Sexuality, Voyeurism, and Objectification

Born in 1864 with the full name Henri Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa, this impressionist artist received from his parents aristocratic wealth, artistic talent, and genetic complications, as his parents were first cousins. He broke both his legs at the age of thirteen and never fully healed, resulting in abnormally stunted legs and the dependence of walking with a cane in adulthood.[1] Toulouse-Lautrec didn’t feel at home with this aristocratic stature. Édouard Vuillard, a fellow painter and friend, once attributed Toulouse-Lautrec’s fascination with the prostitutes he painted to his feeling of isolation from his upper-class background, confessing in an interview with art historian Germain Bauzin that, “As a physical freak, an aristocrat cut off from his kind by his grotesque appearance, he found an affinity between his own condition and the moral penury of the prostitute.”[2] As a French painter, printmaker, illustrator, and draughtsman, Toulouse-Lautrec is known not only for his poster portrayals of Paris nightlife, but also for his “scandalous” paintings of prostitutes, dancers, and nudes, his radical portrayal of sexuality.

It wasn’t that Toulouse-Lautrec chose to paint prostitutes in most of his works, but because of his interest to depict the extent to which working-class women were exploited, he saw no difference between the two, thus helping to direct the organization of feminism.[3] In this paper, I intend to investigate how Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec used themes of spectatorship to challenge traditional artistic representation women and reconsidered their link with society through analysis of themes of sexuality in The Kiss, 1892, spectatorship in Woman before a Mirror, 1997, and objectivity in, The Medical Inspection, 1894.

I – Sexuality and Spectatorship

Let’s consider The Kiss, 1892 (Figure 1) first in regards to its formal and aesthetic qualities. It is an oil painting featuring two figures, seemingly one female and one male, in a bed. Framed such that the heads are situated in the top left corner of the painting and their crossed arms are at the centre, each figure, naked at least from the waist up, with eyes closed, caresses the back of the other, engaging in a passionate kiss. Their hair is tousled, as are the white sheets they lay between. I must clarify now, why I refer to the image as a seemingly heterosexual couple; one figure has long hair while other has short hair, a length that is typically associated with males. However, it is possible that the length of the short-haired figure is actually draped behind, and it is in fact another female.

As we are familiar with the fact that Toulouse-Lautrec almost solely painted females, more specifically, prostitutes, it leads us to believe the latter. What is portrayed here then, is the passionate embrace shared between two females, an act of lesbian love. Lesbianism is a common theme amongst many of Touloue-Lautrec’s paintings, and because he felt compelled to display the prostitutes in a light of normalcy, dipicting what they did on a day-to-day basis, as working class members of society, as they actually are, it would be a disgrace to omit this as well. But why was it that the women engaged in these acts in the first place? The artist’s depictions of The Kiss leads us to make a connection between prostitution and lesbianism, as if somehow all prostitutes are lesbians or its opposite. In a passage by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, quoted in Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, he states that, “Prostitutes of gross sexuality who, disgusted with their intercourse with perverse and impotent men by whom they are used for the performance of the most revolting sexual acts, seek compensation in the sympathetic embrace of persons of their own sex.”[4] What Toulouse-Lautrec had come to realize during his regular excursions to Paris brothels was that these private acts between the female prostitutes were acts of companionship. The women looked to one another for intimacy and closeness, a bond only obtainable from that of another woman; it was the warm embrace of a another female’s soft skin that provided for them a form of solace away from their usual, unemotional sex work.[5] And these aspects are reflected in the painting’s artistic treatment as well. As spectators, we are up close and personal with the scene, vividly viewing the textures in the plush pillows and linen, the warm flecks of oranges and reds highlighting every fold and crease.

This act of seeing we engage in today is very much different during the time in which it was first exhibited. In the nineteenth century, sexual activity between homosexuals wasn’t unheard of, it has been going on since the dawn of the Roman, but it was nevetheless taboo. However, this taboo was in particular to male same-sex couples, leaving female same-sex couple as an exception. With help of this painting, among others in Toulouse-Lautrec’s resume, by the end of the nineteenth century, the role of the spectator in regards to viewing homosexual pornographic material marked a discrete difference between understandings of gay versus lesbian relationship, that, “the lesbian only exists through the scopophilic gaze of the heterosexual man.”[6] This painting indefintely distiguished the male viewer from that of the female one, placing the former at an active distance, and the latter in a passive proximity, emphasizing a notion of fetishism, the spectator becoming a voyeur.

II Voyeurism and Fetishism

I will address this notion of fetishism and voyeurism through the example of Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting, Woman before a Mirror, 1897 (Figure 2) first as it pertains to spectatorship and then its incurrence of sexual feelings. Measuring 24.5 x 18.5 inches, this oil on cardboard painting presents to us a red-headed woman, fully nude but wearing knee-high black boots, standing at the centre of the work before a mirror as she holds in her right hand a dress dangling to the floor beneath her. From the spectator’s perspective, her hair is tied in a loose bun, her bare back faces, her bottom is exposed, and we see a portion of her right breast, and it is only through the mirror that we catch a glimpse of front-side — the profile of her unrecognizable face and her left breast revealed. With a subject matter involving nudity, we no longer feel like a spectator, a label that indicates disconnect with the image, but rather a voyeur, a label that inscribes deep feelings, and this notion can be transferred to The Kiss, as well. A voyeur, I shall explain, is someone who receives sexual pleasure from watching engagements of sexual activity. Now, there is no blatant sexual activity occurring within the image, the woman just stands naked looking at herself in front of a mirror, but as the witness of this action, we feel an inclination to turn away, that somehow by looking at the image we are doing something wrong. Such nude images instil in us an embarrassment to view them, but before we get overtaken by our feelings of shame, we must asks ourselves, what is it that we are looking at?

To address this question, I will contrast Woman before a Mirror with a work by Mary Cassatt entitled The Coiffure, 1891 (Figure 3). This artwork features a woman sitting on a bed, the top have of her body nude and the bottom half covered in a white sheet or towel. She is slouched over and placing her hair into an updo while in front of a mirror. This image represents themes commonly found in Cassatt’s works, often depicting upper-class women engaging in private preparations of the body, “existing within a protected and enclosed — even encapsulated — world.”[7] In Woman before a Mirror, the woman stands before a full-length mirror, blankly staring at her body in a manner that is important to her line of work. When comparing these two works, we must clarify the role which each woman takes on. The figure in The Coiffure actively takes on a role involving care of maternal self-care, while the figure in Woman before a Mirror is passive, judging the physical self through eyes of the male. She assesses her female form and its curves, looking for blemishes, hidden flaws, signs of imperfection that would otherwise deem her unworthy to please a man. Griselda Pollock said in her essay Fathers of Modern Art: Mothers of Invention, “If the bodies of women age or expand, they cease to have any exchange value, for the desirable female body is only a commodity when it is available for a specifically sexual mode of fetishism [and] when that fails, they only have their always underpaid labor to sell.”[8] Though Pollock made this claim in relation to that of another of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work, the statement still hold true. And if this concept of perfection is not obvious, we can support this argument through Toulouse-Lautrec’s formal applications as well. The woman’s skin is very pale, seemingly standing in extremely garish light, and in relation to the dark, mostly maroon background, the woman’s figure is only made more apparent. Even her reflection is darkened, the reflection that provides for us an unclear view of her face, which signifies that it is not what the woman sees in herself, thinks of herself, that is of importance, but her physique. The woman becomes an object to be perfected.

III – Objectification and Identification

And we see this notion of objectification transpire in, The Medical Inspection, 1894, (Figure 4). Two women, with their dresses hiked up above their waists, wait in line for their bi-weekly medical inspection, the routine check for sexually transmitted diseases and infections, and other flaws. The women stand voluntarily, their skin devoid of any colour and evidently translucent, aside from the high pigments of blush in the cheeks, lipstick on the lips, and blue shadow on the eyes, as if to showcase no emotion associated with the examination that awaits them. What we get then, through example of two prostitutes, as willing participants in painting, are women being viewed as sex objects, not humans. As well, this work, unlike the previous two I have examined, is much less complete in terms of artistic execution. Toulouse-Lautrec’s brushstrokes are sketchy and spontaneous, more so in the background, revealing the cardboard behind the oils, as if creatively alluding to shady and suspiscious nature of the scene. As is the reality of being a prostitute and participating in prostitution examining women for imperfections with the intent being able to work, to run a smoothly operating business, is one thing, but to do so as the main priority and not care for the physical and psychological wellbeing of the individual, is another.

What occurs then, is that a woman becomes identifiable in only what she can provide to society, and because society during the nineteenth century was most defintely a “man’s world,” she becomes the property of the man, existing only to gratify him. “The forms, conventions and poses of art have worked metaphorically to shore up the female body – to seal orfices and prevent marginal matter from transgressing the boundary dividing the inside of the body and the outside, the self from the space of the other,”[9] declares Lynda Nead in The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality. Thus, the female becomes disembodied not only from society, but herself. And this disembodied sense of self leads a identification of the self formed on the basis of masculine culture. It is the position of disregard and ignorance that society places on women that emphasizes hierarchy, more so than issues of poverty and sex work which prostitutes fall into, and diminishes a woman’s right to express, feel, and think, and furthermore, her right to be equal.

IV – Feminism

I am in no way demanding that prostitutes are equal, nor am I justifying that they shouldn’t be, but as women, there should be an acceptance that who they are cannot be judged solely on the basis of what they do. During a time where the woman’s place was at home, in the kitchen, with the children, there was a “focus on the various acts by which cultural identity is constituted and assumed [and this] provides a felicitous starting point for the feminist effort to understand the mundane manner in which bodies get crafted into.”[10]

Of course, those viewing the works of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec during the nineteenth century was dominantly that of a man, which tranlates itself differently had the main viewer been a female. Furthermore, Toulouse-Lautrec, being a man himself, helped to perpetuate the male’s ideal of the woman and her female form, as it concerns understandings of sexuality and spectatorship, voyeurism and fetishism, and objectification and identification — such themes highlight positive and negative aspects of society seeing Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings. He removed women from the stigma of being mysterious and possessing attributes of unknown territory, as was the case in previous eras, and replaced it with an awareness of change needing to happen. And in the artist’s depictions of these scandalous women, I will conclude that he challenged traditional representation of working class women and reconsidered the link female nudes had on society by assisting in the facilitation of the growing feminism movement.

[1] “Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de.” OxfordArtOnline.com. Grove Art Online, last modified February 11, 2013. http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/subscriber/article/grove/art/T085

831?goto=toulouse&_start=1&type=biography&pos=2

[2] Martin Gayford and Karen Wright, edited by. “La Vie Bohème.” In The Grove Book of Art Writing: Brilliant Writing on Art from Pliny the Elder to Damien Hirst, (New York: Grove Press, 1998): 169.

[3] Stephen F. Eisenman, “The Appeal of Modern Art: Toulouse-Lautrec.” In Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, 4^th ed., (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2011): 403.

[4] Eisenman, “The Appeal of Modern Art.” 406.

[5] Eisenman, “The Appeal of Modern Art.” 407.

[6] Richard Easton, “Raised to the Level of the ‘Sordid and Deviant’: The Paradoxical Sexualisation of Toulouse – Lautrec.” Modern & Contemporary, 1, no. 4, (France: Yale University Press, 1993): 445.

[7] Eisenman, “Issues of Gender in Cassatt and Eakins.” 383.

[8] Griselda Pollock, “Fathers of Modern Art, Mothers of Invention.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 4, no. 3, (London; New York: Routlege, 1992): 91.

[9] Lynda Nead, “Part I: Theorizing the Female Nude – Framing the Female Body.” In The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality. (London; New York: Routledge, 2002): 6.

[10] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, 40, no. 4, (Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1988): 525.