Art through the lens of a repressed sexuality

Freud’s theory that sexuality was the most powerful force determining the development of the human mind would be realised in early 20th-century Vienna

Eros in art

Part 18: Fin-de-siècle to the Great War

The four-and-a-half decades between the unification of Germany in 1870 and the outbreak of the Great War were a time of increasing prosperity and social development but also of steadily growing political tension and consequent strategic realignment: Britain was at the apogee of her power but concerned about the growing strength of her traditional German allies, and slowly moving closer to the old adversary France. Germany was uneasy at being surrounded by a hostile France in the west and Russia in the east, and rebuilding her relationship with the Austro-Hungarian empire, itself undermined by nationalist agitation.

At the same time, while industrialisation and imperial dominion brought unprecedented prosperity to modern Europe, many factors conspired to undermine the optimistic, progressive and humanistic assumptions of the modern world. Religious belief was in irreversible decline – outbursts of religious revival, like those we see today, are symptoms of the long-term ebbing of belief – accelerated by disturbing discoveries about the immense age of the earth and above all by Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Many other new fields of inquiry had unsettling implications: anthropology, which forced us to confront the different beliefs and cultures of other peoples; economics, which suggested that much of history was shaped by long-term and impersonal forces; linguistics, which showed how differently the world of cognition can be mapped; and finally psychology, which revealed the dark unconscious forces that lurk beneath our fragile self-possession.

It is interesting that the most influential of all psychological thinkers, Sigmund Freud, should have appeared in Vienna, rather than in London, Paris or the newly assertive Berlin. But perhaps Vienna was destined to be the capital of modern anxiety: the city that had been the centre of the German world for half a millennium had just lost that role to Berlin. The Prussians had deliberately humiliated Austria in the war of 1866, asserting their hegemony over the German world as a prelude to the 1870 war with France which would lead to unification.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, New York, MoMA

Vienna would never be the same again; even today, of all the great capitals of Europe, it has the nostalgic feeling of a former imperial capital, dwarfed by past grandeur, while London and Paris have continued to grow and change. But at the end of the 19th century and in the first decade and a half of the 20th it remained one of the most intellectually and culturally sophisticated cities in Europe.

So it was here that the sexual energies that had long expressed themselves in a less regulated way, but had more recently been reigned in and suppressed in the interests of bourgeois respectability, would burst out, both in art and in Freud’s theory that sexuality was the most powerful force determining the development, and explaining the pathologies, of the human mind. This hypothesis was to many people as shocking and repugnant as the thought that humans could be evolutionarily related to apes.

Repressed sexuality also erupts in the work of artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. There is nothing repressed about sex in the works of such painters as Manet or Degas or Lautrec; they reveal a barely concealed world that exists in parallel to that of bourgeois respectability. The Austrian artists, in a less tolerant social milieu, evoke the tension of repression and the transgression of the bounds of respectability.

Even before Freud’s theories were published, fin-de-siècle Vienna was said to be obsessed with sex: according to a contemporary joke, a Viennese would assume that any man and woman walking together in the street must be lovers; that two men together must be homosexuals; and that a man walking alone must be addicted to solitary vice. Both this obsession with the idea of a hidden secret life and this neurotic fixation on sex and sexuality are completely new in the history of human psychology.

Egon Schiele, Seated woman with bent knee, 1917

And this is the environment that gave rise not only to Klimt’s shimmering neo-Byzantine The Kiss (1907-08) but to the explicitly lesbian Girlfriends (1916-17), destroyed by fire in 1945, and the highly original Danae (1907). In what is probably a very ancient myth, king Acrisius of Argos was warned by the oracle that he was destined to be killed by a son born to his daughter Danaë. Accordingly, he locked her away in a tower of bronze, out of the reach of men; but Zeus desired her and impregnated her in a shower of gold.

The divine conception of Perseus had been painted by Titian and Correggio, but Klimt interprets it as the image of a sensual dream or even an autoerotic fantasy, the reality camouflaged by decorative exuberance; it is hardly a coincidence that this painting was made only a few years after the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Autoeroticism was a favourite theme of Klimt’s erotic drawings of women who are always partly clothed, reminding us, as I observed a couple of weeks ago, of Kenneth Clark’s distinction between naked and nude: complete nudity is neutral, but vestiges of clothing remind us that the figure is undressed rather than dressed, exposed rather than covered. The same is true of the figures of the younger Egon Schiele, many of which are probably too explicit to reproduce here. He constantly reminds us that the young woman who displays herself so openly to his and therefore to our view, was only an hour ago covered from buttoned-up neck to ankle as she walked demurely through the streets of Vienna.

The northern expressionist vein, which includes precursors like the Norwegian Edvard Munch, especially in works such as Puberty (1894-95) – another image of sexual anxiety and disorientation – extends after the war into Otto Dix’s bitter images of sexual dereliction in the Weimar Republic, or Max Beckmann’s vision of rape and murder in The Night (1918-19).

Northern painters thus continued in a vein that goes back to medieval art and later the vision of the German master Matthias Grunewald, in whose great Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16) the human body can only be imagined as either diseased and suffering in the material world or luminous and transcendent in its mystical resurrected state. The Greek conception that the body could be beautiful, harmonious and a symbol of humanistic hope had never really been acclimatised in these regions that so readily adopted the grim vision of the Reformation and the sense of the pervasiveness of sin.

But even those artists who represented the continuation of the Italo-French mainstream of modern art were caught up in the malaise and turbulence that increasingly overtook European culture as though in anticipation of the Great War, and especially in the last 10 years or so, the most troubled and also the most dynamic decade in the history of modernism: the period that gave birth to Fauvism, Cubism, Abstraction, Orphism, Expressionism in its various forms, Futurism and Metaphysical painting.

Some of these movements were primarily formal in their concerns – intellectually and analytically in the case of Cubism, affectively and mystically in that of abstraction. But both Picasso and Matisse were also deeply concerned with the erotic, even if Picasso was occupied, during the years just before the war, with the most searching formal deconstruction of the conventions and assumptions of painting ever undertaken.

Before this, however, Picasso had laid the foundations for much of his later work in the enormous and ambitious Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), whose poetic, if incongruous title was adopted in preference to the original one that clearly identified the subject as women in a brothel. Thus Picasso is the direct heir to the other great modern artists who had dealt with such subject-matter, particularly Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, who had only died six years earlier.

William Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus, 1879, Paris, Musée d’Orsay

Unlike these painters, however, Picasso chose to present his subject on the most ambitious scale and in a format that challenged comparison with monumental academic subjects, like William Bouguereau’s Birth of Venus (1879); Picasso’s central figure even seems to echo the attitude of Bouguereau’s goddess. And the comparison suddenly makes us see what Bouguereau has omitted from or edited out of his vision of the goddess of sexuality.

Bouguereau, who had also just died in 1905, was a highly talented painter, but like many others in the later 19th century, his vision was imbued with the literal-minded naturalism or positivism of the time; this was the kind of materialist vision of the world against which abstraction later upheld the claims of a quasi-mystical spiritualism. He was also heir to the over-polished academic style of the Empire period that we discussed some weeks ago.

Consequently Bouguereau’s vision is almost photographic in its minute naturalism, but at the same time carefully plucked and airbrushed; the model is so closely followed that the work feels almost intrusive, and yet an invisible veil of prudery distances us from the feel of real bodies. The goddess who is the very embodiment of the sexual drive becomes demure and almost chaste. Picasso does not make his women sensually appealing or attractive; he makes them frightening; he replaces their heads, in two cases, with forms inspired by primitive masks to suggest the inhuman power of totems and fetishes. The others are plain and blank, bodies rather than personalities, and bodies composed of sharp, hard forms. Many have commented on the scythe-like slice of watermelon on the table, but I don’t think anyone has noticed that this must be the source for the red mouths of Albert Tucker’s predatory women in his post-WWII Images of Modern Evil series.

Matisse’s eroticism, as I observed a couple of years ago in reviewing the Matisse and Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery in Canberra, is quite different. Where Picasso has his roots in antiquity and the classical tradition, Matisse is drawn to the Orient and to imagery of oriental comfort and luxury – “luxe, calme et volupté” in Baudelaire’s famous words.

Picasso’s women, however, are seldom calm and serene except in his classicising works like the Vollard Suite. More often, they are harsh and hard-edged, either as embodiments of primal forces in the Demoiselles, or because they seem crushed and distorted as the objects of desire in his later paintings. They are always engaged in some dynamic and even destructive relationship with the male lover.

Matisse is equally fascinated by woman as a subject, but sees her in a more disinterested spirit, less driven by appetite. He is more interested in understanding her otherness, feeling her specific corporeality, the bulk and weight of her body, and what I described before as a certain mysteriously patient, passive and even inert quality. His women have no conscious inner life, but a kind of still and unconscious presence; the beautiful nude in the National Gallery of Victoria is actually asleep, as though representing the deep continuity of being and regeneration that persists beneath the sound and fury of historical turmoil.

Eros in art

Part 18: Fin-de-siècle to the Great War