Fuseli and the Modern Woman

An intriguing exhibition has just finished at the Courtauld's Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries. It focused on the period around the 1790s when the artist Fuseli was making private drawings of what were thought of at the time as 'modern women'. What is fascinating about the drawings is the fusion between reality and fantasy. The observed realities of what was then contemporary fashion, especially hair styles, are suffused with his elaborated fantasies and as he draws they become fetishes. These women are powerful and the drawings suggest that Fuseli had anxieties about gender, identity and sexuality at a time of acute social instability.  This was also the time of the French Revolution, a period where so many ideas that had been unquestioned for many years were being thrown up into the air and effectively ripped apart by what was going on in France. The exhibition, 'Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism', presented a series of drawings I'd never seen before and it helped me to think about a range of issues in relation to image making, in particular the depiction of repressed sexual desire, how to harness difficult psychological energy and how to represent the mythic subconscious in everyday situations. 

Here are a few of the drawings that were shown

I found myself thinking about these head adornments as being similar to those developed by dinosaurs. It has been argued that some dinosaur head extensions, such as those belonging to the parasaurolophus below, were used as sexual attractors. These 18th century drawings feel as if they too represent extinct creatures; unearthed 'creepy' humanoids from an old 'B' movie.

Parasaurolophus

Stegoceras 

The woman sitting reading above is like a member of the Stegoceras family, human invention echoing nature, which is no real surprise as we are as natural as the dinosaurs. 

Triceratops 

Like the triceratops these head growths suggest aggressive defence mechanisms, these are not passive adornments, they are carried with pride. Fuseli's idea of women is a strange one, they exist for him as creatures from another world, some operating as witches or enchantresses; evil beings from midnight fantasies. Apparently his affections were rejected by his first true love, perhaps these drawings are his revenge.

Fuseli: The witch and the mandrake

The mandrake

Because it is a hallucinogenic the mandrake was thought to have magical power and that it was often found in a witch's herbal collection, whereby it was used to heighten and elicit supernatural sexual perversions. It was well known that Joan of Arc at her trial was accused of carrying a mandrake root and this was seen as clear evidence of her witchcraft. Fuseli seems to be both excited and repulsed by these associations. 

Henry Fuseli: The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches 1796

In the painting above, Fuseli is illustrating Milton's text 'Paradise Lost where Milton compares the Hellhounds surrounding Sin to those who "follow the night-hag when, called, / In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance / With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon Eclipses at their charms." These nightmare visions were what Fuseli was famous for, his painting 'Nightmare' in particular brought him much fame and he painted several versions of it. 

Fuseli: Nightmare

You could argue that Fuseli was providing the equivalent of the Hammer Horror experience of his day. 

Publicity still: Kiss of the Vampire

Men's wigs: 18th Century

It is important to remember that men as well as women in the 18th century wore very elaborate wigs. 

Two high hairstyles, the right à la candor or the charm of innocence, 1778

Detail

At times Fuseli's fantasies seem to become even more overt, this particular head covering could be female genitalia. A subject dealt with much more openly by Anna Kiosse in her illustrations. 

Anna Kiosse: Women's genitalia 

Freud would have had a field day with these images. The head and the penis being something that he wrote about as being subconsciously linked. Marcus Grantham, a Freudian psychologist used Freud's ideas to develop his very questionable paper, 'The Sexual Symbolism of Hats' and when you look at wigs you can see that they could easily become part of this collective subgroup of erotic garments. Freud, in the 'Interpretation of Dreams' when writing about the sexual symbolism of hats in dreams stated, 'A woman's hat can very often be interpreted with certainty as a genital organ, and, moreover, as a man's.' So now we have a more complicated reading to consider. These complex constructions like a flowerhead, having both male and female elements. 

Diagram of a flowerhead with male (anthers and pollen) and female (ovary and ovules) aspects

The giant hairpin that is pushed through the top of this hair construction, operates as a sharp reminder of the nature of body piercing. The role of the helmet that Marcus Grantham develops in his Sexual Symbolism of Hats, now being very easy to understand. 

Piercing used to heighten religious ecstasy 

St. Sebastian: Giovanni Antonio Bazzi

Every pierced male member is in symbolic affect a martyrdom. The subconscious desires that are often associated with Saint Sebastian, revealing a psychological sexual ambiguity that lies at the heart of this narrative. 

Freudian psychology is though rather unfashionable at the moment, as Freud is regarded as yet another white, male, middle class privileged European, who analysed the world in terms of his own viewpoint. Witness Paul B. Preciado's address to the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. Preciado pointed out the discipline’s complicity with the ideologies of sex, gender and sexual difference dating back to the colonial era and of course as the speech was delivered Preciado was heckled and booed and was unable to finish what was later published as 'Can the Monster Speak?'. All of which is a rich mix of imagery and as this is art, there is no need to decide what it all means. We can though explore how all of these likenesses or connections can become the soil out of which we can grow metaphors. One of the areas we will be looking at as part of the next module will be the central role of visual metaphors in the establishment of meaning. Metaphor is not concerned with what is a right or true reading, it opens out images into alternative territories and as it does so helps us to cope with the ambiguity of life and reconciles differences. In this case looking beyond Fuseli's misogynistic views and trying to understand and find a use for his images within a more inclusive understanding of what might have been going on in his head. 

Every age has its own readings of what went on before and these drawings have become what are sometimes called, 'free floating signifiers', i.e. we can make of them what we wish. This of course gives us the freedom to visit other forgotten images of past times and opens a door to a way of making new work by revisiting old work. 

References

Beyer, J., Fend, M., Gottardo, K. (2022) Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism London: Courtauld

Freud, S. (2010) The Interpretation of Dreams London: Basic Books

Grantham, M. (1949). The Sexual Symbolism of Hats. American Imago, 6(4), 281-295.

Knell, R. J., & Sampson, S. D. (2011). Bizarre structures in dinosaurs: species recognition or sexual selection? A response to Padian and Horner. Journal of Zoology, 283, 18-22.

Preciado, P (2021) Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts Barcelona: Fitzcarraldo Editions

See also: 

Drawing as a vehicle for sexual politics 

The continuing influence of Surrealism

Drawing from the old masters

Drawing plants