Abstract
This chapter explores how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sculptures of the female nude on display in the V&A may craft an enabling space for female viewers’ experience of homoerotic desire. It problematises the term ‘lesbian spectatorship’ as it relates to theories of ‘the gaze’ and examines the display of single, nude female figures to consider how a visual dialogue between historical sculptures and contemporary viewers might mobilise lesbian desire to disrupt the sociocultural, historically specific heterosexual masculine visual economy in which they were produced. The chapter draws attention to the lack of association between the female nude and female same-sex desire in art historical scholarship and considers the connection between representation of erotic intimacy between female figures in sculpture and female homoerotic, scopophilic pleasure.
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Notes
- 1.
Nigel Reynolds, “Museums Where Love Is the Main Attraction,” Daily Telegraph, May 6, 2006. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517597/Museums-where-love-is-the-main-attraction.html.
- 2.
Commissioned by a campaign for Museums and Galleries Month, the survey was carried out on-line by the 24 Hour Museum between the 24th of April and the 2nd of May 2006. Now called Culture24, this British charity publishes two websites, Culture24 and Show Me, about visual culture and heritage in the United Kingdom. See: http://www.culture24.org.uk/places-to-go/north-west/manchester/art37218; http://www.culture24.org.uk.
- 3.
Quoted in Reynolds, “Museums.”
- 4.
Anra Kennedy, “Kisses in the Gallery,” Daily Telegraph, May 6, 2006. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517599/Kisses-in-the-gallery.html; and Bryony Gordon, “I Admired a Bust in the Hope He Would Admire Mine,” Daily Telegraph, May 6, 2006. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517598/I-admired-a-bust-in-the-hope-he-would-admire-mine.html.
- 5.
Gordon, “Admired.”
- 6.
Quoted in Reynolds, “Museums.”
- 7.
Amy K. Levin, “Introduction,” in Gender and Sexuality in Museums: A Routledge Reader, eds. Amy K. Levin et al. (London: Routledge, 2010), 1–15 (5). See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 59–88.
- 8.
Scholarship considering the ubiquitous association between the malenude (especially in the context of Classicism and Neo-Classicism) and male homoeroticism proliferates, so much so that its close association has been a subject of critique. See David Getsy, “Recognizing the Homoerotic: The Uses of Intersubjectivity in John Addington Symonds’ 1887 Essays on Art,” Visual Culture inBritain 8, no. 1 (2007), 37–57. However, a similar association between the female nude and female same-sex desire remains relatively unexplored and untheorized.
- 9.
In using the term ‘woman’ to refer to the viewer as subject throughout this chapter, I am referring to all viewers who identify as female, rather than assuming an essentialist definition of women as cis women.
- 10.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 815.
- 11.
Karen Hollinger, “Theorizing Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular Lesbian Film,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 3–17 (12).
- 12.
See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” reprinted in Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 11–48. For a useful summary of the debates surrounding Rich’s ‘lesbian continuum’, see Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan, “Lesbian Continuum,” in Fifty Key Concepts in Gender Studies (London: Sage, 2004), 79–82.
- 13.
For a summary of such exhibitions, see Stuart Frost, “Secret Museums: Hidden Histories of Sex and Sexuality,” Where is Queer? Museums and Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse 3, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 29–40.
- 14.
Robert Mills, “Theorizing the Queer Museum,” Where is Queer?, Museums and Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse 3, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 41–52 (41).
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
“Future Plan,” Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/info/futureplan, accessed August 12, 2017.
- 17.
For a discussion of the unusual circumstances through which Rodin’s gift of these objects to the V&A came to be transferred to the Tate Collection and on loan to the V&A, see “Sculpture,” Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/sculpture,-metalwork,-ceramics-and-glass, accessed August 12, 2017.
- 18.
Other sculptures in this gallery included female nudes such as: Jean-Baptise Carpeaux’s Eve After the Fall (1873), Alphonse Legros’ Female Torso (1890), Rodin’s The Muse (1896) and Despair (1890–92).
- 19.
Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), 2.
- 20.
Michael Hatt, “Thoughts and Things: Sculpture and the Victorian Nude,” in Exposed: TheVictorianNude, ed. Alison Smith (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 37–49 (38).
- 21.
Nead, Female Nude, 2.
- 22.
Ibid., 22.
- 23.
Alison Smith, “The Nude in Nineteenth-Century Britain: ‘The English Nude’,” in Exposed, 11–20 (11). For an exploration of the cliché of Victorian prudery and its hypocrisies, see also Martin Myrone’s “Prudery, Pornography and the Victorian Nude (Or, What Do We Think The Butler Saw?)” in the same volume, 23–35.
- 24.
David Getsy, Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 153, 6.
- 25.
Ibid., 153.
- 26.
Albert E. Elsen with Rosalyn Frankel Jamison, Rodin’s Art, ed. Bernard Barryte (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 530.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Catherine Lampert, Rodin: Sculpture and Drawings (London: Arts Council, 1986), 214.
- 29.
Kirk Varnedoe, “Life Drawings and Watercolours,” in Rodin Rediscovered, ed. Albert E. Elsen (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1981), 153–89 (180). For an in-depth exploration of the complexities of the apparent contradiction surrounding attitudes towards the subject of lesbianism at the turn of the century as both taboo and demonized, yet popular and poeticized, see Nicole G. Albert, LesbianDecadence: Representations in Art and Literature of Fin-de-SiѐcleFrance, trans. Nancy Erber and William A. Peniston (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016).
- 30.
Rodin illustrated the collector Paul Gallimard’s copy of the 1857 first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal in the 1880s, resulting in twenty-seven drawings in the margins of that volume. Lampert, Rodin, 144.
- 31.
Elsen, Rodin’s Art, 530.
- 32.
Visitors look down on the object with a restricted view and perceive it at one remove, resulting in an experience which lacks the intimacy and immediacy of The Fallen Angel’s open display.
- 33.
Ibid., 257.
- 34.
Ibid., 256.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ibid., 530.
- 37.
All labels date from the opening of the gallery in May 2007.
- 38.
Whilst the plaster was only bequeathed to the V&A by the collector Mr. Charles Shannon in the 1930s, the bronze was part of the artist’s original gift in 1914. “Search the Collections,” Victoria and Albert Museum. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O135955/metamorphosis-of-ovid-statuette-rodin-auguste, accessed July 1, 2017.
- 39.
Kate Hill notes that the scarcity of “surviving records of visitors’ reactions, actions and experiences has meant that even when historians set out to document visitors’ opinions about museums, they have ended up focusing on how museums sought to shape those opinions.” Kate Hill, Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 103.
- 40.
“Building the Museum,” Victoria and Albert Museum. www.vam.ac.uk/articles/building-the-museum, accessed September 11, 2017.
- 41.
See Bennett, Birth, 25–37.
- 42.
Ibid., 29.
- 43.
Hill, Women, 106. The perception of women visitors, their roles, behavior, expectations and experiences, diverged according to class distinctions, even as cultural institutions became more freely accessible to all, later in the century. Ibid., 114–5.
- 44.
Ibid., 121.
- 45.
Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3.
- 46.
Victoria Mills, “The Museum as ‘Dream Space’: Psychology and Aesthetic Response in George Eliot’s Middlemarch,” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 12 (2011), 3; Hill, Women, 112. See also Ruth Hoberman, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Charlottesville, and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 132; and Aviva Briefel, The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 46.
- 47.
Francesco Ventrella, “Beyond the Gallery Handbook: Vernon Lee, Mary Berenson and Constance Jocelyn Foulkes,” (Gendering Museum Histories Conference, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, September 8, 2016). See also Hilary Fraser, Women WritingArt History: Looking Like a Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 48.
Hilary Fraser, “Women and the Modelling of Victorian Sculptural Discourse,” Visual Resources Journal 33, no. 1–2 (June 6, 2017): 74–93 (75).
- 49.
Ibid., 74.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Ventrella, “Beyond,” 2.
- 52.
Ibid., 3. Kathy Psomiades, “‘Still Burning from this Strangling Embrace’: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics,” in VictorianSexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 21–41 (35).
- 53.
Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beautyand Ugliness, and Other Studies in PsychologicalAesthetics (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1912), 218, 265–6, quoted in Fraser, “Modelling,” 88.
- 54.
Fraser, “Modelling,” 76.
- 55.
Michael Hatt, “Substance and Shadow: Conceptions of Embodiment in Rodin and the New Sculpture,” in Rodin: The Zola of Sculpture, ed. Claudine Mitchell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 217–35 (218).
- 56.
Getsy, Rodin, 3; Hatt, “Thoughts,” 44.
- 57.
Ibid., 46.
- 58.
Herbert Read, VictorianSculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 315, 324.
- 59.
Hatt, “Thoughts,” 46.
- 60.
Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture (London: Yale University Press, 1983), 231.
- 61.
Marion Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-Day (London: Cassell & Co., 1901), 30.
- 62.
For a discussion of Eve as prototypical temptress in sculpture, see Joy S. Kasson, MarbleQueens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 173–90.
- 63.
Spielmann, British, 124–5.
- 64.
Chris Straayer, “The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine,” Jump Cut 35 (April 1990): 50–8 (50), quoted in Hollinger, “Theorizing,” 12. See also Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, (London: Routledge, 1994) for debates surrounding theories of female spectatorship and homoerotic desire in lesbian film.
- 65.
Author’s own discussion with Senior Curator of Sculpture, Holly Trusted, V&A, February 2009.
- 66.
Author’s own discussion with Assistant Curator of Modern British Art, Jenny Powell, Tate, March 2013.
- 67.
Mills, “Theorizing,” 48.
- 68.
Hatt, “Substance,” 227.
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Mechowski, A. (2019). “Britain’s Most Romantic Museum”?: Lesbian Spectatorship and the Reception of Historic Figural Sculpture at the V&A. In: Funke, J., Grove, J. (eds) Sculpture, Sexuality and History. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_11
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