A new exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich revisits the Belgian artist whose wild women of the demimonde scandalised the belle epoque – and still shock audiences today
D
uring an oppressively hot week in Paris in 1878, the bohemian Belgian artist Félicien Rops painted a picture of a woman walking her pet pig. In it, the woman is blindfolded and naked – bar some stockings, long black gloves and a jaunty feathered hat – and the pig has a cute, pink curlicue of a tail. Pornocrates – which roughly translates as “the ruler of fornication” – is an eye worm. Once seen, it’s hard to forget.
Rops recalled composing his most famous work “in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction”. As viewers of Laboratory of Lust, a new exhibition on Rops at Kunsthaus Zurich, will discover to their amazement, or perhaps indignation, mating and painting were indelibly linked in Rops’ psyche.
In the late 19th century, Rops created a vast oeuvre of drawings, etchings, prints and paintings of such breathtaking fruitiness – often laced with satanic elements – that even Picasso responded to him in awe (in homage, the Spaniard drew a cartoon of a man in the form of a pig performing cunnilingus on a woman). Rops’ works depicted naked witches riding brooms, voyeurs in top hats and courtesans riding penis-shaped bicycles. The French art critic Félix Fénéon called him an artist “who paints phalluses the way others paint landscapes”.
