19th century erotica
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The 19th century saw the further proliferation of mass produced texts and illustrations. Add to this mix was the new medium of photography, which begot erotic photography shortly afterwards and which led to developments such as erotic postcards.
Contents |
England
Henry Spencer Ashbee, Aubrey Beardsley, Theresa Berkley, Charles Carrington, Havelock Ellis, Frederick Hankey, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde
France
- French erotica, 19th century French erotica
- French can-can, Moulin Rouge, 19th century Paris, 19th century French literature, modern art
Key figures include Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Binet, Gustave Courbet, Achille Devéria, Théophile Gautier, Jules Gay, Edouard Manet, Octave Mirbeau, Alfred de Musset, Félicien Rops, Bénedict-Auguste Morel
Painting
- Ingres
- Félicien Rops
- Edouard Manet
- Gustave Courbet
- Achille Devéria
- Eugène le Poitevin
- Jean-Jacques Lequeu
- Félix Vallotton
Before the 1860s, Western artists needed a pretext to depict eroticism and nudity. Mythology or martyrology were the most popular pretexts. This changed after the 1860s with the arrival of realism in modern art. A key painting that illustrates this transition is Manet's Olympia.
Beginning with Manet's Olympia, 1863 and jumping to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, modern art took as its subject matter the urban landscape of the Industrial Revolution, which included such themes as prostitution.
In 1877, French artist Edouard Manet exhibited "Nana", a life-size portrayal of an prostitute in undergarments, standing before her fully clothed gentleman caller. The model for it was the popular courtesan Henriette Hauser. Manet was so much taken with the description of the "precociously immoral" Nana in Zola's L'Assommoir that he gave the title "Nana" to his portrait of Henriette Hauser. The painting was rejected by the hanging committee for the Paris Salon of 1877.
Academic art
Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies or universities.
Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des beaux-arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and the art that followed these two movements in the attempt to synthesize both of their styles, and which is best reflected by the paintings of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Thomas Couture, and Hans Makart. In this context it is often called "academism", "academicism", "L'art pompier", and "eclecticism", and sometimes linked with "historicism" and "syncretism".
L'art pompier, literally "Fireman Art", is a derisory late nineteenth century French term for large "official" academic art paintings of the time, especially historical or allegorical ones. It derives from the fancy helmets, with horse-hair tails, worn at the time by French firemen - now only for parades - which are fatally similar to the Greek-style helmets often worn in such works by allegorical personifications, classical warriors, or Napoleonic cavalry. It also suggests half-puns in French with Pompéin ("from Pompeii"), and pompeux ("pompous"). Pompier art was seen by those who used the term as the epitome of the values of the bourgeoisie, and as insincere and overblown.
L'art Pompier (a term supporters mostly avoid) has enjoyed something of a critical revival in the last twenty years, partly caused by the new Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where it is displayed on more equal terms with the Impressionists and Realist painters of the period.
The Manifeste Pompier (Fireman Manifesto) by Louis-Marie Lecharny, was published in Paris in 1990. He also wrote L'art Pompier (1998).
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry, Alfred Agache, Alexandre Cabanel and Thomas Couture are among the classic Pompier artists.
Literature
Printers of erotica in the late 1800s: Jules Gay, Henry Kistemaeckers, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, Isidore Liseux
- Gamiani
- Alcide Bonneau's translations
- Charles Carrington
- Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal
- Théophile Gautier
- Octave Mirbeau
- Alfred de Musset
- Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
- Pierre Louÿs
- Alfred Binet
- French academic art
Germany
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Hungary
