Intimate Powers: Eroticism and its definitions in the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, Schiele, and Riley
Although often reduced to and misremembered as a man who made exuberant posters for nightclubs, it is Toulouse-Lautrec's subversively sensitive portrayals of fin-de-siècle brothel workers that arguably form the most influential of his oeuvre. Lautrec’s lithograph series, Elles, sharply captures the small, tender moments in the lives of these women. He observes unassumingly mundane yet precious moments of daily ritual; brushing their hair, adjusting their corsets, and lounging in bed are moments in which Lautrec’s subjects are presented not in relation to their work and its world of sexual extravagance and fantasy, but in settings of stillness and solitude. Lautrec’s prostitutes are not commodities; their personalities have survived the objectifying force of the capitalist transactions to which Degas shows them succumbing.
In his Le Lit series, Lautrec depicts a raw and sincere queer intimacy as the brothel workers embrace and lounge together in bed. These pictures emphasise the individuality and mutual affection of these stigmatised women, showing an alternative eroticism that does not fetishise the bond they share, nor present their day-to-day as a spectacle at which to be gazed—a considerable feat which contrasts the conventional visual tropes of commercial sexuality at the time. The medium, a modest oil on cardboard, is as intimate as the image, glimmering with gentleness and simplicity.
When compared to the work of Egon Schiele, considered as one of art’s greatest provocateurs, both artists have a similar approach to the female body, with a distinctive style; a harsh yet rosy rendering of human flesh, raw energy, which together reveal the personality of the modern woman and the power she holds over eroticism. With Schiele, the locus of tension is more radical, with a savagely direct focus on brazen figures, as he ruthlessly exhibits the human form. The viewers eyes dart from ribs, to pouting lips, to open legs, rosy nipple, and sultry eyes, with only her calves, at the very front, covered. The Seated Female Nude, Elbows Resting on Right Knee (Figure 2) shows us everything, yet she remains unknown to us. Schiele’s figures’ eyes are piercing, staring directly at us from a century ago. Extreme angles, brutal brushstrokes, tangled limbs, all blur the line between invasiveness and intimacy. Schiele’s work was considered radical; a shockingly dramatic shift from the paradigm of the female form being an ethereal vessel, such as in the work of Botticelli and his Venus, to a stark and upfront presentation of the unromantic body.
A reflection of this ambiguous approach to the female form is still seen in art today, despite a colossal shift in acknowledgment of the male gaze and what it means to be erotic. Erin M. Riley, whose work is outstanding in both subject matter and medium, presents a vulnerability and brazenness in each posed figure, woven onto the softly textured medium of her hand-dyed tapestries (Figure 3). It greatly parallels that of Schiele, yet this is a woman whom, through depicting herself in the act of taking a selfie, reclaims her upfront nude image, actively transforming her vulnerability into power.