Dali House

Unless you really want to talk about Jackson Pollock some more, we don’t do “fight club” at Dali House — our boys are mostly the lovin’ type. Some of them get carried away with it, like JW “Bosom Buddy” Godward and Louis “The Ladies’ Man” Eilshemius, and this curious little Casanova here, Félicien Rops.

Though he wrestled with inner conflicts, Rops was gleeful in celebrating the female, and had as his resolute motto “No desire to be otherwise”.

His reputation precedes him, quite a long distance actually, from the pages of history: He’s been dead 110 years and people are still keen as hell to hear about his adventures.

“He never drew the nude but, rather, like Manet in ‘Olympia’, naked women,” Sotheby’s said enigmatically in its catalogue notes for last month’s European paintings sale in London, at which it was flogging the Rops “masterpiece” shown above — “Pornokrates”, also known as “Woman with a Pig” — for up to £350,000 … or more! (It’s “only” watercolour and pastel.)

Whatever term you use for bare flesh, Rops was a connoisseur, a nighthawking whirlwind of sketches and etches, many bags full. “I am Jack the Ripper!” he exclaimed of his own prolific output.

Ah, but he did rip well. Ensor, Munch, Beardsley and even Rodin thought he was the black cat’s meow and cheered every midnight howl from the leading devil of “Dark Symbolism”. Deliberately shocking to the lecherous edge of perversity, he was actually quite refined and a barrel of laughs, if occasionally struck by melancholy at the lash of women’s whimsy.

“The love of women, like Pandora’s Box,” he wrote, “contains all the grief of life, but they are enveloped in such luminous golden spangles, they are so brilliantly coloured and have such a perfume, that it is never necessary to repent for having opened it.”

Félicien Rops (1833-98) was born in Namur, Belgium, the son of an industrialist. Soon enough the Catholic Church surgically implanted the sacramental coal in his heart that spoils all Catholics’ fun for the rest of their lives.

He married a lawyer’s daughter in 1857 and they had two children, the son alone surviving youth. In Paris for the first time by 1861, Rops had a furious go at getting clear of his various manacles, and even joined the Freemasons.

Charles Baudelaire, a fan of his caricatures, did the luring, and set him loose in the metropolis with the rhyming recommendation that he was “very bizarre” and “not the grand prize of Rome”, but “Rops has talent as high as the pyramids of Cheops”.

Rops plunged into the City of Lights, especially its red ones, and was quickly notorious for his shenanigans as well as his illustrations for publications by Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé, among others. Below is “Sunday in Bougival”.

Before he severed links forever with Brussels, Rops joined Les XX, the avant-garde Belgian art clique that spotted the importance of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Seurat long before many in Paris did.

Curiously, the group didn’t get to be scandalised by “Pornokrates” until its 1886 exhibition, seven years after the painting dropped jaws in the French capital.

Les femmes parisiennes: Elegant beauties or cheap tarts? Rops didn’t seem to know the difference or care. “That formidable strange product called a Parisian girl” is one description he used. They made him bleat from the eyes with their clothes or without them, resulting in a gloriously Catholic self-flagellation because decadence is such an almighty delightful sin.

Rops, the bug-eyed tourist, left quite an impression on the Siamese-pen writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt when he met them in 1866.

“He speaks of the bewilderment aroused in him, once he had left his country, by the harness, the transvestism, the near fantastic clothing of the Parisian woman, who appeared to him like a woman from a different planet.”

“I had the opportunity to see and kiss the black silk stockings with red flowers of a young girl whose lover is in Monaco,” Rops wrote to a friend by way of explaining the origins of “Pornokrates” — “a large she-devil of a girl”.

“I placed her nude like a goddess, I had her wear long black gloves on these long beautiful hands that I clasped for three years, and on top, I coiffed her hair like those in Gainsboroughs, in black velour ornamented with gold, which gives the girls of our era the insolent dignity of women of the 17th century … her eyes blindfolded, walking on a pink marble frieze, led by a pig with a golden tail in front of a blue sky. Three loves (cupids) — the ancient loves — disappear crying.

“I have no idea to whom I could sell this work, but I don’t care!”

“Were it not for her brazen nakedness,” Sura Levine wrote in 1992’s “Les XX and the Belgian Avant-garde”, “she might be mistaken for a proper middle-class woman walking a well-bred dog. Adorned with the accoutrements of her trade, she parades not on the boulevards that were the streetwalker’s domain, but above the weeping personification of the arts — suggesting that the modern prostitute is truly the new muse of the arts.”

Paging Toulouse-Lautrec!

“Coin de Rue, quatre heures du matin (Parodie humaine)” — the human parody on a 4am street corner, Rops watching what was characterised in the 1870 “Paris after Dark: a Night Guide for Gentlemen” like this: “As soon as the lamps are lit, they come pouring through the passages and the adjacent rues, an uninterrupted stream, until past midnight.”

Rops painted this pas de coquette at the end of that decade, having jettisoned the Belgian wife in favour of the doubled charm of fashionistas Aurélie and Léontine Duluc (both popped out little Ropses) and also having, as Sotheby’s scribe put it, “thoroughly researched first-hand” the clotted evening of lust for hire.

With the naturalist writers watching him with their cool, scientific objectivity, Rops followed Baudelaire up and down some dubious stairways in search of true human nature, and painted a skeleton in a gown for “Death at the Ball” and the grim reaper as a prostitute in a doorway in “Mors Syphilitica”.

Prostitutes as disease carriers: The revelation must have come from Rops’ Catholic angel whispering in his ear. He had morphed into a moralist tallying the wages of sin and, while he did not ignore the streetwalker’s victimisation, he was also starting to bristle at the suggestion he was a pornographer.

“If, as you believe, I have ever made some smutty drawings, it is precisely in hatred of this public of which you speak, and in order to lower my buttocks to the level of its face,” he spat at a journalist.

The joy of sex is certainly in full romp, however, in “Voyage au pays des vieux dieux” from 1881, as the ageing Rops struggles to keep his righteous rudder in the water. It’s far too raunchy for Photobucket to let me include an image here (I think Playboy would probably pass on it too), so a description has to suffice: two satyrs porking voluptuous ladies out in the woods. Cocks out. Bouncy bouncy. The girls are loving it.

Better suited to his swelling conservatism is the sly voyeurism of “Le Paravent”, below. The folding screen of the title hides a peeping dandy, the cad. But wait a minute: What are YOU looking at? You’re a pervert, admit it! For artists, it’s a great old leg-puller.

By 1892 an eye problem was letting Rops do less and less peeping of his own, and his health declined steadily until his death six years later at his home near the Fontainebleau forest, the Demi Lune on the Seine. Léontine and Aurélie were at his bedside, as was Claire, the daughter he had with Léontine.

“This heart of mine is entitled to be ill,” he’d written not long before.

“For 60 years it has vibrated at each emotion like an Aeolian harp, and what is killing is that it is not over. The little girl silhouetted on the horizon makes it suffer again, and, like those mediaeval Christs whose wounds bled again every time they were kissed by a virgin, the memory of the touch of young kisses brings back to my heart all the powerful beats of blessed nights and the sweet stifling of ancient ecstasies. I shall die of a heart attack and impenitent.”

The website of the Félicien Rops Provincial Museum in Namur has some interesting notes on his life and work, though it’s awfully tame.
Rops fits in well at the large and turgid website History of Erotic Art.