Chapter 43: Mystical and perverse

Mystical and perverse

There was no single female type in commercial advertisements, just as there was no single graphic style within modernism. Two main influences intersected during this time. On one hand, there was the Pre-Raphaelite movement, with its delicate, ethereal female prototypes who seemed to move between pastoral and legendary settings. Eugene Grasset, one of the founders of modernism, advocated for this approach (Fig.6) that reached its splendor in creations such as those by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha or Catalan artist Alexandre de Riquer. The result tended towards overcomplication and excessive decoration, often making women appear unreal, as if they were ideal beauty incarnate.

On the other hand, there was Japonism, which gave rise to a synthetic style based on large color masses and thick outlines, with expressionism relying more on the color palette than on the drawing itself. This style essentially portrayed a worldly type of woman, the heiress of Chéret's demimondaine - seductive, with an ambiguous gaze and bare shoulders, but less vivacious. This model was less expressive than Chéret's, sometimes a bit insubstantial, and other times with a sinister touch.

If Chéret had been the precedent, Bonnard (France Champagne, Fig.7), Lautrec, and others portrayed this coquettish and suggestive woman, which, with Beardsley, became morbid and even perverse.

This entire female world was largely designed to cater to men. I mean, both prototypes seemed tasked with leading men in different directions - one towards salvation and the other towards damnation. Let's take a closer look at each of them.

The mystic type consisted of somewhat fairytale or Medieval legend-like characters. They were hieratic and reserved, depicted against baroque backgrounds of vegetation, underbrush, groves, parks, thickets, or framed by leaf and garland decorations. This was very much in line with the common belief of the time that women were inherently romantic. Often, these women held some kind of flower, and the symbolism varied depending on their class (exaltation, purity, unattainability, dreams, etc.), or an open book. Their eyes were generally lost in the distance, and the profile, in the style of Florentine portraiture, was the preferred position for the model. One of the commercial images that best embodies this spirit is Concert Mystique (1901) by Paul Berthon (Fig.8), a decorative painter known for his posters and covers. The image conveys a sense of spiritual and somewhat delicately ethereal feeling, painted in faded tones, and the characters adopt that dreamy air of Pre-Raphaelite figures.

As for the perverse woman, there is no standardized representation. Sometimes she appears lounging indolently or involved in a seduction scene, or alone in a box seat or drinking at a cabaret. She is the seductress who, in some cases, adopts an almost sickly or disconcerting beauty.

These representations of femininity in advertisements are not far from certain dominant ideas of the time. Let us consider for a moment Lombroso's doctrines regarding women, viewing them as childish and irrational beings, inherently amoral. Of course, the biography of the almost forgotten Cesare Lombroso is a collection of scientific errors developed from crude and senseless positivism.

Grasset's illustration La Vitrioleuse (1894, Fig.9), which is typically inclined towards serene and amiable female figures, sums up this interpretation of women. It features a character with a deranged appearance, holding a container of acid ready to throw it at her rival, in a composition clearly influenced by Japanese prints. It could serve as an illustration for Lombroso's well-known work "La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale" (1893), in which he explained the criminal behavior of women as a result of their atavistic degeneration. He similarly thought of anarchists as primitive criminals.

Seldom has the scientific method been employed with more erroneous results.

More interesting and complex is the thinking of Jung and his concept of "anima," that is, the image of a woman according to a man's fantasies. "When someone wants to leave a woman and cannot, that is anima," Jung declared. According to the Swiss thinker, there is a dangerous power of attraction in them. These images are not so much personifications of specific women, but illusory creations that embody emotional needs and practices: certain celebrities, goddesses, virgins, courtesans, maternal figures, witches, or female mythological creations (harpies, sirens, etc.). Among them would be Circe and the Gorgon, Judith and Salome, but also Lily Langtry or Sarah Bernhardt.

The diffusion of this type of speculation seems to penetrate popular imagery as a collective opinion or thought. Another practitioner of floral modernism, the Czech Alphonse Mucha, usually gentle in his female figures, does not escape this somewhat demonic view of women. His advertisement for Champagne Reinart (Fig.10) shows a sort of tired Medusa Gorgon, with hair disheveled like snakes and a somewhat lost gaze.

Both in style and theme, even in what it announces, Lautrec's poster for the book Reine de Joie by Victor Joze is enormously characteristic of the role of the worldly woman (Fig.11). In the Revue Blanche of February 1893, the poster was described as "brilliant, beautiful, and exquisitely perverse." Resolved in a Japanese manner, through large masses of flat color, it incorporates a scene from the play Reine de la Joie. Mundane customs in which the protagonist, the cocotte Helene Roland, kisses the corpulent banker Olizac.

This image of the opulent bourgeois accompanied by the beautiful courtesan was, on the other hand, very much of the time and appeared frequently in paintings and writings. The book Reine de Joie was, in fact, a scandal. Not, of course, because of the type of woman it portrayed (as I mentioned, it was a quite common allusion), but because Baron Rothschild felt portrayed in the character of Baron Rosenfeld. He tried to withdraw the entire edition of the book and his henchmen dedicated themselves to tearing down Lautrec's posters from the streets. As shown in the poster, the man assumes a passive position in the face of the young woman's amorous fervor, while she embraces his voluminous figure with her arms and kisses him on the face.But for a woman to be perverse and tempting, there is no need even for the presence of a docile or cowardly man. From his first poster, Beardsley had portrayed a mysterious, unsettling, even somewhat satanic woman. In fact, he somehow foreshadows the whole host of femme fatales of the time: Cléo de Mérode, Mata Hari, etc., to which he adds that malevolent touch. This character (Fig.12), who appears to look askance, partially hidden by translucent curtains, with bare shoulders and loose hair, perfectly embodies that type of unsettling lady he liked to draw.