My association with Ian Tovey dates back to 1995 and to my ill-fated newspaper publishing venture. He has since gone on to do great things and his work appears at weekly intervals in one of our leading quality newspapers, The Observer, which is part of The Guardian group and hits the streets every Sunday. Whilst I am “of a certain age” when it is possible, and indeed meet, for a person to take a relatively detached view of sex and sexual matters, Ian is younger by several decades. He has a huge talent for a capturing a likeness and I kind of feel proud for spotting him at the beginning his career. OK! OK! So I am talking the talk. But if you want some proof I will walk the walk with you just a few steps to the most recent edition of the Observer where, as ever, his work is prominently featured in the main part of the newspaper.

As soon as the Decima Four had completed their detailed assessment of whatever erotic content there was to be found in the National Gallery’s paintings – the starting point for my Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery project - I put to Tovey the idea that he should provide the book’s illustrations. There would be twelve in total. Each illustration would re-interpret a famous National Gallery picture. The selection process proved more difficult than I had anticipated, however, and ground to a stop at just seven. These seven more or less selected themselves by combining an iconic image familiar to members of the public with very definite erotic content. The remaining five candidates for the Tovey-Samuelson treatment were less obvious either because the erotic potential was more obscure or because the pictures were not very well known.

The first-to-be-chosen seven were: Judgement of Paris by Rubens, Young Spartan’s Exercising by Degas, Venus with Mercury and Cupid by Correggio, Venus and Mars by Botticelli, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid by Bronzino, Angelica saved by Ruggiero by Ingres and The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez. These seven works are more than iconic, they are super-iconic. They are instantly recognisable to anyone with even a slight acquaintance with Old Master art. For the remaining five, we eventually settled on Cupid Complaining to Venus by Cranach the Elder, Chastity by Moroni, Judith in the Tent of Holofernes by Liss, the Bagnio scene from Marriage A la Mode by Hogarth (the same Horrible Hogarth and the same Marriage A La Mode that I have been writing about for weeks now) and Ladies and Gentlemen playing La Main Chaude by Janssens. The Cranach and the Hogarth are very iconic, the Moroni and the Liss less so, and the Janssens not at all. In fact the Janssens picture - which I picked out from the Gallery’s catalogue - was nowhere to be seen in the Gallery’s public rooms. It was eventually unearthed in the basement storeroom.

The description “Tovey-Samuelson” for these re-interpretations is appropriate because, although every molecule of ink on the drawings comes from Ian Tovey’s hand, the underlying conception of what to do with each picture was largely mine. And as the work proceeded I was never backward in putting in my two penn’orth. My brief to Tovey was that he would do “straight” pictures. By “straight” I meant without surrealist overtones. This is akin to instructing a rottweiler not to bark but I was not displeased with the outcome of our joint efforts. For most of his commercial work Tovey is left to his own devices and receives (and needs) little or no direction at all. With my work, the drawings were batted to and fro until I felt that we had sucked into the open every vestige of eroticism bottled-up within the picture on the National Gallery’s wall.

Later, I commissioned further illustrations along similar lines from Ian Tovey for two subsequent writings. One was a book with the working title A Surfer’s Guide to Erotic Art on the Internet – which in essence was a book about the still to be publishedGuide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery book – and which has been overtaken by this blog. The other vehicle for the Tovey touch was the Ten Sexiest Moments in Mythology to which references have been made in these pages. This project generated ten more illustrations (one for each sexiest moment) for the Tovey-Samuelson collaborative oeuvre. The Ten Sexiest’ book will eventually find a publisher. The illustrations for the Surfer’s Guide’ will come in handy and will not be wasted.
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The sex angles present in the twelve works selected for re-interpretation for publication with the Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery, aka the “Tovey Twelve”, can all be summed up in a few words. Keeping to the same order as above: Paris is judging a beauty competition between three voluptuous females without a stitch of clothing between them. Naked Spartan boys are wrestling nearly naked Spartan girls. Not everyone thinks that Venus and Mercury were just good friends. Venus and Mars (another of her boyfriends) are relaxing after making love. Cupid is French kissing his mother (Venus again). The naked Angelica is chained to a rock averting her eyes from the knight who has come to rescue her. (Tovey and I always referred to her as “the tot on the rock”.) The Venus which for years hung above the mantlepiece in Rokeby Hall (who was not Venus but a dishy piece especially well furnished in the bum department and Official Best Bum per the BBC) is the equivalent among Old Master works of art to Jennifer Lopez. Cranach’s Venus (her again) looks anorexic (which is typical for this artist) but this does not stop her strutting her stuff. Chastity is sitting very unchastely with her legs spread wide open. Whether Judith had sex with Holofernes is an open question. Bagnio, in Hogarth’s time, was the name for a brothel with rooms for renting by the hour and “La Main Chaud” (literally “hot hand”) is an old French party game in which playful socialites get to spank each other.

Of the twelve pictures, Cranach’s painting, responds the least to the Tovey-Samuelson treatment. We have her on the catwalk where she is probably infecting the male members of the fashionista audience with erectile disfunction. It has been doing that to National Gallery goers for four decades now and in today’s blame culture the Gallery should think about whether they should continue to have it on display.

The mostly widely accepted explanation for what the Cranach Venus painting is about passes over her 200 calories a day skin and bones frame and homes in on the little Cupid who, the story goes, has been trying to steal honey from a hole in a tree. It is a shame that there is no Tarzan-like figure in Cranach’s picture because then I could get to tell the story about Tarzan and Jane, unsuitable though it is for a scholarly discussion about art like this one.

The story that I am not going to tell is about how Jane (a big well fed girl) comes across Tarzan in the jungle and strips off and invites him to make love to her. Tarzan says that he “not know how”. Jane explains to him what is involved. Tarzan then moves back half a dozen paces and takes a running kick at Jane’s crotch. Jane collapses and gasps “What do you think you are doing?” “Check for bees,” says Tarzan.

Not very long after Tovey and I had finished our twelve re-interpretations of National Gallery paintings the Gallery itself embarked upon a similar project and put on a show in which 24 contemporary artists were invited to re-interpret a similar number of the Gallery’s most iconic masterpieces. The show was called Encounters - New Art from Old. The Gallery marked the occasion with a sumptuously illustrated book which would have been a fun read but for the suffocating curatorial artspeak that accompanied the pictures. This is a whole other story, the telling of which must await another day.

In ascending order, Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark (1902-1983) is famous for being the Director of the National Gallery between 1932 and 1945, for producing the BBC’s groundbreaking television series Civilisation, as author of the definitive work on the nude in art, The Nude, and as father of the sometime representative in Parliament for Kensington & Chelsea, serial womaniser and diarist, the late Kenneth Clark MP.

Clark the younger was for a time a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. He famously fucked a judge’s wife and his two daughters at the same time and wrote it up in his diary, referring to them as “the coven”. He tells of a time when he was on a train traveling from London down to his family home at Saltwood in Kent.

“…a plump young lady came into my compartment at Waterloo. She was not wearing a bra, and her delightful globes bounced prominently, but happily, under a rope knitted jersey, as the new coach/old chassis train joggled its way over the many points and junctions.

“I gave her a huge grin, couldn’t help it. After a bit I moved over and sat beside her. She was adorable. Am I crazy? Death wish? Above us in the luggage rack the Red Box gleamed like a beacon. She works as a shop assistant in Folkestone.”

[A red box, for the benefit of my overseas readers, is a box the size of a large briefcase, coloured bright red, in which government ministers receive and carry around documents of State. One of the things that I learned from following the Phil Spector trial (possibly the only thing of lasting value) is that in the USA a briefcase is called a valise.]

Inherited genes being what they are, it is possible see the man behind the many sensual passages in The Nude through the pages of the son’s diary. When Lord Clark came to describe the contrapposto pose, which he calls “dehanchement”, the phrases that he used were “vivid symbol of desire” and “swing of the hips” - the latter being the meaning in French. On the other hand an aging woman in a Durer bathhouse is dismissed as “the fat monster on the right” and on a poor Roman copy of another of Praxiteles’s Venus’s (the so called Venus of Arles now in the Louvre) he comments that “if she were placed on the staircase of an old-fashioned hotel we should not give her a second glance.”

It is because he writes so beautifully and because he shamelessly admits that the “turn on” factor is an important part of the art landscape that Clark has been given the accolade of “of blessed memory” in my own inadequate writing. He would not have earned it for his sojourn at the National Gallery because during his time there he did the equivalent of “going Hollywood”. It must surely have been contrary to his gut instinct to hang on to all the boring religious art and Grand Tour rubbish instead of selling it off and getting some good erotic pictures in their stead.

The opening paragraph of The Nude has been committed to memory by generations of students of art and art history. It distinguishes between the naked and the nude. The former, says Clark, implying embarrassment for most people, the later, in educated usage at least, no uncomfortable overtone. The projected image is not a “huddled and defenceless body” but a “balanced, prosperous and confident body.”

The sites on the Internet on which the word de’hanchement (sometimes spelled dehanchement) is used in an artistic or in any other context are few in number other than those in the French language. In fact, I have been able to discover only two for “dehanchement” in the sense in which Lord Clark used it. One of these, curiously, is the web site of a former art professor, name of Stephen Dubov, serving a thirty year sentence without parole for possessing a sizeable stash of cocaine. He spends his time in the Federal penitentiary making modern sculptures that are well received by the world outside. He has done his own version of the The Three Graces and in a well researched background note (here) he uses both “dehanchement” and “contrapposto”. It is not clear from the context whether he sees a difference between the two poses.

The second site is a recent posting by someone who is gleeful at having discovered so unusual a word. I know the feeling. You will find it here.

There is another phrase used by the blessed Clark in The Nude that has stuck in my mind. When he singles out the Limburgh Brother’s Fall of Eve (c.1410) as marking the nude’s return to the world of art’s favour as the Renaissance gets under way he says that Eve is “naked as a shrimp.” I googled the phrase back in November 2003 and came up with what I call a “constructive Googlewhack” (see here in the Glossary) there being no sightings for the phrase. By contrast “naked as a jaybird” gets an entry in slang dictionaries, my favourite definition being “bare-assed”. “Naked as a shrimp” is still to this day a constructive Googlewhack. When I googled it just now I came up with one hit - which was my posting of yesterday trailing this present piece! (The jaybird phrase apparently originates with the little featherless jaybird chicks that fall out of the nest.)

If we look carefully at the bare-assed Eve (or, if you prefer, Eve in all her shrimpiness) you will see that the Limburgh boys had not thought it desirable to bring back from the classic era the dehanchement pose. They may have reasoned that, as the book they were illustrating was to assist their patron the Duc de Berry in his private devotions, too much swinging of the ass would be counter productive.

Lord Clark sets out his stall within the first few pages of The Nude. On page 1 there is a reproduction of Valasquez’s Rokeby Venus, pride of the National Gallery which he once directed. It is, incidentally, an example of horizontal dehanchement and as Ian Tovey and I demonstrated here it retains its allure when re-arranged vertically. On page 5 of The Nude the illustration is Courbet’s La Source which, to the average bottom, is as a 12 meter yacht to a dingy. On page 6 comes a photograph by Oscar Rejlander taken in 1857 of a lady with a bottom with the lines, say, of a classic Riva power boat. At this point in the book there is the passage which I am about to quote and which, if I could parade it across the top of this web site as a permanent banner, I would.

“The human body, as a nucleus, is rich in associations, and when it is turned into art these associations are not entirely lost. For this reason it seldom achieves the concentrated asthetic shock of animal ornament [referring to images of an animal biting its own tail found in antiquity] but it can be made expressive of a far wider and more civilizing experience. It is ourselves, and arouses memories of all the things we wish to do with ourselves; and first of all we wish to perpetuate ourselves.

“This is an aspect of the subject so obvious that I need hardly dwell on it; and yet some wise men have tried to close their eyes to it. ‘If the nude’ says Professor Alexander ‘is so treated that it raises in the spectator ideas or desires appropriate to the material subject, it is false art, and bad morals.’ This high-minded theory is contrary to experience. In the mixture of memories and sensations aroused by the nudes of Rubens or Renoir are many which are ‘appropriate to the material subject’. And since the words of a famous philosopher are often quoted, it is necessary to labour the obvious and say that no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even although it be only the faintest shadow – and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals.”

You will see now why, for me, Kenneth Clark, whether commoner or Peer, will always be of blessed memory.

I started out on the journey that brought me to this web site in the Autumn of 1998. The central concept of the book that I had decided to write, and which (to my thinking) the public interest demanded be written, was a guide to erotic art in the National Gallery in London. Then as now I strongly held the view that art collections, regardless of whether the building in which they are housed is called a gallery or a museum, are exceedingly boring to most visitors. The tedium could be alleviated, I thought, by identifying those pictures with an erotic content. Such pictures were less likely to be boring to the average male. And, for all I knew, to the average female, likewise. Looking for erotic paintings in the National Gallery seemed to me to be a task akin to hunting for truffles in the Sahara desert, the more worthwhile for the challenge that it presented.

Having reached this conclusion it was but a step to seeing the merit in providing itineraries for the use of short stay visitors to London who were engaged in the standard tourist preoccupation of eyeballing all the available iconic images to the extent necessary for them to be able to give a good account of themselves on their return home. Beyond the mandatory requirement of a visit to the National Gallery which is common to visitors of either sex, there is a divergence between the needs of of the two sexes. Women (who must expect to be thoroughly de-briefed by their hairdressers, manicurists and fellow guests at bridal and baby showers) feel compelled to look at everything there is to look at. Accompanied men, trailing along after their wives past wall upon wall of Holy Virgins, landscapes, seascapes, fruitscapes, flowerscapes and facescapes, cannot but welcome concise directions to the most expansive bosoms and delectable bottoms. They do not need to be able to debate whether or not Mrs Arnolfini was pregnant when she got married.

THE DECIMA FOUR

To implement such a scheme it was necessary to devise a system whereby the physical attributes of the subjects depicted in the Old Master paintings were individually rated for their erotic content and then ranked in order of merit. This was clearly a task best entrusted to youngsters and it happened that, about this time, I chanced upon a group of recent art graduates who were struggling to establish an art gallery in Bermondsey, south of the River Thames and hard by London Bridge. Their gallery was called the Decima Gallery after Decima Street where it was located. Parts of Bermondsey are fairly sleazy and Decima Street not the least. Although geographically it is not a very long way away from Cork Street, Mayfair, where the most fashionable galleries are situated (and the Atrium bookshop of blessed memory once was), the contrast in the local environments could hardly be greater. My suggestion that these young people might care to undertake the assessment of the works in the National Gallery collection for me, paying each of them the handsome sum of £4 per hour, met with the same enthusiastic response as might have been expected by a mid 19th century Montmartre café owner offering a square meal to impressionist painters starving in nearby ateliers.

The membership of the Decima Four, as I came to think of them, was made up by David West, Alex Chappel, Derrick Welsh and Karen Morgan. Karen, I seem to remember, was co-opted onto the team for the project and was less of an anarchical character than the other three.

Previous to our coming together David and Alex had had a lot of fun with a pantomime cow called Diana who made a number of high profile street appearances including a cow walk from St Paul’s Cathedral on the first anniversary of her Royal namesake’s untimely death. They were also responsible for a number of media hoaxes, among them Fuck Art and Pimp and the Dennis Nielsen Tour Company . Alex’s recent credits include a pop video for the notorious poet Micalef whose works bear such titles as No Pussy without Pork Scratchings and We Like Harold Shipman ’cause he kills Old People. Derrick Welsh was described as the Decima Gallery’s resident artist although his role there seems to have been not only permanent but leader de facto. His recent works have parodied corporate brands such as Nike and Tate Modern.

Congratulating myself on finding a group of young people who, if not quite in my own image, were possessed of the independence of thought that I deemed necessary for the task in hand, I prepared three different kinds of questionnaire. Each was individually numbered and ring bound into volumes, a hundred to a volume.

THE PICTURES

In the first set of volumes, labelled “Pictures”, boxes numbered 1 to 50 were provided for ticking according to the salient erotic features of a particular work. The object of collecting this information was to enable the identification of which pictures had the most female breasts, nipples, bottoms and genitalia on view, the size of the portrayal (lifesize, plus or minus) and whether the subjects were human or mythological beings such as satyrs or centaurs, or angels or putti. Male attributes could similarly be noted. Boxes were also provided for the name of the painting and its collection number, the observer’s first impression, any other remarks, and his or her initials. In addition there was a box for a sketch map showing the exact location of the work in the room in which it was hung in relation to the entrances and exits. Men who are short of time, I reasoned, do not want to hunt for an erotic fix among scowling canvases of long dead princes and prelates and the living rooms of dull middle class Dutch dry goods merchants.

THE SUBJECTS

The second set of volumes, labelled “Subjects”, contained pages that could be cross-referenced to the works recorded in the first volume and allocated on the basis of one page per subject of interest. Thus a typical Rubens might have up to half-a-dozen pages, one for each naked female. Each of these “subject” pages contained 67 boxes, just over half of them requiring a subjective 1 to 5 rating to be awarded by the observer. Features such as lips, eyes, neck, fingers, breasts, nipples, areolae, navel, thighs, under-arm hair, pubic hair and genitalia all had their separate boxes as did attributes such as “20th Century Realism”, “Sensuality”, “Provocativeness” (either vis-à-vis another subject or the viewer), “Shyness”, Exhibitionist, “Availability” and “Social Status”. As with the judging of ice skaters, you can see at a glance from the number of fives and fours whether or not you are on to a good thing. A box for remarks was again provided but to describe those which were proffered as “laddish” would be to elevate them to an unjustifiably high literary status. Karen’s perhaps less so, but her remarks were anatomically explicit nevertheless.

THE DRAWINGS

The pages of the third set of volumes, “Drawings”, cross-referenced as before to the first volume, were devoted to a simple line drawing of each of the pictures. These were executed by one or other of the Decima Four team who initialled the page. These line drawings were thought necessary because at that time there was no comprehensively illustrated catalogue of the National Gallery’s collection and there was not much of any use available on the Internet. It was clear to me that the guide would have to have illustrations of the “pictures of interest”. This expression, incidentally, is borrowed from the police who use it to describe a suspect who they are convinced is guilty of the crime that they are investigating but have not yet caught. It will crop up from time to time in postings to this web site.

To ensure that the National Gallery did not get an inkling of what was afoot the covers of the volumes in which the Decima Four were to be seen scribbling as they stood day after day in front of the Gallery’s paintings were suitably cryptic: The Depiction of the female form in classical art - Preliminary Survey. To the extent that the Decima remit covered male subjects as well as female subjects the title was a misnomer. It was, I thought, definitely preferable to something along the lines of the probable title for the book which, at that time, was The Complete Guide to Tits and Arse in the National Gallery

The Decima Four started their work at the beginning of November 1998 and were in the National Gallery every day for a period of six weeks with a day or two off when the Gallery was closed over the Christmas and New Year period. To this day I marvel at the dedication that they brought to their task. It would have driven most people mad. Obviously, with so much imagery now available on the Internet, one would do it differently today but their meticulous assessment has provided a unique and valuable resource without which no guide to erotic art in a gallery could do justice to its subject.

The next posting will be a Glossary Gloss on the Decima Four. It was these four young people who carried out the initial assessment of the erotic content of the National Gallery’s collection for me. As so often, one thing leads to another, and this time it is one of the best bottoms to be seen in the National Gallery that leads us away from the straight and narrow. The bottom happens to belong to a girl satyr and so any attraction that we might have is complicated by an element of bestiality. The alleged artist is none other than Nicolas “Nick the Fish” Poussin and even the National Gallery, who dotes on the old fellow, can not bring itself to believe that he did anything so good.

There were three formative influences when I started out on the research that will eventually lead to a Guide to Erotic Art in London’s National Gallery once a publisher has been found. There was Ian Tovey, the illustrator with whom I go back to 1995 and the World’s first newspaper to be worn on the head. There was the Decima Four - four young art graduates whose lair was an small art gallery which they had set up in Decima Street, Bermondsey. They did the initial trawl for erotic art in the National Gallery on my behalf, tramping through room after room with clipboards ticking boxes on pre-printed forms. And there was the Atrium Bookshop in Cork Street Mayfair, alas no more.

Tovey and the Decima Four are prime subjects for special articles on this web site but I am dealing with the Atrium Bookshop now because it jumped into my mind when I was thinking about what to write about the curtained picture in the Horrible Hogarth’s second of six Marriage a La Mode paintings. This mysterious picture will be the subject of a detour from the main body of discussion of this famous work under the title Drawing back the Curtain on Mr Hogarth. One of the books that I found at Atrium introduced me to Courbet’s The Origin of the World which is a seminal work in the history of erotic art and which spent a large part of its early life hidden from view behind a curtain. Hence the connection.

The Atrium Bookshop was probably the best specialist art book shop there ever was. It was run by a group of Sloan Rangerish young women which always made me feel slightly uncomfortable given the kind of literature that I was looking for. I quickly discovered that Atrium kept the more scholarly of their pornographic books (or may be I should say the more pornographic of their scholarly books) on a shelf 2 inches above floor level. The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris has its famous L’Enfer (literally “from Hell”) collection and the British Museum its “Private Case”, access to both of which is as closely guarded as if they were the repositories for state secrets. Atrium did almost as well, as far as I was concerned, by positioning the books in a place where it was necessary to endure considerable pain in order to get at them if one happened to be of a certain age and stiff of joint. But get down I did and there I discovered a trove of books on erotic themes which taken together effectively defined, as it turned out, the project.

Among the books that I purchased from Atrium on a single day’s foray were: Ganymede in the Renaissance - Homosexuality in Art and Society (James Saslow), Heaven & the Flesh - Imagery of desire from the Renaissance to the Rococo (Clive Hart and Kay Stevenson), Taking Positions - On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Bette Talvacchia), The Invention of Pornography - Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity 1500 - 1800 (Lynn Hunt, Editor), Solitary Pleasures - The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism (Paula Bennett and Vernon Rosario, Editors) and The Rear View - A brief and elegant history of bottoms through the ages (Jean-Luc Hennig).

Solitary Pleasures was notable for providing as fine an example as could be imagined of literary badge engineering - the equivalent of Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors Even as a name for a work of art. The literary “come-on” took the form of a contribution by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick re-running an earlier piece by her entitled Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl. Fans of Jane Austen were, of course, outraged on the article’s first appearance but Ms Sedgwick’s career prospered. (I was later to discover that she is a highly respected feminist sex maven - her field of expertise being sometimes referred to as “queer theory”).

Taking Positions is all about I modi, the sixteen drawings produced by Giulio Romano in the 1520’s illustrating sixteen positions of sex. In that moment pornography was born and although the Church promptly moved to suppress them, hunting down those involved, the genii was out of the bottle. The author deserves credit for her identification of a phenomenon in erotic art largely unnoticed by other writers: the slung leg. It is a device developed by artists during the Renaissance to signify copulation without depicting the act itself.

In 1997 The Origin of the World was one of the main attractions in the Women in the 19th Century exhibition put on by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, where the painting has found a permanent home. The book of the show took the form of a folder containing each of the twenty four paintings on cards with an introduction penned by the well known feminist art historian Linda Nochlin. Nochlin and I met on the Shelf L’Enfer, one might say. Ms Nochlin relates the Courbet picture to the then recent invention of photography which had immediately lead to the creation of pornography for the consumption of a new male market for visual erotica. One result of the impact of the visual realism of photography, says La Nochlin, is that when the ageing Ingres was putting the final touches to his La Source (1856) he added an inviting droop of the belly and a come-hither glance not seen in his earlier nudes.

Jean-Luc Hennig’s masterly exposition on bottoms is by turns chatty and erudite. Its failing grace is that it lacks illustrations. Which is like picnicking in a parking bay on the side of a motorway. Jean-Luc Hennig tells a good story about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa which, without an illustration, is less than user friendly. He quotes a Quebec art critic Suzanne Giroux as saying that the painting, if turned on its side, conceals a boy’s behind. The artist’s homosexuality, hidden during his life time as best he could, provides a plausible explanation, she says, as to why he should take the trouble of painting the remainder of the picture just to put on to canvas this tiny vignette of desire. The book does have one illustration. The dust cover shows an appropriate view of Canova’s Three Graces - the Pepysian Moment of sculpted bottoms.

Atrium, sadly, proved too good to be true. Even though they were never shy of pricing-up a difficult-to-find book (Heaven & the Flesh, 235 pages, I recollect, cost me £35) and although they clearly did an extensive mail order business, it was a mystery to me that they could afford to pay a Cork Street rent. All around them in Cork Street were galleries with large expanses of light coloured walls punctuated by an occasional Lichtenstein, Pollock, Rouchenberg or Warhol and patrolled by sloopy looking receptionists. True that Atrium’s complement of sloopy girls was the equal of any, but there is a difference in terms of economies of scale between selling books, even at £35, and a nice Roy Lichtenstein with an impeccable provenance at $2,000,000. Eventually Atrium were taken over by Christies, the fine art auctioneers, and soon after that they were shut down.

Of the books liberated from Atrium’s Shelf L’ Enfer, Solitary Pleasures was perhaps the greatest eye-opener. It deals with masturbation which is still a taboo subject in most sections of society and is an anthology of papers submitted by university academics to a symposium held in 1989 under the title The Muse of Masturbation. If the dictionary meaning of “prurience” is correct - “characterised by or appealing to an inordinate interest in sex” - it is not possible to write about masturbation in a wholly clinical way such as one might find in a textbook about gynaecology or urology. Nevertheless the six men and four women brought to their task a certain aplomb and can not be accused of failing to explore the subject in all its ramifications

Amazon.com. completely filled the yawning gap left by the demise of Atrium. Indeed, even if Atrium had struggled on after the takeover, Amazon would surely have dispatched it to an honoured place between the Great Bookends in the Sky. If I had to chose the most significant titles in my bookcase which were born of a click on an amazon.com or .uk web page they would be: Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Marylin Yalom’s A History of the Breast and The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. The Indispensible Hall’s Dictionary and Kenneth Clark’s The Nude I had previously acquired from Atrium, although not from the Shelf L’Enfer. The Story of Art by the All Knowing Gombrich, The Arts by Guru Hendrick Willem van Loon and the Dictionary of Art and Artists by the always dependable Murrays I bought in second hand book shops. This still leaves several hundred books that came from somewhere and I am getting one or other down from the bookshelf all the time. Anyone writing about erotic art cannot live by the Internet alone.

During my short acquaintance with Atrium a very strange thing happened. The shop’s clientele included photographers and from time to time a small area at the back was put aside for a display of their work. Whether as a publicity stunt or for whatever reason the girls behind the counter allowed one of the photographers to photograph them in the nude. The event made a newspaper diary piece and reading it made me want to see it for myself. Very strange feeling walking past the girls on the way to look at the photographs of them without clothes. Particularly as I was not sure where the back room was and had to ask for directions.

I had not been working on my Guide to Erotic Art in London’s National Gallery for long when I came to realise that a shorthand expression was needed for the times when I found myself commenting on facts, the acceptance of which at face value might be an act of faith for many people, but to me seemed questionable. Not wishing to offend anyone I came up with the idea of referring any differences of opinion that might potentially arise to Her Majesty’s Royal Marines.

By tradition the Royal Marines are seaborn soldiers who combine qualities of loyalty, courage and tenacity of purpose of the highest order with an innate capacity to believe whatever they are told. It may be thought that whenever a reference to the Royal Marines is made in anything written by me I am indicating that I personally think that there is something fishy afoot. Such an assumption would be incorrect. When a set of facts are referred to the Royal Marines, or are stated to have somehow come to their notice, what is indicated is a possible difference of opinion upon which readers should make their own judgment as to where the truth lies.

Those of you who have been following the Phil Spector trial will be interested to know that, when Kim cast doubt in her blog as to whether Linda Kenney Baden’s absence from the courtroom was due to illness, as the judge and jury were led to believe, or whether it was to avoid the embarrassment of her sitting at the defence table while her husband was giving evidence, a General Order was put out by the Commandant General, Royal Marines, forbidding all ranks to log on to Kim’s DarwinException blog.

And when there was a chorus of disbelief among posters to the CourtTV message boards following Dr Baden’s testimony that, in an “aha moment”, he figured out that the clumsy criminalists had flung the victim’s body into the back of a truck and broken its neck thereby severing the nerve supply to the brain (intact at the time of death), the Royal Marines marched, colours flying and brass band playing, through the City of Portsmouth holding aloft banners with pictures of Dr and Mrs Baden. The rear of the parade was brought up by their mascot, a goat that had been renamed “Eureka”, sitting on its hind legs in a wheeled bath-tub. This moving display of support for the Badens was not reported in the American media.

Because so many of the pictures in the National Gallery’s collection have a religious subject it has, unfortunately, been necessary to make frequent referrals of stories from the Bible to the Royal Marines. It is pleasing to report that their belief in The Word remains unshaken. In what was, I admit, a wicked moment I brought to their attention the late Dr Ernest Martin’s theory that Gothic architecture was Satan inspired and that entering a Gothic church was indistinguishable from penetrating a woman through her vulva. (Article here.) The only response made by the Corps was an order that, on church parades, only officers above the rank of Major would be permitted to go through the front door of a church without wearing a condom and that, on no account, were any personnel to enter through the rear entrance.

Picture Captions: On the left hand side: The National Gallery’s three Judiths; Top: Johann Liss (about 1595); Lower Left: van der Neer (about 1678); Lower Right: Master of the Mansi Magdalen (about 1525). On the right hand side: The Tovey/Samuelson re-interpretation of Judith in the Tent of Holofernes by Liss - with strong associations with the famous Athena tennis Girl poster.

Looking through the various drafts of my as-yet-unpublished Guide to Erotic Art in London’s National Gallery I see that among the stories that I asked the Royal Marines to look at was Judith in the Tent of Holofernes. The National Gallery has three works in which the lady is depicted and - although some might say I stretch the meaning of “erotic” at times – no one would dispute that Judith’s meeting with Holofernes has all the necessary elements to get it on CourtTV.

I have written so much stuff about so many of the paintings in the National Gallery, and I have such a bad memory, that when I do a search (in this instance the key words were “marines” and “judith”) what comes up reads as if it had been written by someone else. Sometimes the “someone else” looks to have been a better writer than me. Sometimes he looks a bit crappy. Everyone has off days Read the rest of this entry »

Where does the name come from?

The original Happy Porker was a three feet high display model in a butchers shop in the High Street of Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex on the South coast of England. It was a jolly looking pig wearing a blue and white striped apron standing on its hind legs holding a tray of pork sausages. The present illustration, assembled from Internet clips, is a fill-in until something better comes along.

How did the Happy Porker become a syndrome?

One of the definitions of “syndrome” is: “a distinctive pattern of behaviour”. In art, what is referred to is the saints’ habit, as depicted by the painters of the early Renaissance, of parading the instruments of torture and death inflicted upon them by their persecutors.

Why did the painters show the saints in this bizarre way?”

The paintings were devotional works designed to focus the attention of the illiterate masses on what would happen to them if they did not toe the Church’s line. The saints, they were taught, were all that stood between them and Hell and Eternal Damnation.

Why does it matter to us?

These early paintings are taking up too much room in the National Gallery and need to be weeded out with, may be, a few representative examples displayed in a side room. By modern day standards such works can not be said to constitute art. Rather they are fossils from a long ago era.

How do they come to feature in a Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery?

Such a guide has to cater for all kinds of sexual preference and there are those who choose a life style centred upon Sadism and Masochism.

Placing a representative selection of Happy Porker pictures in a side room would enable them to enjoy the pictures in quieter surroundings and meet others with similar tastes.

What paintings are we talking about?

Here are some examples:

Saint Peter Martyr was hit over the head with an axe, allegedly by Cathartist heretics. In his portraits the axe is still embedded in his head. The Cathartists were a splinter group and the Church in Rome set about winning their hearts and minds by hunting them down and burning them at the stake. Saint Peter Martyr was born into a Cathartist family but turned his back on the faith of his fathers and became Chief Inquisitor for Northern Italy. So, in the words of the six merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail, he had it coming.

Saint Agatha rejected the advances of a Roman Governor, was thrown into a brothel and had her breasts cut off. In Old Master Land she is never seen without her breasts on a plate, a pair of sheers, often as big as bolt cutters, nearby. As a rule she is holding the plate, Happy Porker fashion. She is the patron saint of Bell Founders. Not a lot of people know that.

Saint Lucy is another one who is forever seen with her detached body parts on a plate but in her case it is not her breasts but her eyes. The story goes that, having dedicated her life to Christ, she was resisting a forced marriage arranged by her mother. Her betrothed annoyed her by keeping on about her beautiful eyes and she tore them out. After that there nothing for her but the brothel but unlike Saint Agatha, who seems to have gone quietly, it took a team of oxen to drag her there. Read the rest of this entry »