Erotic/Pornographic art/prints and illustrations [merged]

[tombed]

Everyone from TS Eliot to Marilyn Manson has done a take on Baudelaire's 1857 poems on eroticism and decadence, Les Fleurs du Mal. Here is Suzanne Ballivet's.

[tombed]

And some more Ballivet.

..twelve powerful colour illustrations for a French edition of Venus im Pelz (in English Venus in Furs). The story with its themes of female dominance and sadomasochism is semi-autobiographical – Wanda von Dunajew, the novel’s central female character, is modelled on Fanny Pistor, a determined writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was fascinated by. The book tells tells of Severin von Kusiemski, who is so infatuated with Wanda that he asks to be her slave and encourages her to treat him in progressively more degrading ways. At first Wanda does not understand or accede to the request, but after humouring Severin she enthusiastically embraces the idea, at the same time disdaining Severin for allowing her to do so.

[tombed]

It turns out I have some Lydis as well.

Part one.

The high point of Mariette Lydis’s career as an illustrator came in 1935, when Paris-based publisher Le Vasseur commissioned her to produce fifty-six colour illustrations to accompany a three-volume de luxe limited edition of Boccaccio’s famous Decameron.

[tombed]

Part two. IMHO, this is superb work, full of atmosphere, movement, story.

[Joszka]

Leo Impekoven (1873-1943) was a german illustrator & designer.

[deepsepia]

Gotta say, Joszka impressed above . . . "Leo Impekoven", never heard of him or seen his work before. Proves there are still things to find!

So I went looking to see if I could find something that hasn't been posted -- getting harder and harder!

Surprised that John Currin hasn't been posted . . . some of his works are more recent, but he began painting in the mid-80s. He's a very high regarded painter in art world circles, and we may note that he certainly enjoys big tits as much as the next man . .. even if these works sell for fortunes of money.

Originally Posted by Artnet

John Currin is a contemporary American artist considered among the most influential painters working today. Combining the techniques of Northern Renaissance painters such as Lucas Cranach the Elder, with a satirical attitude towards his subject matter, the artist produces works steeped in both art history and kitsch, as seen in his 2003 painting Thanksgiving. “I find I can't get rid of my trashiness as an artist,” he explained. “A lot of my themes in painting, to the extent that there are intentional themes, are meant to bring that conundrum into high relief.” Born in 1962 in Boulder, CO, he grew up in Connecticut where he studied with the academically trained artist Lev Meshberg. After receiving his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1984, Currin went on to study at the Yale School of Art alongside both Lisa Yuskavage and Sean Landers. Through the following decades, he has participated in shows at Sadie Coles HQ in London and Gagosian Gallery in New York, and was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004. Currin currently lives and works in New York, NY, with his wife the artist Rachel Feinstein, who often serves as a model for his paintings. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

The crazy thing is that in addition to the Cranach references, Currin looks a lot like he's been looking at Tom Poulton's work. How ironic is that-- Poulton, a commercial illustrator, hid his erotica away during his lifetime, and here's Currin producing often very similar material and proudly selling it for fortunes of money to Wall Street titans . . .






The painting "Nice N Easy" below recently sold for $12 million -- is this the highest price paid for an artwork on this thread?




[edit] His wife Rachel Feinstein -- a hot redhead, often his model-- is seriously fun. From her bio

Ms. Feinstein was born in Miami-“very Wild West in the mid-80’s, like Scarface “-and discovered art in elementary school, taking private lessons in Coconut Grove with pop-psychology books like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain . Coming of age, she appeared twice as an extra on Miami Vice before attending Columbia, where she studied religion and philosophy. She applied to Yale’s M.F.A. program wearing a see-through plastic mini-skirt and a T-shirt reading “I’m a Satisfier.”

Gotta admire that spirit for . . . er. . . . art.

[edit] Few more

[deepsepia]

A real mystery here . . . this is an artist known from a cache of drawings found in Oakland in the 1990s . . . no real idea who the artist was. The art reminds me a bit of Stanton, I don't think its all that great, but the story evidently has a lot of art critics (and dealers) excited

It is a remarkable thing to see a pencil line drawn by untrammeled desire. Its precise qualities are hard to describe, but just as Justice Stewart famously said about pornography: I know it when I see it. Each curve is a caress, each area of shading a hymn. William Crawford is an artist who is known for just one body of work: a stash of drawings, mainly in pencil on low-quality paper, showing magnificently proportioned men and women in ecstatic sexual positions. The drawings were either stolen or rescued, depending on your ethics, from an abandoned house in Oakland.

While not quite at the level of finesse achieved by Tom of Finland, with whom there are inevitable comparisons, these drawings far exceed the average smut. What makes them especially sophisticated is Crawford’s eye for narrative, and his almost Art Nouveau sense of graphic composition.

Everything known about Crawford, however, is a supposition. Since his pictures mainly show black figures, many assume he too was black. Some are drawn on the backs of 1997 prison roster sheets, which suggests that he was incarcerated. Some feature crack pipes or hypodermic needles which might indicate a fondness for narcotics. His fastidious and hyperbolic draftsmanship hints at a man with the luxury of time to kill.

But how much of our reading relies on the romanticization of Crawford’s biography? Would we be as interested if he was not a prisoner but a guard? What if he was a murderer or a rapist? What if he was not black, but white? When artists cannot speak for themselves, what we may be hearing is our own idealized conception of Otherness, ventriloquized through their art. Until William Crawford stops by to claim his drawings, we may never know the answer.

[tombed]

In the spirit of mysterybadger's post here, I offer Franz Xaver Winterhalter:


A group of Queen Victoria's friends, cousins and their ladies in waiting.


A painting by the same artist that Victoria bought for Albert on his 33rd birthday.

Speculate away!

The legend of the eighth-century Visigothic king Rodrigo of Hispania tells how Rodrigo’s seduction of the beautiful maiden Florinda ('La Cava') initiated the Arab conquest of Spain. In this scene Florinda (centre left) and her companions, all draped to varying degrees in luxurious Indian silks, prepare to bathe in the grounds of the castle near Toledo where she lives, unaware that they are being watched by King Rodrigo who hides in the bushes nearby. Rodrigo falls violently in love and seduces Florinda, to the anger of her father, Count Julian, who secretly meets with the Moors and encourages them to invade Spain. In the subsequent war Rodrigo is killed in battle by the invaders, who subject the country to their rule for two hundred years.

Winterhalter wrote in a letter dated 1869 that his inspiration for the painting was a sixteenth century Spanish ballad entitled La Cava, and his painting follows the text closely (Merwin, 1961). He might also have been aware of the Romantic treatments of the subject by English writers in the early years of the century, for example in the epic poems The Vision of Don Roderick by Sir Walter Scott in 1811 and Roderick, The Last of the Goths by Robert Southey (1814). Perhaps a more immediate inspiration was the staging of a new four-act opera by Sigismond Thalberg, Florinda, ou Les Maures en Espagne, which opened in July 1851 at Her Majesty’s Theatre during one of Winterhalter’s summer visits to England. Queen Victoria attended the opera during its opening month, and enjoyed seeing her singing instructor of twenty years, the celebrated bass Luigi Lablache (also the composer’s father-in-law), performing the role of Florinda’s father, Count Julian.

The Queen purchased the painting for Prince Albert in April 1852, writing that she had seen, ‘a most beautiful picture by Winterhalter, his favourite work, which I have purchased for Albert’s birthday, but which can be no secret, as it has to go to the Exhibition. It is a most lovely picture containing a group of beautiful women, ½ life size’ (Journal, 3 April, 1852). The painting was hung in the Queen’s Sitting Room at Osborne House, initially without a frame (Journal, 18 July, 1854).

Florinda was favourably received at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1852, where it was particularly admired for its colour and the beauty of the female figures. The critic of the Athenaeum wrote that ‘It is a picture of very great merit; the models are elegant and drawn with learned and decided outline…The colouring is gay – every possible tint is enlisted in the rich draperies. A warm light plays about everywhere; and the flesh glows’ (15 May, 1852, p.551). It was probably another signed version, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1853.

Historical genre painting was an unusual departure from Winterhalter’s typical court portraiture of the 1840s and 1850s. There is perhaps in its design a recollection of earlier depictions of the Ovidian scene of the bath of Diana observed by the hunter Actaeon. Winterhalter had used the arrangement of a circle of figures in a picturesque outdoor setting fifteen years earlier in his Decameron of c.1837 (Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle). The artist clearly found the composition satisfactory, as it was to be reused, with the picturesque woodland setting, for his later group portrait, The Empress Eugenie surrounded by her Ladies-In-Waiting of 1855 (Compiègne, Musée national du château). The striking similarity between this later painting and Florinda, even to the extent of the position of the key figure, did not pass unnoticed and popular scandalous rumour suggested that the Empress and her ladies-in-waiting had modelled for the deshabillé figures in Florinda (in fact the Empress did not marry Emperor Napoleon III until 1853). One European princess however does appear to have been a model for the picture. In 1860 Queen Victoria wrote of the Princess Wittgenstein, ‘She still very handsome, having been a great beauty & her head painted by Winterhalter, appears in his “Florinda”’ (Journal, 12 October, 1860).

[tombed]

At last, a full set. More to come.



The rest of the book is here:
Post 2
Post 3
Post 4
Post 5

[mysterybadger]

One of Sweden's greatest artists, celebrated on stamps and with a square in Stockholm named after him, and credited with introducing neo-classicism to Sweden.

After spending many years in Rome, where he hung around with Fuseli, he was summoned back to Sweden by the king and given important public commissions.

But he also produced a lot of mythological raunch whch must have been pretty near the knuckle for the time.

In private he went much further...