Dreams of Desire 66 (Courbet)

Le Sommeil-Gustav Courbet 1866

The publication of Les Fleurs Du Mal by Charles Baudelaire in 1857 can rightly be judged as the birth of Modernity. Baudelaire’s innovation wasn’t in style or technique, but in the bold, shocking subject matter, (that would lead to obscenity trials) and its depiction of a sordid, urban milieu. As well as the poems themselves, Baudelaire as a perceptive art critic would have a great influence upon emerging young artists determined to break with convention and tradition, notably Edouard Manet (see Olympia Press: A Brief History of DBs which features his groundbreaking painting Olympia from 1863).

The great realist Gustave Courbet was  directly inspired by Baudelaire’s poem Femmes damnees Delphine et Hippolyte (Damned Women Delphine and Hippolyte) from Les Fleurs du mal in his masterful  erotic painting Le Sommeil (The Sleepers) from 1866. This provocative depiction of lesbianism  with its compelling, and at the time completely new, realism led to a police report and removal for display when first exhibited  in 1872. Le Sommeil was not subsequently allowed to be publicly shown until 1988.

1866 was also the year that Courbet completed a commission for his most famous erotic painting L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) with its graphic close up view of a naked woman’s genitals and abdomen. In February 2016 a Parisian court ruled that Facebook may be sued in France for removing the image from users pages.

The Origin of the World-Gustave Courbet 1866

(This is a revised version of a post that originally appeared here September 2016, in order for to fit in with the Dreams of Desire Series. If you like this post or my many other stories, poems, essays then my collection Motion No. 69 will be available for sale on 30th November 2017.)

Dreams of Desire 60 (Venus of Urbino)

Venus of Urbino-Titian circa 1532-1534

I have concentrated in the Dreams of Desire series on erotic images produced by the various avant-garde movements that followed the great rupture with tradition that was Impressionism, especially the Symbolist, Expressionist and Surrealist movements. However eroticism had long been a staple of Western Art, notably in the Renaissance.

Although Titian’s painting bears the title Venus of Urbino, it is immediately evident that it represents a break from the numerous preceding pictorial versions of the Goddess of Love. This is a Venus that is shown in a domestic scene as opposed to the bucolic countryside, and she has been largely stripped of her standard allegorical and mythological accoutrements.  The viewer is presented with a sensual and erotic image of a earthly woman (probably a courtesan); nothing more, nothing less.

Also startling in a painting almost 500 years old is the frankness of the steady gaze of Venus, a  frankness that certainly invites comparisons with Manet’s Olympia, a painting  that caused such controversy and consternation upon being first exhibited in 1865.

Edouard Manet-Olympia 1863