Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin (1877-1959) was an Austrian printmaker, illustrator and occasional writer. In 1898, after a failed apprenticeship with a photographer, a suicide attempt (on his mother’s grave with a rusty, faulty gun) and a nervous breakdown (for which he was hospitalised for a time), Kubin began training as an artist at a private academy. He didn’t complete this course, seemingly impatient to progress his career, for he enrolled at the Munich Academy the next year.
After the Battle, 1902
In Munich, Kubin began to visit art galleries and first encountered the work of Odilon Redon , Edvard Munch, James Ensor, Félicien Rops, Aubrey Beardsley and Max Klinger. The latter’s series of prints, Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove, which I have described before, had a particular impact on the young and impressionable artist. Of this “cascade of visions,” he declared “Here an absolutely new art was thrown open to me, which offered free play for the imaginative expression of every conceivable world of feeling… I swore that I would dedicate my life to the creation of similar works”.
Haushamerlind, 1907
Inspired by Klinger and Goya- and by a visit to Redon in Paris in 1905- Kubin began to produce fantastical, macabre drawings in pen and ink, with some watercolour washes. Although initially associated with the Blaue Reiter group of expressionists, from 1906 he gradually became ever more withdrawn and isolated and lost contact with the artistic avant-garde. Despite (or perhaps because) of his solitary life, Kubin was prodigiously productive and inventive, especially during the first decade of the new century. In total he produced between six and seven thousand drawings- of which just a few are selected here. Kubin’s art, stylistically, looked back to Symbolism with its morbid and supernatural elements. Like Goya, he often created thematic series of drawings, regularly dealing with issues such as sexual violence, human suffering and magical, malevolent female power. After Germany absorbed Austria in 1938, Kubin’s output was condemned as ‘degenerate’- perhaps this isn’t surprising given that he had termed himself “the artistic gravedigger of the Austrian empire.”
Epidemic (1901)
Kubin also worked as an illustrator, designing plates for editions of works by Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Dostoevsky, amongst others. He was also an author in his own right, albeit of just one book, Die andere Seite (‘The Other Side’) in 1908, a fantasy novel set in an imaginary land. In the story’s epilogue, Kubin revealingly declared “I loved Death, loved her ecstatically, as if she were a woman; I was transported with rapture… I surrendered completely to her… I was the lover of that glamorous mistress, that glorious princess of the world who is indescribably beautiful in the eyes of those she touches.”
Ins unbekannte (Into the unknown), 1901
It seems pretty clear that Kubin’s unhappy youth and his troubled mental state contributed directly to the art he created. He may have officially have been cured of his mental illness, but his work suggests an imagination still disturbed- and it can’t have helped that, from the age of nineteen, he was steeped in the rather pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, who saw “misfortune as the general rule.” Kubin recorded how important dreams were for him as a source of artistic inspiration and that when he sat down to create art he was seized by “unspeakable psychic tremors.” From the artists he admired and closely studied, he seems to have retained only the most morbid elements. In his images, women and sex represent danger and power and death is ever present.
The Swing, an homage to Fragonard’s famous original
Louis Icart (1888-1950) was a French painter, graphic artist, and illustrator. Born in Toulouse, he had shown a talent for drawing from early in his boyhood and his aunt, impressed by his artistic potential, took him to Paris in 1907, when he was nineteen. She was the owner of the upmarket Paris milliner Maison Valmont and was therefore able to introduce him into the circles of fashion press illustration. In the French capital the young man trained in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Icart’s initial commercial venture involved producing frivolous postcards using copies of existing images, but he soon began to create his own designs. As a result, he started to receive commissions to design the title pages for the magazine La Critique Théâtrale and to create fashion sketches for haute-couturiers. This helped to establish his name, as did the opportunity in 1913 to exhibit his work at the Salon des Humoristes.
Kiss of the Motherland, one of Icart’s patriotic images
Icart served in the First World War as a fighter pilot, but continued to produce sketches and etchings with patriotic themes. After the war, he made prints of this work, which sold well in both Europe and America- where he exhibited his work in 1922. In the late 1920s, Icart was prolific and very successful with his many publications and his work for large fashion and design studios. He illustrated works such as Carmen and La Dame aux Camellias (1927), and Casanova, Tosca and Faust (1928). He chronicled changing fashions and city life and is regarded as one of the leading Art Deco artists. During World War II he created a series of works titled L’Exode that documented the German occupation of France.
Icart’s style of painting was based on the French masters of the 18th century, such as Jean-Antoine Watteau, Greuze, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. His drawings were influenced by Edgar Degas and Claude Monet; his rare watercolours bore features of the Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau.
It will be clear from his regular work with the Parisian fashion houses that Icart appreciated feminine beauty. It was probably for this reason that he was commissioned by Parisian publishers to provide plates for a number of erotic books, beginning with Les amusements du faune (1925)- a fantasy threesome of two women and a satyr; this was followed by Le Sopha (1935)- an Orientalist romp in a harem; Rabelais’ scandalous Gargantua & Pantagruel in 1936; , La vie des seins– ‘The Life of Breasts’ (1945)- by the sexologist Dr Jacobus X; La nuit et le moment (1946), and Félicia, Baudelaire‘s Fleurs du mal (1947).
Icart worked on three books by Pierre Louys: in1940 he designed plates for Chrysis– a version of Aphroditeand Leda, one of the author’s retellings of classical myths that forms part of Le Crepuscule des nymphes (‘Twilight of the Nymphs‘). Lastly, he provided illustrations for Louys’ Chansons de Bilitis in 1949. This last was one of a rush of new editions of the Songs issued after the end of the Second World War which I discuss in another post. The symbolism of Bilitis in the tree is also examined elsewhere. Icart had already created an etchings and aquatint of Leda and a large black swan in 1934; his sixteen plates for Louys’ rendering of the story are all tinged with blue to capture the authentic non-human nature of the helpless nymph that’s brought out the story.
Icart, Leda
The erotic nature of some of Icart’s own books is revealed by titles such as Intimité, 1917 and Venus, 1928. Icart’s depictions of women were always very feminine and highly stylish, mostly sensual, often erotic, but also often teasingly shy or humorous. Even when handling the most erotic of material, his designs were always charming, light and sweet.
Waltz Echoes
For more discussion of the work of Icart and of illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon. Please also refer to my Pierre Louys bibliography.
Several times previously, I’ve described the various books of poetry and prose written by the Belgian author Pierre Louys, as well as highlighting how his works have frequently been enhanced by the work of leading artists illustrating them.
Louys was a classically educated man with refined tastes. He read and translated Greek, and his books are scattered with references to obscure authors- the Renaissance theologian Erasmus, the Roman poet Tibullus and many French poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Louys was an artist and photographer (though he admittedly preferred to portray female nudes in both media) and he was a keen collector of art- not just Greek and Roman sculpture, but engravings of works by Fragonard and by cutting edge artists of the day, such as Odilon Redon, Felicien Rops and Auguste Rodin. Louys was also friendly with numerous writers, artists and musicians of the time. His friends and correspondents included Rodin himself, Mallarme, and the composer Claude Debussy. Louys and Rodin shared a model as girlfriend at one stage and the two men also shared a fascination with sexuality and eroticism. Rodin was an admirer of Bilitis and gave the book’s title to three erotic watercolour drawings he designed.
Debussy was an especially close friend- to the extent that Louys would confide his sexual exploits in the composer. In addition, they collaborated on two musical projects. In 1900 the musician took several of the verses from the Chansons de Bilitis (The Songs of Bilitis) and wrote a cycle of actual songs for piano with them. The composer Charles Kochlin was also inspired by Bilitis to write a suite of songs for voice and piano in 1923.
Rodin’s sculpture for the stage play of Aphrodite
Louys and Debussy also worked together for some time on an adaptation of Louys’ first novel, Aphrodite, but that idea eventually came to nothing, which led the author in 1910 to pass the right to compose a light opera to Louis de Gramont and Camille Erlanger. Initially, Louys was unhappy with seeing his story brought to life on stage, but when the production opened in 1906 he was won over- as were audiences around France, for it toured extensively in the subsequent years. As a result, Louys agreed to a dramatisation of La Femme et pantin (Woman & Puppet) by Pierre Frondaie in 1910 and then agreed to a further, lavish, stage adaptation of Aphrodite in 1914, once again by Frondaie. As before, at the outset, the author was cautious about the production, but he warmed to it. Rodin paid tribute to the work (and provided lots of free extra publicity) by contributing a life-sized plaster sculpture of a female nude to use on stage and, despite the rather plodding verse dialogue composed by Frondaie, audiences responded well- not least, probably, because of the amount of nudity and sexual innuendo involved.
Dans les jardins de la Déesse– Illustration of the Aphrodite stage play by Charles Martin, from Gazette du Bon Ton, 1914.
Such was the prominence of Louys’ works that several other musical projects were based upon them. Max von Oberleitner wrote an opera inspired by Aphrodite in 1910; Riccardo Zandonia founded an opera, Conchita, on the novel La Femme et pantin in 1921 and Albert Willemetz composed an operetta based upon Les Aventures du Roi Pausole in 1930. The number of scores, and the variety of languages involved, are testimony to the popularity and standing of Louys.
Louys therefore emerges as a major, and highly influential, figure in the Decadent, Aesthetic and Symbolist movements. He is scarcely a household name any longer, but for his prolific and provocative output, deserves to be better known. For more detail of the writing of Pierre Louys, see my Bibliography for him.
In 1864 the French author Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) published A Rebours, ‘Against the Grain’ or ‘Against Nature,’ a strange plotless novel that almost single-handedly defined and popularised the Symbolist movement in literature and art. He established Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme as its key poets and Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin and Odilon Redon as its archetypal artists.
The ‘hero’ of the story, Des Esseintes, embraces and revels in his outsider status, deliberately cutting himself off from the metropolitan life of Paris so that he may indulge his weird tastes in isolation from society. He immerses himself in his books, his art and in sensations: incense, alcohol and the colours and textures of his furnishings.
From the first chapter, we know that Des Esseintes is odd and decadent:
“He had taken to carnal repasts with the eagerness of a crotchety man affected with a depraved appetite and given to sudden hungers, whose taste is quickly dulled and surfeited. Associating with country squires, he had taken part in their lavish suppers where, at dessert, tipsy women would unfasten their clothing and strike their heads against the tables; he had haunted the green rooms, loved actresses and singers… Finally, satiated and weary of this monotonous extravagance and the sameness of their caresses, he had plunged into the foul depths of society, hoping by the contrast of squalid poverty to revive his desires and stimulate his deadened senses…Like those young girls who, in the grip of puberty, crave coarse and vile foods, he dreamed of and practiced perverse loves and pleasures. This was the end! As though satisfied with having exhausted everything, as though completely surrendering to fatigue, his senses fell into a lethargy and impotence threatened him.”
Des Esseintes’ retreat from Parisian society and from his old habits is thus forced on him by physical circumstance, as much as by satiety and ennui. Even alone, though, he is still able to explore his erotic tastes. This is the description of Moreau’s Salome:
“In the perverse odour of the perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of the temple, Salomé, her left arm outstretched in a gesture of command, her right arm drawn back and holding a large lotus on a level with her face, slowly advances on her toes, to the rhythm of a stringed instrument played by a woman seated on the ground.
Her face is meditative, solemn, almost august, as she commences the lascivious dance that will awaken the slumbering senses of old Herod. Her breasts rise and fall, her nipples hardening under the friction of her whirling necklaces, the diamonds scintillate against her glistening skin. Her bracelets, her girdles, her rings flash. On her triumphal robe, seamed with pearls, flowered with silver and laminated with gold, the breastplate of jewels, each link of which is a precious stone, flashes serpents of fire against the pallid flesh, delicate as a tea-rose: its jewels like splendid insects with dazzling elytra, veined with carmine, dotted with yellow gold, diapered with blue steel, speckled with peacock green….”
In Gustave Moreau’s work, conceived independently of the Testament themes, Des Esseintes as last saw realized the superhuman and exotic Salomé of his dreams. She was no longer the mere performer who wrests a cry of desire and of passion from an old man by a perverted twisting of her loins; who destroys the energy and breaks the will of a king by trembling breasts and quivering belly. She became, in a sense, the symbolic deity of indestructible lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, of accursed Beauty, distinguished from all others by the catalepsy which stiffens her flesh and hardens her muscles; the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, baneful, like the Helen of antiquity, fatal to all who approach her, all who behold her, all whom she touches.” (c.5)
Des Esseintes’ bed resembles one that might be found in a painting by Greuze: “a broad, white, lacquered bed which is an additional titillation, a final touch of depravity so precious to seasoned voluptuaries, who leer at the false chastity and hypocritical modesty of Greuze‘s tender virgins, at the pretended purity of a licentious bed that seems destined for an innocent child or a young virgin.”
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Une jeune fille
Des Esseintes is a student of classical and medieval Latin. Perhaps predictably, his favourite book is Petronius Satyricon– a realistic slice of everyday Roman life:
“Observing the facts of life, stating them in clear, definite form, he revealed the petty existence of the people, their happenings, their bestialities, their passions. One glimpses the inspector of furnished lodgings who has inquired after the newly arrived travellers; bawdy houses where men prowl around nude women, while through the half-open doors of the rooms couples can be seen in dalliance; the society of the time, in villas of an insolent luxury, a revel of richness and magnificence, or in the poor quarters with their rumpled, bug-ridden folding-beds; impure sharpers, like Ascylte and Eumolpe in search of a rich windfall; old incubi with tucked-up dresses and plastered cheeks of white lead and red acacia; plump, curled, depraved little girls of sixteen; women who are the prey of hysterical attacks; hunters of heritages offering their sons and daughters to debauched testators. All pass across the pages. They debate in the streets, rub elbows in the baths, beat each other unmercifully as in a pantomime.”
chapter 3
Amongst his more modern books there is the De Figuris Veneris, or the Manual of Classical Erotology (1824) by Friederich-Karl Forberg. This is a survey of straight, gay and lesbian sexual practices, based upon classical sources. In 1906 a version illustrated in colour by Paul Avril was published, something which would surely have delighted Des Esseintes.
Foremost among the contemporary authors admired by Des Esseintes is Baudelaire. What has earned this “boundless” respect is the writer’s explorations into the sinful depths of the human soul- its passions, avarice, “paternal infatuations and senile lusts.” Obliquely, therefore, Huysmans suggests once again that there is something unwholesome about his lead character, who- like Baudelaire- has “watched the very gradual emergence of those horrifying passions that come with age… [in which] couples resort to filial caresses whose apparent childishness seems to offer novelty, and to artlessly maternal embraces whose tenderness is restful and affords, so to speak, interesting feelings of remorse inspired by some vague notion of incest.”
De Sade (or, rather, sadism) receives commentary too. Huysmans takes the radical approach that the condition, or fetish, is not merely a matter of “wallowing in sexual excesses… a deviant manifestation of genetic instincts, a case of satyriasis in its most extreme form…” Instead, he sees it as a “sacrilegious deed, a moral rebellion, an act of spiritual debauchery” whose obscenities can only exist in opposition to Christian religion. It is therefore a modern parallel to the “unnatural copulation [and] bestial orgies” of the medieval witches’ sabbaths. This is certainly a provocative idea but then, Des Esseintes could find something queasily corrupt in almost anything: witness his description of an especially fine Benedictine liqueur as having a “volatile fire concealed beneath a completely virginal, completely inexperienced sweetness, delighting the nose with its hint of corruption wrapped in caress that was at once childish and devout.” This renders it as a spirit distilled by Greuze.
A Rebours, ‘Against Nature,’ has its faults- it can perhaps too often lapse into catalogues of books and philosophers admired by Huysmans, but it is a snapshot of a particular point in the emergence of the Symbolist movement, an icon of its thoughts and sentiments, and worthy of repeated reads.
Further Reading
For more information, see- of course- Huysmans’ book, which is available as a Oxford University Press paperback, and on symbolist art see, amongst others, Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context (1972), Edward Lucie Smith’s classic 1972 Symbolist Art, Pierre-Louis Mathieu’s Symbolist Generation (1991) and, by S Conroy, Nudes, Nymphs and Fairies: Undercurrents in Victorian Art (2022) and on Greuze and his contemporaries (as well as Petronius) The Broken Pitcher: Sex and the Darker Side of the Enlightenment (2023).
English poet Muriel Stuart vividly depicted a centaur’s passion for one of his own kind in her verse, The Centaur’s First Love:
“I hunted her down the morning. Sharp hoof and shoulders bare, She fled me in swift scorning, With her great golden mane of hair Firing the hot and quivering air. Down broad bleached plain, up sunburnt hill She led me and I followed still… her hair alone With long gold fingers urged me on Till I was mad and blind with love… I hunted her down the morning.
I loved the beast in her, the hide Sweating and sleek, the heaving side; I burned to stifle savagely The human mouth that taunted me The supple, tawny flanks above… I saw her stumble, sway and fall. But from her eyes as I drew near Leapt fear and something more than fear, She did not stir, she did not move, She knew the ancient Sport of Love, She knew me at the side of her! From great gold mane to trembling hoof The sleek, the tawny hide of her- All the predestined sweets thereof Were mine to crush or choke or kill …
Kisses grew quicker, closer still, Lip to lip, hoof to hoof we lay … The Centaurs’ day, the Centaurs’ love! The glorious chase was all for this, More fleet the flight, more fierce the kiss! She knew how doubly sweet would be Her first surrender, and to me How sweet the vengeance on her scorning… And now I lie and laugh with her, She will not fly, I shall not stir To hunt her down the morning!”
Kley, Centaur Courtship Display
Rothaug, Drei Kentauren
The violent passion described above could be expressed in another way. Centaurs are powerful and aggressive creatures and one common cause of animosity between them is rivalry over sexual partners. Heinrich Kley’s Centaur Courtship Display has two stallions showing off in front of three naked nymphs; one is rearing up, the other rolling on his back, but it is easy to imagine how this could readily degenerate into fighting between the two, as was clearly shown in Alexander Rothaug’s Three Centaurs and Centaurs Fighting, in both of which the third person present is a female centaur. Giorgio de Chirico painted A Dying Centaur, which appears to represent the aftermath of just such a confrontation. In the foreground a centaur is in his death throes on his back; a second figure is just glimpsed disappearing around some rocks in the distance.
de Chirico, Dying Centaur
Rothaug, Teased Centaur
Their courtship could be playful as well as passionate, as in Alexander Rothaug’s Teased Centaur, which shows a female of the species grinning as she reaches to pull a male’s beard. Wilhelm Trübner depicted centaur lovers in several pictures, first in pursuit through the forest and then in a passionate embrace near a waterfall.
Trubner, Centaur Pair in the Forest I
Trubner, Centaur Pair in the Forest II
Trubner, Centaur Lovers
Franz von Stuck’s Sunset (1891) shows a centaur husband and wife, arms around each other’s waists, as they watch the twilight glow behind trees on the horizon. It is a charming moment of intimacy and affection. Sebastiano Ricci depicted a harmonious Centaur Family, in which the mother suckles an infant and the father offers a pet lion cub to his older son. Odilon Redon drew a centaur couple standing together, holding hands, in another clear demonstration of partnership and love.
von Stuck, Sonnenuntergang, 1891
Redon, Centaur et centauresse
In contrast, consider Ferdinand Keller’s Lonely Centaur, who gazes at his reflection in the solitude of a mountain stream. The setting and pose eloquently suggest dejection and isolation. This loneliness may be the result of the centaur race dying out. The Cuban Symbolist poet José-Maria de Heredia imagined how this might come about in his poem His Mate, a lament by a centauress “Because our breed is day by day diminishing… as they forsake us and madly follow Woman.”
Symbolism was an artistic movement which came to prominence in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, most especially in France and Belgium. Unlike the Impressionists, they rejected the effort to simply paint nature as it appeared and sought, instead, to portray ideas through symbolic images. The Symbolists drew their inspiration from several sources- from literature, especially the Symbolist poets such as Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarme- and from artists including the British Pre-Raphaelites.
Several themes occupied Symbolist painters. One was religion and mystical spirituality. Inevitably, given the French and Belgian roots of the movement, Catholic images were common, but more ‘pagan’ scenes were painted as well, doubtless drawing in part upon Baudelaire‘s admiration for supernatural themes. Fairies, angels and other spiritual, magical and fantasy beings were regularly depicted.
The Spirit of the Forest, by Edgar Maxence
Alongside these devotional and spiritual scenes (perhaps inevitably) were sexual ones. Within this general category, two classes of fantasy image were created. The first depicted mature, often voluptuous, women- who were shown as sensual, self-possessed and- not infrequently- dangerous to know. Symbolist paintings were seldom situated in the present day; instead, they drew upon a wide range of classical, Biblical, literary and traditional myths and portrayed sirens, Salomes and other such femmes fatales. The artists’ preference for such highly sexed but perilous women in considerable measure derived from writers such as Baudelaire, whose verse celebrated passionate, mysterious and potentially deadly lovers. This was the period of ‘Decadent’ writers and artists and such images both fed and formed such a taste. Poet Verlaine declared, for example, that “I love that word, Decadence… all glistening with purple. It is the combination of the sensual spirit and the sorrowful flesh and of all the violent splendours of the later Roman Empire.”
Typical female figures depicted included sphinxes, sirens, witches, angels of death (see Bellery Desfontaines, 1897, below) and women like Pandora, Helen of Troy, Medusa and Salome. Writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, in his novel, Against the Grain (À rebours– 1884), devoted a chapter to celebrating and describing Gustave Moreau’s painting of Salome. Huysmans lauded the artist as a genius and praised his image as “the symbolic deity of indestructible lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, of accursed Beauty, distinguished from all others by the catalepsy which stiffens her flesh and hardens her muscles; the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, baneful, like the Helen of antiquity, fatal to all who approach her, all who behold her, all whom she touches.”
Moreau, Salome
Huysmans depicted the book’s hero, the aesthete Des Esseintes, as being “Like those young girls who, in the grip of puberty, crave coarse and vile foods, he dreamed of and practiced perverse loves and pleasures. ” Des Esseintes’ favourite book was the scandalous Satyricon by Petronius, with its decadent descriptions of “bawdy houses where men prowl around nude women, while through the half-open doors of the rooms couples can be seen in dalliance… old incubi with tucked-up dresses and plastered cheeks of white lead and red acacia; plump, curled, depraved little girls of sixteen; women who are the prey of hysterical attacks; hunters of heritages offering their sons and daughters to debauched testators…” A conscious revelling in the forbidden was part of the style- as well, as can be seen, in a promotion of ancient Rome as a world of orgies and uninhibited lust (compare the works of Pierre Louys).
Charles Curran, Bacchanal, 1890
Another female heroine beloved of the period was Salammbo, the priestess of Astarte who gives her name to Flaubert’s 1862 novel. Her erotic dance with a python was a scene a favourite of numerous artists at the time, combining as it did two perennially popular themes- sex and orientalism.
Charles Allen Winter, Fantasie Egyptienne, 1898
Critic Roger Marx declared that “There is something sphinx-like about the eternal female.” Jean Delville’s Idol of Perversity, which I’ve illustrated before, is an epitome of the style, as is Alexandre Seon’s The Despair of the Chimera, shown below. Delville’s painting was, perhaps, well-named, for it emphasised a central aspect of one type of Symbolism.
In 1933 art critic Antoine Orliac proposed that there were two sorts of Symbolism: Black, which was full of macabre, gothic images and morbidity, and White, which was more angelic and spiritual. Firmly in the Black category sit pictures by Delville and Felicien Rops. Journalist Laurence Jerrold published an essay on Symbolism in the American arts journal, The Chap Book, in 1896. It was entitled ‘The Uses of Perversity’ and it praised this strand of imagery. “Idealism [another term for Symbolism] is our perversion, and the Soul depraves us. We are drinking the dregs of the immaterial and have touched the dingiest bottoms of purity.” Perversity, he explained, was not mere “waywardness”- “it has more of the perverted than of the perverse.” It was all about decadence, “innuendo and salaciousness.” Jerrold declared “The fruits are not seldom ill-flavoured, but the flavour is strong, and the uses of this new perversity are not insipid, though they be but bittersweet.”
Bellery-Desfontaines, Angel of Death
Suggestions of lesbianism were also popular- whether in the frequent portraits of Sappho or more erotic scenarios: examples include Joseph Granie’s The Kiss, George de Feure’s The Voice of Evil, To the Abyss and Temptation or Charles Maurin’s Dawn of Love. As in the works of Pierre Louys, the late nineteenth century saw a far greater focus fall on the poet’s sexuality than on her status as a composer of verse.
Seon, The despair of the Chimera, 1890
In contrast to these mature women, though, many artists preferred to paint younger figures. A leading and highly influential example is the painting Hope by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. An artist of a slightly earlier generation, Chavannes was taken up as an inspiration by many of the younger Symbolists: Gauguin, for example, always had a reproduction of the painting pinned up in his studios in Pont-Aven and, later, Tahiti.
Hope, Puvis de Chavannes, 1872
Puvis’ Hope typifies the second strand of female nude painted by the Symbolists and- indeed, many of the ideas or allegories that artists in the movement strove to represent. A close comparison is Love and Life by British artist George Frederick Watts (see below) who, along with Burne-Jones, was a key inspiration for the Symbolists.
Edward Burne-Jones, Perseus & Andromeda
Together, both Watts and Burne-Jones supplied painter like Puvis with a highly influential ideal of female beauty and, in turn, as French art historian Philippe Jullian wrote, “Hope, that scarcely pubescent girl, contributed greatly to the creation of the Symbolist ideal, for she resembled a Burne-Jones.” (In fact, the model was Emma Dobigny, who was popular with numerous artists including Degas and Corot; she was born in 1851.) Rather like Hope, Watt’s figure of Life is a rather unformed figure and, even more so, her expression is one of lost bafflement.
Watts, Love & Life
One of the leading figures in Symbolism was the writer Josephin Peladan, who styled himself ‘Sar,’ a Persian word meaning ‘magician.’ Peladan’s series of novels, La Decadence Latine, promoted an androgynous ideal, proposing hermaphrodites as the creatures of the future. For example, he praised “Virginal youth of incomparable glamour, the only absolute grace, delicious unpublished poem… naked flesh which has not weakened, a still-soaring spirit… praise be to You!”
Drawing upon Watts and Burne-Jones, a certain perfect Symbolist female emerged- that of the young girl (although it’s highly arguable that this wasn’t something unique to this one genre but was common amongst many styles of late nineteenth century painting). So, in 1895, the novelist Paul Adam, reviewing that year’s exhibition by Peladan’s Salon de Rose Croix, commented on the prevalence of:
“nymphs in diaphanous garments who flit through woods of red trees all over the salon.. rather pale and almost always thin, long-thighed and graced with embryonic breasts, they all seem to be still waiting for the state of womanhood.”
Of Gustave Moreau’s Jason (1865) Symbolist painter Cornelius Ary Renan described in the Gazette des Beaux Arts for 1899 how “two tender puberties [the hero and a fairy], brimful of energy, unite in their innocence… Memory turns back towards the androgynous attractions of a prophane Sodom.” Edmond van Offel’s ‘Summer Rain’ is another typical example of this Symbolist ideal.
These figures seem to encapsulate two conflicting ideals- a second dichotomy within Symbolism. On the one hand, the emphases upon virginity and innocence link us back to the Christian strands in Symbolist iconography discussed at the start. Evocations of the Virgin Mary, Eve before the Fall and other such ideals of (feminine) purity were very popular themes in Symbolism. Yet- as Ary Renan clearly implied- there could be other meanings and responses to such figures. Laurence Jerold in the Chap Book described this:
“A virginal appearance and the candour of an “enfant de chœur” [choir boy] are its necessary conditions. The hair, dark for women, preferably golden for men, is long, forlorn, and parted. Complexions are of wax when feminine; when masculine, of pale peach-blossom! A cherub’s smile plays on the lips, and eyes must, within the bounds of feasibility, show the vacuity of an infant’s. In voice and gesture, being more easily practised, is the new puerility most felicitously expressed. The secret lies in the suppression of both. The voice must be “white,” and every accent, every shade of tone that gives but the faint image of a colour, is a flaw. A still grosser imperfection would be aught of hasty or unmeasured in gesture or movement. In small-talk anent the Soul, as in the impressive elocution of nursery rhymes, carnal oblivion must be insured by immovableness of limb, and further than the uplifting of a finger the soulful do not venture. The golden-haired youth, lisping with the “voix blanche” [literally ‘white voice’- clear tones, perhaps] of white-robed “premières communiantes” [first communion], pictures the perversion of purity.”
Curran, Venus Unveiling Pandora
There may be a contrast, then, between surface appearances and actuality- and, as nymphs, dryads and mermaids, these figures could evoke not Edenic innocence so much as uninhibited natural instincts- Dionysian orgies and unrestrained bacchanals.
Moreau, Jason & Medea
van Offel, Summer Rain
There was quickly a reaction against this too. Novelist Octave Mirbeau attacked the Symbolists as (amongst other insults) “pederasts,” condemning their preference for ‘Papuan natives, embryonic forms and larvae.’ The first target was doubtless a dig at painters like Gauguin, who went to the Pacific to paint (and have relationships with) young teenagers. That said, (and perhaps predictably) author Huysmans congratulated Gauguin on sharing his “disgust with mannequins with pink, perfect breasts and neat, firm stomachs…” The artist Odilon Redon wrote in A Soi-Meme that “No artist is intellectual when, having painted a nude woman, he leaves us with the feeling that she is going to get dressed straightaway. The intellectual painter shows us a nude girl in such an honest way that we are convinced of their nudity… Puvis de Chavannes’ female nudes never get dressed straight away.” Thus, Symbolist art divides between what Jullian called “young, gentle girls” and older, more sensual and-perhaps- less reassuring figures.
As a movement, Symbolism in both literature and art was constantly intrigued by the power and complexities of sexuality. It liked to provoke and challenge audiences with daring and risque themes, and its portrayal of the feminine was clearly part of this.
I also now have a page dedicated to nymphs: for lots more information, please visit my nymphology blog.
Leon Frederic, Untitled
Carlos Schwabe, illustration for Baudelaire’s Spleen & Ideal (1907)
The Renaissance of Venus (1877) Walter Crane Tate Gallery
The painters of the Symbolist movement were particularly keen upon classical mythological scenes and made good use of the many gods, goddesses and other beings. Aphrodite and her sisters appear quite frequently in pictures. The Birth of Venus is a common scene, sometimes presented in slavish imitation of Botticelli, as is the case with Walter Crane’s canvas of 1877, The Renaissance of Venus. Doves flutter past, myrtle (a plant sacred to Aphrodite) sprouts on the shore and the naked goddess tries to control her billowing hair, whilst looking down demurely to one side. Venus is an attractive young woman, but with quite a muscular frame. We might suppose that Crane wished to represent the intersex aspect of the goddess, but in fact the story goes that his wife objected to him working from naked female models, so he painted instead from an Italian called Alessandro di Marco, a young man popular with many London artists. Allegedly Lord Leighton spotted Alessandro’s physique adapted to become Aphrodite when the picture was first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. Far less inspired is the image of Venus’ Mirror included below, in which Crane’s goddess seems no more than a Victorian lady admiring herself- though admittedly she may be suffering something of a wardrobe malfunction.
Crane, The Mirror of Venus (or, Art and Life)
French painter Gustave Moreau created some comparably conventional pictures: in his Birth of Venus (Venus Appearing to Fishermen) a similar long-haired, slender and youthful blonde emerges from the waves to receive the fishermen’s obeisance, whilst The Birth of Venus/ Naissance de Venus is an even more slavish copy of Botticelli and others. More original is his Venus Rising from the Sea (1866), in which the goddess appears, arms outstretched to support her voluminous locks, whilst attendants offer her pearls and coral. Moreau’s vision of the goddess is always rather pallid and insipid, though, lacking Aphrodite’s energy and power.
Moreau
In contrast, Odilon Redon offers several sensually glowing visions of the same divine birth. The bright pink body of the goddess is revealed within a rosy heart of a shell, as if emerging from a womb (1866 and two from 1912). In a third canvas, dating from 1910, she sits at ease in a deep red shell, watching the breaking waves. In a fourth scene, also from 1912, she floats ashore in a giant nautilus shell. Redon’s images, with their flesh pink tones and the emphasis upon the oyster-like shell, are expressly sensual. One of the ancient symbols of the goddess was the scallop shell, a reference to her birth from the shell as we see in Botticelli and in Moreau’s Naissance, but it also signified the female genitalia and emphasised the goddess’ sexual nature. Indeed, in the play Rudens by Roman author Plautus, two girls who are devoted to the goddess are described as conchas, shells: this term seems to have a double meaning.
Redon, Birth of Venus, 1912
Redon, Birth of Venus, 1912
Swiss Arnold Böcklin is known for his classical scenes, in which he regularly portrayed mythical beings such as sirens, nymphs, centaurs and fauns. He also tackled Venus’ birth several times. His Venus Anadyomene (born of the waves), painted in 1872, is carried across the sea by a monstrous dolphin (another animal closely linked to the goddess in her marine aspects), whilst little cupids with butterfly wings flutter above her head, holding gauzy draperies around her. A Birth of Venus from 1869 rehearses the same scene, but with only a couple of cupids and the goddess’ robes merging into what resembles a waterspout arising from the waves. Another such picture, also called the Green Venus, portrays the goddess walking on water.
Böcklin, Venus Anadyomene
Nearly all of Böcklin’s goddesses seem to be the same staid-looking Germanic matron, who is largely devoid of sexual frisson. This is especially the case with his triptych Venus Genitrix (the mother of the (Roman) people ) of 1895. This version of the goddess attracted official worship under the Caesars in Rome in order to promote maternal qualities and, in addition, to underline Julian family claims to descent from her. Böcklin’s Venus is a respectable wife- who plays a triangle (?)- and is seen with her husband and her children (although the bare bottomed Eros/ Cupid is- admittedly- somewhat at odds with this overall tone. I assume he’s there to bring the two young lovers together). If so, Böcklin’s Venus Dispatching Love of 1901 depicts a slightly earlier episode from this love story. In this image, a rather more voluptuous and wanton Venus is seen reclining beneath a myrtle, sending her son to bring trouble in mortals’ lives.
Venus Dispatching Love, 1901
Sexuality was never far from the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98). His Venus Between Two Terminal Gods (1895) depicts the goddess wearing a long, off-the-shoulder dress, with dark, tousled hair. She faces the viewer impassively, sternly even, as a dove glides in front of her. The statues on either side hold pan-pipes and carry baskets overflowing with fruit on their heads. This is a respectable, slightly intimidating deity, whereas in Eros and Aphrodite, she is blatantly the harlot queen of physical love. We see her from behind, wearing only knee length stockings and reaching between her legs. Eros powders between her buttocks and thighs with a large soft brush, at the same time sporting a large erection; it appears as though they are both getting rather excited by the titivations. The indications of incest- and of a prostitute preparing herself for a client- are typical of Beardsley’s taste. Nonetheless, they are very much in the tradition of Bronzino and the mythology as well.
Symbolist style was adopted by society portraitist John Singer Sargent when he was asked to provide murals for Boston public library. His cycle, titled The Triumph of Religion, covers Egyptian and Assyrian religion as well Bible scenes portraying Judaism and Christianity. The work on the cylce, which is still to be found on the hallway of the third floor of the McKim Building, occupied Sargent between 1890 and 1919.
Astarte, John Singer Sargent
Amongst the pagan gods the artist portrayed is a striking Astarte, painted in 1895, who wears a blue robe and stands upon a crescent moon. She is encrusted with beads and gold ornamentation highly reminiscent of Gustav Klimt. Naked attendants surround her, their hands raised in worship. Her eyes are closed and her lips bear a beatific smile. She is serene and powerful, sparkling with light, and is arguably a great deal more attractive a figure than the rather worthy ‘Mysteries of the Rosary,’ ‘Dogma of Redemption,’ ‘Israelites Oppressed’ or ‘Prophets.’
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