A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern.

  • Iwan Bloch
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    himself of 6 bad taste '. At one Royal Academy exhibition an over-zealous anti-nudist wanted to pierce several canvases with his umbrella because he could not bear to see the human body in the nude. But in spite of, or perhaps because of, the universal con- demnation of the nude in art during the second half of the nineteenth century, the artistic conception of the erotic element received a new fillip and found expression in a new direction. As the simple natural phenomena of love could no longer be represented with the essentially naive naturalism of Rowlandson, Hogarth, Morland, etc., an artificial eroticism was evolved. It was attempted to express the erotic element in a purely spiritual form, but this necessarily led to a subtle kind of sensualism that was even worse than the merely obscene yet still natural representations of the sexual act. This movement started with the Pre-Raphaelite School, whose most famous representatives were Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. States of mind, emotions and psychological experiences were the principal subjects of the Pre-Raphaelites. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was the ' soul' of the Pre-Raphaelite School. He was also the founder of an entirely new conception of eroticism in English art. His love scenes of the Bible, of the Decameron, of the Divine Comedy, and of the Roman de la Rose showed an entirely new kind of ' vibrant sensuality ' that had been foreign to English art up till then. There is no sensuality in these pictures in the antique sense, only a voluptuous, guilty passion, of the kind that first became known with the introduction of Christianity. The subjects of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings were what might be described as fatal loves. There is a great deal of kissing, but it is kissing of a kind that desiccates the spirit. Voluptuous- ness is expressed by a long, slender hand, a long, slender [656]