Sitting in an armchair (1913)
It is Masturbation Month, once more and so I am celebrating by re-posting some of my lost posts featuring frigging females. What better
place to start than with the splendidly abandoned drawings of Austrian artist Gustav
Klimt (1862-1918). Since I first posted these two years ago I have located a number of extra pictures.
Seated woman with legs spread (1916)
Klimt was born in Baungarten, near Vienna, and early
in his artistic career focussed on painting architectural decoration. His initial treatment of figures was very
classical and tight (almost photographic) and he only evolved his distinctive
linear with bold blocks of colour approach to painting in the mid eighteen nineties. This new style, as an influential member of
the Wiener Sezession movement, brought him fame and wealth, in contrast to his
poverty stricken student days.
By 1904 Klimt had conceived the idea of keeping a
number of models (some of whom became his mistresses) on hand in his studio for
whenever inspiration struck him.
Described as being like a harem, they inhabited a waiting room connected
to his studio until, like a a sultan summoning a favourite concubine, they were
invited into the studio itself.
Shortly after Klimt's death the art critic Franz
Servaes wrote, rather breathlessly, about Klimt's studio. "He was
surrounded by mysteriously naked female creatures, who, while he stood silently
in front of his easel, promenaded up and down his studio, lolled and lazed around
and bloomed throughout the day - always ready for the master's signal to remain
obediently stiff as soon as he had glimpsed a pose or a movement that
tantalised his sense enough to fleetingly capture it in a quick drawing."
The use of the word 'lolled' by Servaes is
interesting as it is exactly the same term used by a journalist in the sixties
when describing the abandoned poses of the girls in the early days of
Penthouse, compared with Playboy.
Klimt's women loll with thighs spread and fingers delicately probing at
their vulvae, just as Bob Guccione had them in the pages of his magazine
seventy years later. Like the Penthouse
Pets, Klimt's girls are lost in their own self-absorbed reverie. Abandoned, reflective, disinterested but
assertively feminine.
Reclining semi-nude facing right(1914)
We know nothing about these models, really, other
than the fact that some, at least, were prostitutes, as Klimt didn't keep
diaries and all his papers were destroyed by a lover after his death. But the freshness and spontaneity of Klimt's
line shows us that these were real women, not a created fantasy, exposing
themselves and masturbating for the artist.
Klimt produced around five or six thousand sheets of drawings during his lifetime and women were overwhelmingly his favourite subject. Some were undoubtedly done as studies for his paintings but these erotic pictures were done for himself and were not, of course, exhibited during his lifetime.
Many of Klimt's figure drawings of women demonstrate similar approaches. Klimt often used. extreme foreshortening in his erotic figures figures so as to focus attention on his models' genitals, Legs are spread and pussies are thrust at the viewer tin away that makes them the unavoidable centre of the composition.
Another aspect that adds to their erotic charge is the use of partial nudity. The models in his masturbation pictures are never depicted nude; they are all wearing clothes which have been pulled up or aside to reveal themselves. There is really only one part of the body Klimt is interested in here.
These were not created for 'gentlemen collectors' (as were Boucher's
explicit nudes and some of Courbet's paintings, for example) or as pornography; they were part of Klimt's obsession with
documenting the essence of life of the human being, including its sexuality.
Female sexuality, which was being acknowledged openly for the first time, having previously been denied, ignored or even feared, being
a subject of great fascination to Viennese artists during this period.
Seated woman with hat (1910)
Equally, these women are not the idealised ones of
his earlier works but are everyday women, dressed or undressed. His use of line is not employed to create an
image of improved beauty but to record the women as they were at that point in
time. legs apart in his studio, frigging unconcernedly as if the artist wasn't
there in the room with them, watching their movement and inhaling their musky
scent. Like Guccione's later photographs, it is the art of the voyeur and, as we will see in a future post, very
different to his contemporary, Egon Schiele's, approach.
Klimt had a number of run-ins with the public and
critics over his frank depiction of women's bodies in his paintings but these
pictures were not, of course, made public at the time. Although Vienna was becoming a hotbed of
sensual exploration during this period these would have been considered obscene
and even as recently as 1966 an Italian judge branded them as just that.
From Dialogue of the Courtesans (1907)
In 1907, however, Klimt was asked to illustrate a
new German translation of Lucian of Samosata's Dialogue of the Courtesans by
Franz Blei. He went back to the drawings
he had done in his studio and fifteen of them were published in the book: the
only occasion his erotic drawings saw the light of day during his lifetime. The
drawings included single girls, a copulating man and woman and a lesbian
threesome (Lucian's book, published in 43 AD, was, perhaps, the first to
discuss lesbianism). Two out of the
fifteen drawings featured masturbating women
From Dialogue of the Courtesans (1907)
At the time it was published, the writer Felix Salten said about Klimt's illustrations: "You poor fools who do not hear the nameless power of this sacred invocation of carnality. Here is the only artist whore bourgeois prudishness does not obscure nature in all its glory."
Masturbating girl 1917
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