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January 2023

Vol. 165 / No. 1438

Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism

Reviewed by Kevin Salatino

Courtauld Gallery, London, 14th October 2022–8th January 2023

Of Henry Fuseli’s many ‘shockingly indelicate’ drawings, as John Flaxman described them, none is more shocking or more indelicate than his study of a dominatrix using an elaborate strap-on dildo on a figure bent over a chair (Museo Horne, Florence).[1] And although that sketch, which he made in Rome in the 1770s, is not included in this riveting exhibition of Fuseli’s drawings of the ‘modern woman’ (organised with the Kunsthaus Zürich), there are enough kindred works to give the visitor a bracing sense of what the eccentric and visionary painter of The Nightmare (1781; Detroit Institute of Arts) was attempting in his moments of greatest graphic liberty and libertinage.[2]  

The famously splenetic Benjamin Haydon memorably described Fuseli’s female protagonists as ‘whores [. . .] with the look of demons [who] have the actions of galvanized frogs’, whereas Fuseli himself, Haydon claimed, ‘was engendered by some hellish monster on the dead body of a speckled hag’.[3] So hyperbolic is Haydon’s language that, one speculates, he must have seen at least some of the artist’s controversial drawings, most of which, as Fuseli’s biographer Alan Cunningham assures us, were burnt after his death. ‘Nor do I blame the hand of the widow who kindled it’, Cunningham primly added.[4] 

That widow was Sophia Rawlins, an artist’s model whom Henry married in 1788 when he was forty-seven and she was twenty-five or twenty-six. Of the fifty drawings on view (plus one by John Brown; c.1775–80; cat. no.36), more than half depict the artist’s wife, either literally or allegorically, making the exhibition, in large part, a visual biography of Sophia, the obsessive subject/object of her husband’s affection.[5] In most of them she is highly fetishised, sporting extravagant, indeed bizarre, hair or headdresses, and elaborately costumed in either the latest fashion or in historically inspired inventions. And while her breasts are often exposed, her face whitened and her cheeks heavily rouged à la cortigiana, of all her strange accoutrements, her coiffures take the proverbial cake. 

A number of historical sources may be adduced as inspiration for the Fuselian head, including Michelangelo’s teste divine drawings and ancient Roman (Flavian) portrait busts, the putative influences behind, in the first case, an outlandish headdress resembling a pair of ram’s horns (no.7; Fig.16) and, in the second, a hairdo of upswept rows of tight curls that calls to mind the ‘Teddy Boy’ style of the 1950s (1799; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg; no.6). If, as David Solkin, who curated the exhibition with Ketty Gottardo, speculates in the superb accompanying catalogue, Sophia herself designed and created some of these remarkable concoctions, ‘she deserves to be credited with as much artistry as her husband’ (p.30). In this reviewer’s opinion the designing and creating were a family affair, but this does not diminish Sophia’s alleged achievement. 

Handsomely installed in the Courtauld’s new Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, with loans from fifteen public institutions and seven private collections, Fuseli and the Modern Woman is a rare opportunity to see a body of work that constitutes, as Solkin revisionistically declares, ‘one of the thematic [. . .] cornerstones of [Fuseli’s] career’ (p.34), ushering in ‘a period of stylistic and technical experimentation without precedent in his practice’ (p.44). Surprisingly, no show devoted to this compelling and provocative material (constituting more than one tenth of approximately 1,300 extant drawings by the artist) has ever been mounted. Divided into three thematic groupings, the exhibition unfolds as both a narrative and a défilé de mode

The section ‘The Medusa of the Hearth’ focuses, as the wall text indicates, ‘on Fuseli’s fetishistic preoccupation with female hairstyles of extraordinary complexity, [. . .] mainly of his wife’, observing that such ‘displays of artifice were commonly associated with [. . .] courtesans’. It could be argued, of course, that this is the focus of the entire exhibition, but it helps to break up what might otherwise seem a relentless progression of increasingly eccentric femmes fatales into semiotic or iconographic taxonomies. In Fuseli’s profoundly private and performative portrayals of his wife, for example, Sophia can be said to adopt a number of potentially identifiable characters (such as coquette, courtesan, dominatrix or simply fashion plate), presumably known and understood by the Fuselis but now largely irretrievable. She can also be seen to exercise a good deal of personal autonomy. 

‘The Other Side of Venus’ explores Fuseli’s images of women (again, mostly Sophia) rendered from behind, a particular fetish of his. A dozen drawings fall into this category, several of which are large, highly finished works in watercolour and gouache (no.27; Fig.17). Sophia’s majestic swaying figure – an exercise in clothed contrapposto – is rooted to the ground like an oak tree, while her coiffure, seen from the rear, assumes ever more fantastic and suggestively phallic forms. One of this group, the small but powerful Kallipyga (no.24; Fig.18), is among the most objectifying and erotic in the exhibition, its implicit threat of sexual violation implicating both artist and viewer. It depicts Sophia leaning against an altar-like console with ithyphallic supports, staring into a mirror, her skirts hiked up above her waist to expose her buttocks. The floor’s pattern of alternating disembodied male and female genitalia makes plain the drawing’s message. 

‘Dangerous Liaisons’, the final section, addresses Fuseli’s unambiguous renderings of courtesans. Again, Sophia clearly posed for some of these, whereas others depict actual (or imagined) sex workers. Still others, the most outré, come from the realm of purest fancy, their startlingly creative and ever-more architectonic head gear defying both gravity and belief. Some of the works in this group, such as The Debutante (1807; Tate; no.41) and Allegory of Vanity (1811; Auckland Art GalleryToi o Tāmaki; no.65), are among the most beautiful in the exhibition, as accomplished as any of Fuseli’s better-known drawings. 

A disturbing subcategory in this section depicts women enacting enigmatic rituals of sadistic violence. In them, the artist’s dominatrices (a lifelong obsession) achieve the inevitable Fuselian apotheosis into madwomen and murderesses, blithely indulging in sexual torture, mutilation, dismemberment and infanticide. Most of these are private penseés, unsettling products of Fuseli’s darkest fantasies. Unlike anything else of the time, they are also a testament to his unfettered mind and Gothic sensibility. All of them (indeed, most of the drawings on view), it should be emphasised, were clandestine, shown by Fuseli only to a select few, far too ‘indecent’ ever to have been made public. That they survive at all is miraculous. 

Showcasing Fuseli’s graphic invention and abiding strangeness, this deeply intelligent exhibition and its catalogue are a substantial contribution to Fuseli studies. More significantly, they also enlarge our understanding of proto-Romantic art and thought, expand our perception of the erotic and pornographic in the long eighteenth century and further problematise the depiction, reception and agency of women – modern or not – in a patriarchal age that confined them, in the memorable words of the Fuseli-besotted Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘in cages like the feathered race’, with ‘nothing to do but to plume themselves and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch’.[6]

[1] John Flaxman’s description concerned a group of ostensibly obscene drawings discovered shortly after Fuseli’s death, as recorded by Benjamin Robert Haydon. See T. Taylor, ed.: Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals, London 1853, II, p.129. 

[2] Catalogue: Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism. Edited by David H. Solkin and Ketty Gottardo, with contributions by Jonas Beyer, Mechtild Fend and Ketty Gottardo. 168 pp. incl. 75 col. ills. (Paul Holberton, London, 2022), £30. ISBN 978–1–913645–29–8. 

[3] Diary entry for December 1815 in W.B. Hope, ed.: The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Cambridge MA 1960–63, I, pp.488–89. 

[4] Cunningham was wrong. Although some of Fuseli’s erotic drawings may have been burned, many clearly were not. A. Cunningham: The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, London 1879, I, p.100. 

[5] The catalogue’s checklist contains sixtyfive drawings, fifty-one of which are on view in London whereas fifty-nine will appear in the exhibition’s second iteration, at the Kunsthaus Zürich (24th February–21st May 2023). Six of the drawings appear only in London, fourteen only in Zürich. 

[6] S. Tomaselli, ed.: Wollstonecraft: A Vindi-cation of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Cambridge 2012, p.130.