Renoir and bêtes noires
David Holbrook
Woman as Sex Object edited by Thomas Hess. and Linda Nochlin (Allen Lane £6.00)
Although this book is about erotic art, it could also make a good subject for a discussion of the present sickness of the American consc_iousness. The studies in it were collected by Newsweek from the art departments of American universities, and in a sense the book debates around the way in which woman in art has declined into a sex object — or Perhaps something even 'baser, for we end up With Andy Warhol whose ambition was to make copulating a ' non-event ', and thus to eradicate the last vestige of meaning from sexuality. Strangely enough although the academics In this symposium are experts in art, they too convey this kind of destructiveness in the book. The most destructive picture is a photograph taken by one of the editors, of a silly-faced naked hippie kind of man, holding a tray of bananas next to his genitals. The effect is virtually to drive the meaning out of all the other pictures in the books, many of Which are charming, and out of some great Paintings.
The above picture is employed to illustrate an absurd kind of 'women's lib' theory oferotic art. It was painted for men to enjoy, to stir them sexually. In this, women's 'erotic needs' have been neglected, though there are happily, signs of a change which go beyond such ephemera as the male nude fold-out ..." there are some painting of male nudes in seductive postures, by women artists. But the basic aspect of erotic painting (according to this book) is that "man's association of inviting fruit and a succulent, inviting area of the woman's body lends itself easily to artistic elevation ..." Even of Renoir we read that he
painted nudes from a man's point of view, as a source of delight for men's eyes. In essence, Renoir created an art about women for men to enjoy." He was what today "we might consider a well-meaning male chauvinist." Only at the end of this grudging essay on Renoir do we gather that Renoir saw the nude
woman as " sexuality, maternity and comfort ... The nude is a fertility goddess — the ultimate symbol for the continuity of life ..." It is as if Barbar Erlich White of Queen's College, Boston University, had hit upon the truth in spite of herself. But lust as sex is a function, so erotic art is tasty bits—dish.
Most of the above-mentioned article is about Renoir's rheumatism, his personal life, his women, and his wheelchair. There is nothing about the growing delight in woman's being in the world. The other articles are about corsets, the pill, vampires, and infor mation about patrons. There are some analyses of rather dreary pictures of tailors adjusting women's breasts, and an incredible
essay on Fuseli's Nightmare which attempts. to persuade us that the figure is having an
orgasm. The author can find no tumescent nipples, and no tuft of pubic hair, but, all the same, he is determined to see the crouching gnome on the woman's body as a ' monster ' of internal desires which is carrying her away. There are some rude Rowlandson's, deeply ironical.
There is a trendy article on that kind of boring modern art on which we may find pin-ups stuck, and a quite interesting article on the desperate anatomical voyeurism of Picasso in his old age. Most of the illustrations are good and interesting, and one thing that emerges is that at the time of Manet some pornographic photographs were very beau tiful: they display none of the schizoid hate of today's debasements, nor the sterility and old blankness of the Warhol syndrome.
But throughout this book there is a total failure to say anything useful or insightful about the meaning of art, erotic or any other.
There is the usual dreary, literal, Freudian analysis — a sword hilt is a male, a rose is female: as a boy once said of his psychoanalysis-mad teacher, anything longer than it's broad is phallic. This reductionism destroys meaning — and it goes with the prevalent perversions in culture themselves. As various psychotherapists argue, the sexual pervert cannot tolerate ' meeting ' with a whole person: so, he satisfies himself with parts and functions. Our need to relate to the 'significant other ', and to find the world meaningful through love and transcendence, becomes reduced to 'man's erotic needs' and 'woman's erotic needs' — so that one wants a tray of apples, and the other a tray of bananas. Erotic art is conceived in terms of 'turning one on' — and, as an American student said recently to his counsellor, "Don't know when you're in love, or just turned on": we all became involved, by culture, in the crippled inability of the pervert, who cannot creatively love.
Some of the authors in this book, revealingly, have no sense of the difference between literal photographs and created paintings. They see erotic content where there is none: but where there is trans cendence, as in Renoir, they cannot see that either. The woman in painting is the femine, creative, transcendent element in both men and women. Women can identity direct, as they did with their mothers. Men, who have a problem of getting their mother's closeness of care off their backs, can learn to love their femininity through erotic and nude painting. Pornography, by contrast, teaches both men and women to humiliate and despise their female elements, and in the end to do them to death. The hideous creature in
Fuseli's Nightmare is the ape of Mahler's Das Lied VonDer Erde, that mocks Life's sweetness with nothingness and death. The Americans see it as orgasm — and in this they are true Freudians, for, I believe, his dismally• organic view of sex, which plagues us, derived from a fear that to give oneself in love was to be open to annihilation.
David Holbrook teaches at Downing College, Cambridge
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