is silk, satin, leather, PVC or latex, this is more readily comprehensible, as a major part of the allure must then lie in the smooth, ‘second skin’ fabric. What, though, is the fascination of the glove itself? Is it the simultaneous intimacy and covering of the hand- the sense of personal contact combined with the barrier to the sense of touch? It’s a deep-rooted, but very puzzling, aspect of our culture. It’s also quite a long-standing one, as various artists’ work shall demonstrate.

I begin with the German Symbolist, Max Klinger (1857-1920). In 1874 he began his artistic studies in Karlsruhe, and then Berlin, before spending several years living and working in Brussels, Paris and Rome, where he met and was inspired by the Swiss Symbolist Arnold Bocklin. His other major artistic inspirations were the paintings of Puvis de Chavannes and the engravings of Rembrandt and Goya; the latter awoke in the artist an attraction to the fantastic. The philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Beethoven and Brahms were also very important to him. From 1893 Klinger settled in Leipzig, where, amongst his own students were the equally gothic and macabre Alfred Kubin and Otto Greiner.

Klinger worked in several media: he was a painter of neo-classical images that combined mythology and Christian idea, but also sculptor and extremely fine graphic artist. He said that he wished to translate “life’s dark side” into lines and in pursuance of this aim, Klinger produced a series of fourteen sets of etchings, which he termed Opera. This depicted themes such as Eve (1881), Brahmsphantasie (1894), Life (1881-84), Plague (1898), Death (two parts, 1881 & 1889) and Love (1879-1887). Klinger had his humorous and bizarre side, too, such as his images of Der pinkelnde Tod (a skeleton urinating into a lake), Death- a skeleton- tied to a railway track (from Opus XI, On Death) and the curious Bear & Elf from Opus IV.

I am concerned here with Opus VI: Paraphrase on the Discovery of a Glove. This set of ten images explores the nature of female gloves with obsessive fetishism; it also typifies a quality in Klinger’s art pointed out by art historian Michael Gibson: Klinger developed “an imaginary world which is both realistic and slightly out of kilter with reality, thus giving an impression of the uncanny” (Symbolism, 1996, 130). The series begins realistically enough, at a roller-skating rink, where a woman drops a glove. A man picks it up and from here apparently develops a strange adoration from the item, passing through various stages of desire, triumph, homage and anxiety. The unhealthy obsession with the glove culminates with its loss: Seizure, in which a pterodactyl seems to fly off with the item, evading the out-stretched arms of the desperate man (although in fact it can only be his arms alone that have broken the window panes, suggesting that the creature does not exist outside his fevered imagination); and Love, a final image placing the glove as an object of adoration with Cupid and roses. Gibson comments on the surreal and dream-like nature of the series, and on their “barely veiled eroticism.”

After his death, the Greek/ Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico wrote that Klinger had been “a painter, sculptor, etcher, philosopher, writer, musician and poet.” He was certainly an influence in De Chirico (1888-1978), who in 1914 painted his own glove picture, Love Song (see below). Amongst other Symbolist artists, the Belgian Felicien Rops displayed a similar fetish interest in gloves.

Giorgio de Chirico, Love Song, 1914

In July 1914, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire noted that “Monsieur Giorgio de Chirico [who was then living in Paris] has just bought a pink rubber glove.” He felt the purchase was significant because, he went on to say, he knew that the presence of a glove in a de Chirico painting would add to its uncanny power. Love Song is now on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York: the MoMA website describes the glove as “implying human presence, as a mould of the hand, yet also inhuman, a clammily limp fragment- distinctly un-flesh-like in colour- [that] has an unsettling authority. Why is this surgical garment pinned to a board or canvas, alongside a plaster head copied from a classical statue, a relic of a noble vanished age? What is the meaning of the green ball? And what is the whole ensemble doing in the outdoor setting insinuated by the building and the passing train?” Locomotives are a constant in de Chirico’s painting in this period, as are classical sculptures in deserted plazas. There repeatedly create a desolate mood, to which the glove may add not just a sense of absence but, perhaps, a suggestion of an impersonal eroticism- something that the title Love Song may confirm. 

‘Wighead,’ from Grégor Yvan, Chair Sanglée ou les Voluptés fetichistes, 1935

Certainly, by the date that de Chirico was painting Love Song, the glove was making its transition from ordinary garment into fetish object. This is amply confirmed in much of the erotic illustration that was produced in Paris after the end of the First World War. Two artists from this period stand out for their vivid imaginations, creating bizarre costumes for the dominatrices they depicted, and for their ability to depict materials such as leather and latex; these are the illustrators known only as ‘Carlo‘ and ‘Wighead.’ From the two specimen illustrations from the mid-1930s, you may gain a little idea of their skills and of the frequency with which gloves (along with those other staples, stockings and basques) featured in their art work. Rene Desergy’s Diana Gantee (Diana in Gloves) from 1932 only underlines the now unbreakable association that has been formed between gloves and BDSM. These vintage books still retail through Amazon, Abe and other outlets. See too Paris Olympia Press and BiblioCuriosa. 

Alan Mac Clyde’s Dolores Amazone (1934)