I have for some months been working on revising several books on art and literary history that I wrote over the last few years. My ongoing researches especially into the work of Pierre Louys and the illustrators of his prose and poetry, has produced considerable new material that I wished to add to the existing titles. I have now republished three of these books, with new titles, and they are available as paperbacks and Kindle e-books through Amazon.
The titles are A Voyage to the Isle of Venus- Greuze, de Sade & Libertinism in Enlightenment Art, which is a study of eighteenth century art and sculpture in the context of some of the novels, poetry and memoirs of the period- a subject touched on in a number of my posts here; Eat Me: When Alice Grew Up: Or, How the Modern World Consumed Wonderland & Its Creator which is a study of how Lewis Carroll/ Charles Dodgson, and his greatest creation, Alice, have been reinterpreted and re-used over the last century; and, ‘Cherry Ripe’- Decadence, Classicism and Fantasy in Late Victorian Art, an examination of various issues in Victorian painting in Britain and Europe. This last book deals with many of the artists I have discussed over the last few years, such as Alma Tadema and William Stephen Coleman. Further details of the titles are available on my books page.
What is it about masks that makes them a symbol of a perverse eroticism? Simply putting on a black mask covering half the face, as is so often seen at masked balls in costume dramas, immediately bespeaks seduction, mystery and illicit love. The mere wearing of the mask, without anything else, signals this to us- along with a range of other subtexts.
We saw these messages being deployed most recently by Ariana Grande to promote her 2016 album, Dangerous Woman. The implication of the mask is clear: those playful bunny ears belie the fetish, sensual undercurrent. The pvc bra, leather skirt (pulled up to reveal more thigh) and fur stole all suggest sexuality to us, however innocent the expression. There’s a hint of dominatrix, power and control, but somehow, although the outfit is quite revealing, the concealment of the mask preserves the independence of the wearer.
Ariana Grande
Aubrey Beardsley’s use of masks on the cover of the Yellow Book underlines their connection with a sort of decadent sensuality. For both wearer and observer, the partial anonymity gives a sense of liberation- the individual is free to do what s/he wouldn’t dare to do in normal life. It’s a sanctioned act of losing oneself in the crowd, of abandonment to the erotic impulse, as we see with Pierre-Amedee Marcel-Beronneau’s Masked Woman at the top of the page. The woman caresses her own breast and surrenders herself to pleasure, safe in the feeling that she isn’t constrained by the usual social rules that govern her behaviour; she is released from her known, recognisable social persona.
Aubrey Beardsley, cover design for the Yellow Book, 1894
Charles-Antoine Coypel, Young Girl Holding a Mask, 1745
Given the mask’s rather adult and risque associations, perhaps we are right to detect a certain daring attitude in the expression of the adolescent who’s the subject of Charles-Antoine Coypel’s painting, shown above. She knows she is playing with a slightly illicit aspect of adult life and that she’s sending a bold message, the response to which she might yet not fully be able to handle.
Italian painter Romualdo Locatelli took the erotic suggestiveness of the mask a step further in his 1927 painting La Mascherina. Here, I think, the mask only partly conceals the fact that his model is a rather young woman, meaning that he creates a complex of emotions for viewers. Like Coypel’s, the image is slightly illicit; she is revealing her body, yet she’s disguised; it’s playful yet serious. As she bares her breast, it’s jokey, but provocative- a gesture that’s somehow kept in check by the concealment of the mask.
Romualdo Locatelli, La Mascherina, 1927
The American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin (born 1939)- whose use of classical imagery, such as centaurs, I’ve described before- has pursued these ideas to even more challenging conclusions. He is known for working with models whom most would hesitate to depict- the obese, the disabled, amputees, and (even) the dead. Witkin very frequently deploys masks, sometimes in more conventional images, such as Fictional Storefront: Camera Store Window, New Mexico, 2004 (below)- a nude adult woman reclined on a bed, but he has also featured them in much more provocative images.
These include Carrot Cake no.1 (1980), a large corpulent woman apparently masturbating with a root vegetable; Portrait of a Vanite, New Mexico, 1994– a one-armed male nude; Melvin Burkhart- Human Oddity, Florida, 1985, an elderly freak show performer who’s hammering a nail into his nostril; Botticelli’s Venus, NYC, 1982 and The Graces- LA, 1988- both featuring naked she-males; The Whine Maker, NM, 1983– a BDSM mistress with gloves, whip and chains (and a baby) and, lastly, Nude with Mask, LA, 1988. This shows a naked girl of perhaps ten or eleven who is reclined languorously across a large armchair, one leg partly raised. Her face and blonde curly hair are half covered by a black mash with pointed cat ears. The disguise the hood provides goes some way to making the child’s nudity less troubling; even so, her lips are slightly parted and the fingers of one hand rest lightly on her upper chest in a vaguely suggestive way. The mask echoes the tone Grande’s playful yet adult headgear but with a far younger wearer, the image, overall, is both striking and disturbing.
Fictional Storefront: Camera Store Window, New Mexico, 2004
Masks are obviously about anonymity, but the purpose of that concealment seems to be to allow things to which we would not consent if our identities, or those of others, were fully revealed. Hiding behind the mask, or permitting others to hide, we can pretend not to know anything about them except what we would both like to imagine. The mystery is as much in the mind as in the garment. Repeatedly, Joel-Peter Witkin has challenged us with just this moral dilemma.
Lorenzo Lippi, Allegory of Simulation (Woman with mask and pomegranate)
Spanish painter Luis Ricardo Falero (1851-96) is today especially remembered for his faery paintings. He developed a signature style featuring slender young teenage girls equipped with large butterfly wings and labelled as fairies. The Poppy and Lily Fairies– both of 1888, Butterfly, exhibited in 1891 and Sea Nymph (1892), all typify this facet of his work, which derives its continuing appeal from the pretty, harmless and tiny conception of faeries which first prevailed in Victorian times and which he exploited so effectively.
These faeries, besides their rather sugary nudity, are pretty anodyne. The same probably can’t be said for the Nymph of 1878, who may have hazy butterfly wings but wears a much more serious, if not threatening, expression. As for Fairy Under Starry Skies (1885), this is remarkable for its leaping, flame haired girl, who is equipped with dove’s or angel’s pinions rather than the more conventional insect wings of the artist’s other fairy pictures. Feathered wings notwithstanding, she doesn’t look very angelic. Of course, Falero had a double defence that he could mount to any challenge to the propriety of his art: his topless teens were not just unreal (as supernatural beings), they were also of diminutive dimensions, living amongst flowers that were larger than they were (witness the Lily Fairy, no bigger than a fern leaf, yet somehow holding a microscopic lily stem).
A Fairy Under Starry Skies
Falero was a nobleman who chose art as a career after failed ventures in the military, science and engineering. He received his training in Paris from Gabriel Ferrier, a painter whose output was a curious mixture of portraits, orientalist and fantasy scenes and erotic or pornographic prints, amongst which topless young women and nymphs featured quite frequently.
After studying in Paris, Falero moved to London. In the year of his very early death, the painter was successfully sued for maintenance by his former housemaid and artistic model, Maud Harvey, for having seduced her at the age of seventeen and then made her pregnant. She must therefore feature amongst the many fantastical nudes that Falero painted. She could well be the red-head in The Artist’s Model, who also appears in numerous other of his pictures. Maud seems to be the model in the Reclining Nudes of 1879 and 1893, the second being a sumptuous scene in which she stretches out languorously on rich fabrics. The same young woman may be seen in Posing (1879), La Favourite (1880) and A Beauty (1885).
La Favourite
Witches going to their Sabbath (The departure of the witches): 1878
A substantial number of Falero’s canvases even more powerfully erotic than his nudes, depicting writhing naked females. Examples include Witches’ Sabbath (1878) and Faust’s (or Falero’s) Dream (1880), a picture that’s particularly notable for its jumble of entwined youthful flesh. More so than faeries, witches were associated with an uninhibited and ecstatic sensuality, as the cavortings with broom sticks demonstrate.
The witch, painted on a tambourine 1882
Faust’s Dream
Whilst Falero’s witches tend to be full-breasted, energetic women, slim young nudes appear very regularly too- usually in static, solitary poses- such as La Coquette (1878), Moon Nymph and Dawn (1883), Allegory of Art (1892), An Oriental Beauty (1895) and La Favourite (1896). All are full-length studies, focussing our gaze solely on the figure with no distracting narrative. Similar are the twinned young nudes clinging together, amongst which are Balance of the Zodiac, Moonlit Beauties, Twin Stars, Double Star (1881) and Leo and Virgo (1886).
Balance of the Zodiac
Prayer to Isis, 1883 (also called Mystic Blessings)
Alongside these supernatural fantasies, Falero also indulged the Victorian taste for nudity that was presumed to be found amongst ancient and non-European cultures. A canvas like A Prayer to Isis (1883) must derive from his teacher Ferrier’s orientalist interests. We see, in profile, a naked young woman playing the benet or Egyptian harp and, in front of her, a little nude girl holding aloft two sistra. By silhouetting the pair against the twilit sky, Falero has cleverly emphasised their beautifully modelled outlines. The Enchantress of 1878 derives from this same orientalist school that we’ve seen before, in which the ‘east’ (generally Egypt and the Levant for Europeans of the period) was a realm of exotic, liberated sexuality and provocative if impractical clothes (compare Ernest Normand’s Playthings).
The Enchantress
The classical world provided a similar distance in time and space, that allowed artists to justify as much bare flesh as they dared to paint. A Beauty of 1885 is along the same lines as the Egyptian scenes, except that it places the nudity in a Roman bath- something we’ve examined before in several postings. Closely related is the Reclining Nude of 1879. She luxuriates on a some fabric, it seems in an opium dream, but the lined material (to my eyes anyway) is contrived to look rather like an oyster shell, which arguably takes her away from the orgasmic pleasures the boudoir and deposits her on a sandy shore, suggesting instead that we view her as some sort of siren, naiad or sea nymph, or even as Aphrodite, born from the waves. See Gioacchino Pagliei’s nearly contemporary Naiads (1881) in Nottingham City Art Gallery, the picture that for me is immediately evoked by Falero’s image, although we could probably point to Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (1863) as a strong contender for inspiration, as well as plenty of late Renaissance images of Venus on a bed too as possible precedents.
Reclining Nude
Cabanel, Birth of Venus
Pagliei, Gioacchino; The Naiads; Nottingham City Museums and Galleries
Planet Venus
One could probably justly condemn Falero’s work as glamour photography in oils. The Planet Venus of 1889 isa good example of this. It is a very curious image: the central figure, standing before a crescent moon, is a naked young blonde who is, for some reason, pressing her forefinger into her left breast just below the nipple. In the background four plump little naked girls gambol and pirouette amidst swirling draperies along the edge of the lunar sphere. The picture has an unsettling atmosphere of disturbing eroticism. In Falero’s picture Morning Star the nude female subject clasps and squeezes her left breast; exactly the same gesture is seen too in Leo and Virgo. It is an attitude that’s very familiar to us now from soft pornography- the nipple being offered in a manner that is at once both maternal and sexual.
For more information on Victorian art, see details of my bookCherry Ripe on my publications page.
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