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Art Nouveau, Sex and Fascism

Periodically, we look at the relationship of art and popular culture to the market and to politics. We have covered Manga and Abstract Expressionism earlier in the summer, now we turn our attention to Art Nouveau.

This is not so much a case of as it happens as how it was and why we need to remember what has been in order to manage what is and will be …

While Art Nouveau is a movement of design rather than high art (of which Aubrey Beardsley's line might be the noble type), artists and architects of the calibre of Klimt and of Gaudi might be considered part of the school.

Much of Art Nouveau was simply beautiful, sinuous and organic, with little ‘political’ import other than to demonstrate the growing material comfort of the European bourgeoisie. It even attained an admirable starkness of form by the time we get to the workshop of Mackintosh in Glasgow.

Art Nouveau was never in itself necessarily 'dangerous' - the culture from which it sprang, though, undoubtedly had poisonous aspects.

We are interested here in the meaning of its erotic underpinning, one that introduced a faux-aristocratic decadence to the European middle classes as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth.

Where Art Nouveau Fits

This erotic component to Art Nouveau suggests a culture that was struggling to pull itself out from under conservative traditionalism and not entirely knowing how to do so. The mix of eroticism and misogyny is heady but you know in your heart that it could go nowhere.

Europe was not ready to be libertarian rather than pretend to be libertine. The movement was already ending as war loomed in 1914. The subsequent fifty years of fascist nationalism, near constant war and nuclear anxiety suggest that the middle classes got scared and quickly drew back into their shell.

In an age of mass democracy, the prospect of the erotic might become an interest of the servant class, of workers in the factories and of women themselves. This alone would have encouraged patriarchs to return to the safe haven of church and property and to the secret sex of the brothel.

The conservative high middle classes removed their patronage and shifted their attention elsewhere. Ironically, this permitted artists the freedom to go down more liberatory routes that take us from Duchamp to Koons which ultimately undermined convention and tradition irretrievably.

Nevertheless, while the ideology behind Art Nouveau might be highly suspect and neurotic at worst, and only unfulfilled and yearning at best, the actual art works are often very beautiful and inspired.

Amidst the sleaze, there are women of great beauty, jewellery of exquisite craftsmanship, engaging 'rococo' vases and porcelain and some furnishing masterpieces of genuine if sinister erotic power.

Rupert Carabin's very late post war chest 'Regard chaste, laisse-moi' and the associated sculpture 'Deux Femmes' of 1918/1919 and his sinister and Sadean armchair of 1896 with its naked woman bound and embedded into the back are cruel but undoubtedly imaginative.

The Hidden Meaning of Art Nouveau

There is also the question of the esoteric nature of much Art Nouveau. One suspects that in a pre-Freudian era, most ordinary observers either did not make a sexual connection to the work, or the sexual material was for the private delectation of 'connoisseurs'.

Or did some of the artists themselves fail to question the convention that had detached 'beauty' and sexuality through the medium of art?

Only this last week, a photographer and model challenged the assumption that it was fine to show naked flesh on a canvas on a Gallery’s walls but not fine to pose naked within the Gallery.

This could have been a po-faced feminist protest thirty years ago. This time around it was a libertarian one. The protest was not so much against the depiction of women as against the 'public' (actually institutional) ownership of rights to decide the conditions for sexual display.

Many of the artists and designers of the Art Nouveau either seem not to have thought about what they were doing in any depth or to have allowed their 'vicious' side (in the sense of lauding what the age would have termed 'vice') to be presented within closed communities of haut bourgeois customers.

This lack of understanding comes across most vividly in what is so obviously (to us) a double phallic symbol at a girl's Catholic school built in Paris in 1895 (Architect, Hector Guimard).

Either the artist was cynically having a laugh at the expense of the entire Catholic Church and of the local traditionalist bourgeoisie or all parties naively failed to see the symbolic import of the design motif.

Whether deliberate or not, bourgeois girls in this Catholic School walked past two giant male members holding up the building where they were supposed to learn about Catholic morality in order to become both good wives and mothers of the sons to be slaughtered on the Western Front just a decade later.

Almost certainly, prelates, teachers, parents and the girls themselves never saw the irony because they did not actually see the art. No better example could be given of the lack of importance of art and design in the transformation of mass society when the public have not been primed to understand its meaning.

Continuities

Although we like to think of decadence and the soft organic forms of Art Nouveau artists and architects as antithetical to corporatism, mass production and fascism, you can still see the lineage of Soviet, Fascist and Nazi realism in the Middle European Art Nouveau posters of the 1890s and 1900s.

This is the commercial end of the movement and so it is easy to understand how it could be taken up and merge with state propaganda operations. We are also largely talking about the depiction of the 'heroic' male - the fey and come-hither depictions of women, still popular today, were less used.

However, even if we can liken this to the cynical use of state of the art PR in modern Government as ‘spin’ (techniques similar but purposes different), there is some link between not only the forms of the Art Nouveau period’s imagery but the deeper and darker ideological resources from which it drew.

This is more contentious but it is arguable that Art Nouveau’s attitudes to sexuality, the passive feminine principle and a tormented male dominance, were continuous with the ideology of the extreme right wing movements of the subsequent half century.

There is a continuity between the late nineteenth century bourgeoisie and the culture that collapsed in a welter of blood and mayhem in 1945 - expensive private vices were increasingly covered up by exhortatory fake nobility.

The type of High European Culture in this period may be that highly intelligent thief and gangster Hermann Goering rather than Thomas Mann. The best went into exile, embarrassed silence or the political left.

Our earlier piece on Abstract Expressionism was the story of the re-acquisition by the Atlantic system of High Art until its political wing lost control to the market in the 1960s. Picasso remained some form of Communist most of his life despite the cold realist representations of official Soviet culture.

In Germany before the first world war, 'strength-through-joy' romantic naturism, represented artistically by Fidus, created a sublimated sexuality that treated women as vulnerable objects, when, that is, they were not classed as threats – surely one of the cultural components of German nationalist neuroticism.

The Soviets, meanwhile, simply appear to have ignored sex as a bourgeois preoccupation - with some artistic justification at the time. Even today, socialists seem to consider sex to be an irrationalist distraction while non-socialists still wallow in the romantic gender depictions filtered down from above.

Transgressive Sexuality

Art Nouveau, at its very darkest in its revolt against conformity, also contains the seeds of the Nazi attitude to Catholic Christianity. Both late European decadence and Hitlerism despised the Catholic Church but feared scientific materialism far more.

Huysmans in 'A Rebours' constructs a decadent milieu for a bored aristocrat and then passes through Satanism to the great Catholic field of redemption beyond. Hitler’s revolt against Catholicism still permitted an alliance with his enemy against a greater class enemy, Bolshevism.

George Bataille, possibly France's greatest philosopher of sexual transgression, more subtle than De Sade and more attuned to the street than Foucault, would juggle sexual excess with Catholic mysticism in a fit of bad faith.

In the 'real world', Catholic priests would collaborate with fascist dictators against the sexual barrenness of Bolshevism where 'no sex please, we're Communists' was the standard morality of the socialist day, leaving little ground on either side for an open culture of love or pleasure.

The most transgressive image (in this context) may be the exquisitely erotic 'Study for a Crucifixion' by the Czech Frantisek Drtikol (1914), though Felicien Rops will always trump anyone in the range of his aggressive satanic sexual imagery.

Be warned, it is blasphemous by any standards and sincere Christians will be shaken and horrified – and, as good manners, we are not providing a link but it is easily available. Most of his other work is less offensive if preoccupied with naked women.

Drtikol's crucifixion shows a very sexually attractive, quite modern, naked woman in the form of the Christ on the Cross. This type of image has been used in high erotic art ever since - even (in the guise of St. Sebastian) as one of the avatars of Yukio Mishima, a clear link between transgression and the Right.

A modern feminist artist might have done something similar to make some crass point about God being a woman but this work of Drtikol's is just plain erotic Sadism – and, unfortunately for traditionalists, it is as sexy as hell!

This 'Catholic'/anti-Catholic bourgeois dialectic between private transgression and public conformity, whore and madonna, is a theme that runs through European (though not Anglo-Saxon) bourgeois history.

The Church & The Crisis of Modernity

This is not a judgement on a complex 2,000-year institution but on what it felt was necessary during the crisis of modernity between the 1880s and 1940s – a period when tradition was faced by powerful threats from mass democracy and secularism which were increasingly coalescing as ‘Bolshevism’.

The Anglo-Saxons, as always, are sui generis. Compare the women in the current J. W Waterhouse Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London with the fevered imaginings of the Europeans. You will see the same 'patriarchal' and 'bourgeois' culture but one that is kinder and less tormented.

No wonder fascism never took hold in Britain. This was a European culture terrified of modernity, terrified of the mob and terrified of its own impulses - it ended up with the banal Eichmann in Budapest, Goering's hunting parties and art work thefts and Himmler's mad paganism.

This may seem extreme to say so but the themes of these monsters were writ in the culture of which Art Nouveau was an undoubtedly beautiful expression.

The uncleaness of the a-social, life as art and the purity of the pagan within an essentially catholic culture were common denominators in Hitler's ideology and in the milieu of Art Nouveau. As the uniforms of the SS attest, the flowers of evil can be exquisite and art and design have no intrinsic morality.

Edvard Munch’s ‘Madonna’ (1895)

There is one masterpiece of the period, however, that rises above the fear of the female or adoration of woman as object of desire to show a combination of anxiety and compassion that comments directly on the repressed and medically challenged 'condition humaine' of the period.

Edvard Munch's stunning colour lithograph, 'Madonna' (1895) which expresses, better than any other of the period, the confused sexual attitudes of a world where whores and madonnas were separated by a vicious cultural gulf.

Many males of one class, with the silent connivance of their females, were fascinated by, used and despised some women of another. This masterpiece of horror speaks to the neurosis of the period and yet it exhibits a fascination that suggests a compassionate desire for things to be other than they are.

In its pagan fascination with biology and the organic in its most popular form, the dark side of Art Nouveau was also the movement of a bourgeois age that was terrified by sexual disease and of the human rats (as many saw them) of the ghetto.

Some 'nice' middle class people, dangerously, in our period of crisis, look on the 'chavs' on our council estates with the same arrogant disdain. 'Torchwood - Children of Earth' brought this tendency out into the cold light of day and critiqued it to a mass popular television audience in the UK earlier this year.

This work of Munch's is both an indicator of the bourgeois neurosis that would lead to Lodz and Warsaw and, in our interpretation, a sublimated yearning for sexual expression that could mean that the free woman and free man could love safely. 

Sadly, in this confusion of aspirations - for social cleansing and for engagement and love - it was the neurotic obsessive-compulsive desire for cleansing that won out in the end. The rest, as they say, is history.