Victorian Secrets
National Review Online, November 21 2001
Ernest Normand: Bondage
Judged by current standards, Ernest Normand's 1895 painting Bondage must rank as one of the least politically correct canvases ever to decorate the walls of a major gallery. This massive (six feet by ten feet) depiction of the sale of slave girls in an imagined Ancient Egypt manages to combine ethnic, sexual, and cultural insensitivity in a way that leaves Howard Stern looking like Maya Angelou. The villain of the picture is a sinister Eastern potentate of the pre-Islamic fanatic variety. This richly clad monster of decadence is reclining (these people never sit up straight) on a sofa as he contemplates the women being offered for sale by a sleazy slaver (vaguely Semitic, skullcap). At his feet a previously purchased (and, naturally, topless) slave girl fingers an unusually shaped musical instrument. The merchandise on offer to the salacious pharaoh includes one nubile pseudo-Nubian (dark skin, but with the sort of suspiciously Caucasian features that would suggest that there were very few Nubian models available to pose in Victorian London) and two naked white females (one of them, in fact, no more than a child).
The pseudo-Nubian, clad only in a gold-colored girdle, seems content with her lot as she stands proudly and provocatively in front of her potential purchaser. By contrast, the white captives, faced with the prospect of unmentionable foreign beastliness, and blessed, we are supposed to think, with a superior European sense of refinement, are cowering and ashamed. Their fate is not yet finally resolved, but they can take no comfort from the fact that, before taking his decision, the pharaoh is consulting with one of his concubines. This wicked lady has, you guessed it, also mislaid her blouse, and, by the look of her, she is someone, who is very comfortable with foreign beastliness.
Nominally, of course, Bondage is a deeply moral picture, a condemnation of sexual exploitation and heathen wickedness, and Victorian art lovers would have been shocked — shocked — if anyone had attributed their interest in this painting to anything other than the highest of motives. It is the tension between private fascination and its public justification that makes this particular work, and the new exhibition of which it forms a part, so interesting.
The exhibition Exposed: The Victorian Nude opened recently at London's Tate Gallery and will be arriving in New York next spring. It is not, let it be said, a showcase for much great art and in certain respects (notably the use and abuse of images of children) it can make for disturbing viewing, but as a demonstration of how the Victorians managed to satisfy their all too human interest in erotic spectacle within the constraints of a culture that was officially (if not always in reality) highly puritanical, the exhibition adds to our understanding of a society that was always less narrow-minded and more complex than the traditional caricature would suggest.
It was true that Victorian artists did face difficulties in attempting to reconcile the conflicting demands of propriety and pleasure, but the solution came, as so often, from that most helpful of vices, hypocrisy. The depiction of nudity could, apparently, be made palatable if it was somehow removed from any threatening hint of carnal reality. Sculpture, with its avoidance of those suspect flesh tones, posed few problems, while the trick with painting was to dress up the undressed in allegorical, classical, historical, or mythological guise.
Joseph Noel Paton: The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon
The Tate show includes nudie pics of Galatea, Thetis, Andromeda, Harmonia, Circe, Diana (the goddess not the princess), four Lady Godivas, four Psyches, eight Venuses and one languid lovely who liked to lie naked on a cloud, lost in some deeply, ahem, mystical reverie. Contributing to the carnival are the ranks of the anonymous unadorned, innumerable saucy sprites, countless naughty nymphs, and, fluttering within the frame of Joseph Paton's The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847, detail above), literally dozens of our little fairy friends. It was the addition of, say, gauzy wings, Mount Olympus, or antiquity that provided the necessary camouflage. They made it possible to deny that this otherwise unseemly nudity had any connection to contemporary existence, and as such it could be acceptable for public display, particularly if an improving moral message was attached.
An early example was William Etty's Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm (1830-32). This painting, described, accurately but unkindly, by the great landscapist John Constable as "Etty's Bumboat" shows a young man on a vessel only marginally less flimsy than the robes (very) sporadically draped over the lucky fellow's entourage of enthusiastically unclad nymphs. The problem was that, despite some storm clouds over the bumboat, the supposedly devout Mr. Etty made sin look like a lot of fun, a difficulty also encountered by Oscar Rejlander in the production of his epic photograph The Two Ways of Life (1857), where the youth taking the low road (strewn with wanton naked hussies) looks considerably more cheerful than his downcast, yet supposedly uplifted, counterpart gloomily headed towards a dull, but virtuous, future.
Oscar Rejlander: The Two Ways of Life
Perhaps it was this ambiguity that led Etty to try a different approach the following year. In Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret (1833), a knight is rescuing a naked damsel from an evil torturer. Apart from the unusual twist that the knight is female, the painting is a classic of the genre. It borrows from myth and the past (Spenser's 16th Century poem Faerie Queene) and it shows a nude woman who has been tied up, to a pillar on this occasion. In John Millais's The Knight Errant (1870, detail below), the armored warrior is, reassuringly, a man, but the unclad rescuee is once again bound, this time, for variety, to a tree. At least she will survive. The seven naked Christian martyrs in Faithful unto Death (Herbert Schmalz, 1888: five women roped to posts, two women slumped on the ground) are not so lucky. They will not be saved, in this life anyway. The next item on their menu is to be the menu, devoured by lions in front of a leering, jeering Roman mob.
Even allowing for the not always gentle conventions of S&M, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that these surprisingly frequent depictions of trussed-up, humiliated, or otherwise degraded women were in reality symptoms of a wider misogyny, a misogyny that ultimately causes many of the paintings in this exhibition to fail, despite their often very high level of technical accomplishment. This was not an era that was comfortable with any public recognition of the assertive, let alone sexually assertive, female, and the portrayals of women in a good number of these pictures suffer from the failure on the part of the artist to acknowledge that in the bedroom, as much as the ballroom, it takes two to tango. Instead, these ladies tend to be presented as purely passive objects, listless, dead-eyed or, if they are John Waterhouse's morbid Saint Eulalia (1885), just dead.
In this context, it is no shock to discover that when the female libido is depicted, it is often shown as a menace. In Frederic Leighton's The Fisherman and the Syren (1856-58, pictured above), for example, we are left no doubt that the winsome, helpless Mediterranean fisherman (a weak-willed foreigner, of course) will succumb to the charms of the "syren" (misspelled for added antiquity and depicted as a mermaid far more lascivious than anybody in Splash) and her seductive, but lethal, embrace. Thirty years later, John Collier's Lilith (1887) is a delightful portrait of an attractive, lively blonde, but the fact that she is hissing sweet nothings into the ear of a serpent reminds us that, according to Jewish legend, she was Adam's ex-wife and, in her subsequent career, a demon.
John Collier: Lilith
Fortunately, as the Victorian era progressed it was also possible to detect signs of a more even-handed approach towards the fairer sex, whether it be self-assured Aurora, the beautiful goddess confidently opening Herbert Draper's The Gates of Dawn (1900) or the perfect calm of Theodore Roussel's The Reading Girl (1886-87), a Whistler-influenced study of (as the London Spectator angrily noted) "an entirely nude model" leafing through a newspaper.
Reading a newspaper? The nude, it seemed, was finally coming down from Olympus and, even more dramatically, journey's end, it was now clear, might include the artist's bed. A number of the later works at the exhibition are given additional force by their creators' obvious willingness to reveal the true nature of their relationships with their subjects, something that would previously have been close to taboo. This can be seen most notably, perhaps, in William Orpen's unabashedly erotic Nude Study (1906), a compelling portrait of his model, and lover, Flossie Burnett. It is a highlight of the show, and a clear demonstration that, as Britain entered the Edwardian age, times had indeed changed.
Public acknowledgement of private pleasure would no longer have to be reserved for the gods.