Pierre Bonnard, Poster for the brand France-Champagne, 1891
Public and private pleasure
The image of Paris as the capital of nocturnal pleasure is reflected in numerous posters. Pierre Bonnard’s France-champagne, for instance, shows an erotic dream image of a champagne-drinking, giggling woman with fly-away curls and a flimsy dress. At the same time, printmakers produced more intimate erotic prints of naked or scantily dressed women in the privacy of their interior.
Male fantasies
Erotically tinged prints were generally intended for male collectors, who viewed them in the privacy of their study. Consequently, printmakers primarily depicted male desires and fantasies.
Women were not thought to experience pleasure from their sexuality, while sex within marriage chiefly served the higher goal of procreation. Prostitutes were an exception in this regard, but they were seen in turn as sinful, sick and a threat to society.
As far as the world of prints is concerned, the only women who enjoy their sexuality without inhibition are nymphs in the landscapes of Arcadia, exempt from 19th-century morality.
Félix Vallotton, The Three Bathers (Les trois baigneuses), 1895
Ker-Xavier Roussel, Women Bathing (Baigneuses), 1900
Further reading
- Octave Uzanne (ed.), Féminies: huit chapitres inédits dévoués à la femme, à l'amour, à la beauté, Paris 1896
- Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity. Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France, London 1998
- Richard Thomson, The Troubled Republic. Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889-1900, New Haven 2004