Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)  

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Today is Icon of Erotic Art #33 day. Remember the series is handmade, I'm not pulling this out of a list. So it was with great pleasure that I was reminded Eric Fischl's Bad Boy painting[1].

Bad Boy (1981) depicts a young boy looking at and older woman shown in a provocative masturbatory (a beaver shot to be precise) pose on a bed, while the subject is surreptitiously slipping his hand into the woman's purse and presumedly stealing its contents.

The painting unites eroticism and crime, between the two is a very strong link first verbally juxtaposed by Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly in Happiness in Crime, a short story first published in the 1874 collection Les Diaboliques. I hope to explore this connection later.

Bad Boy is a painting which provokes the imagination. What is the relationship between the older woman and the boy. Is he her son? Is it a neighborhood boy who entered her house without her knowing? Is the woman aware that she is being stolen from? Is it a game they play regularly and is the boy rewarded the money afterwards? Who is to tell.

I imagine the neighborhood outside the room depicted suburbian. I imagine her husband watering the garden in a David Hockney painting manner. Or taking a A Bigger Splash in their pool. Or the same husband is entertaining his gay lover in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).