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

  • Bloch, Iwan, 1872-1922.
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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    neck bent back by insanely passionate kisses. Rossetti's goddess of love is always a colossal creature of cruelly dis- turbing beauty. Her body is vast. There is a consuming fire in her eyes. Her full lips are always ready for demoniacal kisses. Rossetti rendered better than any other painter before his time or since erotic subtleties like the fascination of a woman's hand, cruel red lips that look like ' a poisonous flower ', or the cruelly sensuous expression in the eyes of a lovely woman. Rossetti was a new psychologist of love, and saw in woman the embodiment of man's longing to escape from the drab monotony of daily life to the fount of an eternal beauty. , The natural development of this tendency inevitably led i to mvsticism and asceticism, and we find this in the pictures of Burne-Jones. His ethereal women turn from earthly joys | to heavenly joys. The physical sensuousness which is so powerfully expressed by Rossetti is here replaced by pure spirituality, the voluptuous contours of the feminine form i disappear in favour of an ethereal slenderness. Thus Burne- Jones became the idol of the aesthetes, who, having become satiated with voluptuous curves, now began to worship ethereal outlines. Burne-Jones's influence was so great that I it extended to real life, and the slimness of the modern Englishwoman may be attributable to Burne-Jones's pictures. Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), who died at the early age of twenty-six, combined in his pictures the contrasting conceptions of the erotic represented by Rossetti and Burne- Jones. Beardsley rendered all the subtlety of modern love, including its Satanic element. Beardsley's first pictures were after the style of Burne-Jones, his teacher, and his women were angelically pure, with soft eyes, rose-bud lips and gentle movements. Then the artist came under the influence of Rops, who represented woman as the embodiment of lust, [ 657 ]