Stalking hookers with Félicien Rops

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. See the rest.


Pollock’s “Reflection of the Big Dipper”
Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner
The Munson-Williams Proctor Institute in Utica, New York, which has more than 25,000 artworks, including important pieces by Edward Hopper, Arshile Gorky, Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Warhol, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Picasso, displays Dali’s “Cardinal, Cardinal!” from 1934 (detail seen here).

If he had “an obvious desire to play God”, as one observer wrote — and he really was buried in his car, like a Chinese warlord on his chariot — Kienholz (1927-1994) was another take-no-shit American who scorned formal artistic training, took life by the horns and wrestled with it, starting with a Kesey-style gig as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, where you’re bound to get a skewed view of evolution. 
The instigator was William Ronald, who did the artwork for Simpson’s ads and handled the window dressing at the store. His biggest challenge until then had been trying to outdo the displays at rival retail behemoth Eaton’s. 







