Double Exposure (A Tale of Two Pictures)

D. H. Lawrence Boccaccio Story (1926) 

McLaren and Westwood Two Cowboys (1975)

 

Oh what a pity, oh! don't you agree 

that figs aren't found in the land of the free! [1]

 

I. 

 

If, like me, you are keen to promote the idea of D. H. Lawrence as a Sex Pistol, then one of the aspects of his work that you might discuss in order to lend credence to such a thesis is his painting ...

 

Take, for example, the humorous canvas Boccaccio Story (1926), which depicts the handsome young peasant Masetto [2] asleep - or possibly feigning sleep - beneath a large almond tree on a hot afternoon with his clothes in a state of dramatic disarray, exposing his lower body to the view of some passing nuns who, it might be noted, stare intently at his genitalia, rather than averting their eyes in embarrassment as one might have expected. 

 

It was clearly intended to amuse - but also to provoke. For as Lawrence confided to a friend at the time, he deliberately inserted a phallus in each one of his pictures somewhere: "And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality." [3] 

 

This is very much what we might now characretise as a punk attitude and it's not surprising that Boccaccio Story - along with a dozen other pictures - was seized by the police after being exhibited at the Warren Gallery in London in the summer of 1929 [4].  

 

 

II. 

Forty-six years later, another police raid took place at a small boutique called Sex on the King's Road, Chelsea, owned by Malcolm McLaren and his partner Vivienne Westwood ...

 

This time, it wasn't an oil on canvas that the virgin pure policemen came to grab, but T-shirts featuring a print of two semi-naked cowboys "facing each other in side profile [...] one wearing a denim jacket, the other a leather waistcoat" [5]. 

 

The cowboy on the right is shown rather tenderly adjusting the other's neckerchief. It's not this detail, however, which initially catches one's eye. Rather, it's the fact that their "semi-flaccid penises, prominently on display, are close to touching" [6]. 

 

For McLaren, this image - appropriated from the world of gay male erotica - not only possessed the capacity to shock and outrage public opinion, the cowboys also encapsulated the frustration and boredom he was feeling at this time: "'It was as though they were waiting for something to happen, just like everyone I knew in London.'" [7]

 

The shirt went on sale at Sex in the summer of 1975 and Alan Jones - who worked at the shop - was perhaps the first to buy it; he was certainly the person who became best associated with the shirt after being taken into custody by two burly policemen for wearing it whilst walking round Soho and charged with 'displaying an obscene print in a public space'. 

 

He was then released, but ordered to appear at Vine Street Magistrates' Court a few weeks later.  Naturally, the case attracted attention from the press. It also resulted, as mentioned, in a police raid on 430 King's Road: 

 

"The remaining stock  of eighteen Cowboys T-shirts were seized, and McLaren and Westwood's arrest on indecency charges escalated the affair into a free-speech cause célèbre when Labour MP Colin Phipps called on Home Secretary Roy Jenkins to review the outmoded law." [8]   

 

Despite mounting a spirited defence - one that called upon expert witnesses to attest to the artistic merit of the shirt design - Jones, McLaren, and Westwood were all found guilty and handed down fairly large fines [9].

 

 

III. 

 

McLaren may have hoped that this (somewhat farcical) case "would continue the process of 'decensorship' of British life that had begun with the 1960 victory to publish D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover" [10], but, it never quite became the national scandal that he wished for. 

 

It did, however, increase sales at Sex. 

 

And today, five decades later, a Cowboys T-shirt can be found in the Metropolitan Musem of Art - click here - or bought at auction at Bonham's for a substantial sum of money; including this one originally owned and worn by Sid Vicious and autographed on the back by Johnny Rotten (a snip at £17,850). 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Innocent England', Nettles (Faber & Faber, 1930).  

[2] Masetto is a character in Boccaccio's Decameron, a collection of short stories by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). 

      Its overtly sexual and anti-clerical elements did not go down well with the Church, but the work, first translated into English in 1620, has remained hugely popular and influential. It is available online as a Project Gutenberg e-book: click here. The story of Masetto and the nuns is the first tale told on the third day.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence letter to Earl Brewster (27 Feb 1927) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 648. 

 

[4] What is surprising, however, as I indicated in an earlier post discussing Lawrence's Boccaccio Story - click here - is that Lawrence scholars, including Keith Sagar, should wish to play down the scandalous aspect of his paintings. 

      It is surprising also that Lawrence should react with such (seemingly genuine) distress when thirteen of his pictures were removed by the police from the Warren Street Gallery, branded as obscene, and threatened with destruction by the authorities (they were saved from the flames and returned to Lawrence only after it was agreed with the judge at Bow Street Magistrates court that the paintings would never be exhibited in England again).   

 

[5] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 265. 

      As Gorman informs readers, the image of the two cowboys was originally produced as a charcoal and ink drawing by the American artist Jim French, in 1969. McLaren had come across the picture reproduced in the magazine Manpower! that he had purchased at a bookshop located in New York's gay quarter in the spring of 1975.  

[6] Ibid. 

[7] Malcolm McLaren quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 266. 

      This explains the addition of the text McLaren added beneath the figures to the effect that there's nowhere to go and nothing to do; that everything was played out.

     

[8] Ibid., p. 269. 

  

[9] Gorman reminds us that, according to Alan Jones, "McLaren and Westwood renged on their offer to reimburse him for his own £30 fine". See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 271.

 

[10] Ibid., p. 270. 

 

From the Land of Cockaigne to the Big Rock Candy Mountains

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Land of Cockaigne (1567) 

Oil on panel (52 x 78 cm) 

First conceived in the imagination of medieval peasants and poets, Cockaigne is an immanent utopia wherein all desires are realised, sensual pleasures of every description readily available, and the daily restrictions placed upon one's freedom by priests and feudal masters are abolished - whilst they get their comeuppance at last.

Heaven might await the virtuous in some posthumous future, but Cockaigne was the collective dream of an earthly paradise - now/here, rather than nowhere - that encouraged the cardinal sins of lust, gluttony and idleness, thereby challenging the teaching that the good life had to involve constant toil on the one hand and abstinence on the other.       

At it's most carnivalesque, Cockaigne was said to be a topsy-turvy place in which the weather was always mild and even when it did rain, it rained custard; there were rivers of the finest wine flowing freely and ready-roasted pigs wandered about with carving knives conveniently placed in their back. According to some accounts, there was even a fountain of youth. Nobody works and yet nobody ever goes hungry.   

This idea of Cockaigne spread throughout Europe, with some interesting national variations; central to the Italian version, for example, which can be found in Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), is a mountain made of Parmesan cheese - which was handy for the people who lived there and spent the entire day preparing and eating pasta dishes.  

Of course, as with the appropriation of anarchic and amoral folk tales and their literary reworking as so-called fairy tales, eventually the myth of Cockaigne was taken up by the prigs and pedagogues of the emerging bourgeoisie and they turned it a fable condemning gluttony and sloth. Bruegel's depiction of Luilekkerland and its hedonistic inhabitants seen above, is intended as a warning against the spiritual emptiness that follows when we fall into a life of sin; whilst comic, it certainly isn't intended as a celebration of Cockaigne.

However, every now and again the idea resurfaces. In Haywire Mac's hobo-punk classic The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1928), for example, which beautifully sets out an American bum's vision of Cockaigne:

A far away land that's fair and bright, where the handouts grow on bushes and you can sleep out every night; a land where the cops all have wooden legs, the bulldogs have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs; a land where you never need change your socks and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks; there's a lake of stew, and of whiskey too - you can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe - a land where there ain't no short-handled shovels, axes, saws or picks and they hung the jerk who invented work. 

One might ask if a dream of a better life in a land of plenty isn't the primary factor at work within the ongoing migrant crisis; they cross the seas in little boats having mistaken Europe for Cockaigne ...

See: Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne, trans. Diane Webb, (Columbia University Press, 2001). 

For an earlier post on The Big Rock Candy Mountains, click here. 

Phallic Pictures 1: Boccaccio Story by D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence: Boccaccio Story (1926)

Oil on canvas (72 x 118.5 cm)

Boccaccio Story (1926) is one of Lawrence's most charming and amusing canvases. It depicts a scene from Boccaccio's tale of a horny Italian peasant named Masetto, who feigns mutism in order to obtain a gardener's job at a local convent so that he might be afforded the opportunity to fuck the young women therein.  

In the painting, Lawrence shows Masetto asleep - or possibly pretending to be asleep - under a large almond tree on a hot afternoon with his clothes in a state of dramatic disarray, exposing his lower body to the view of some passing nuns who, it might be noted, stare intently at his genitalia, rather than averting their eyes in embarrassment as one might have expected.

For Lawrence, it was great fun discovering that he could paint his ideas and feelings and not just articulate them in his poetry and prose. Keith Sagar insists that the picture is not designed to shock and that it's a perfectly wholesome portrayal of the sexual impulse. But this is rather disingenuous.

For Sagar knows perfectly well that Lawrence's paintings from this period are part and parcel of his provocative project of phallic tenderness, via which, like Nietzsche, he hoped to trigger a revaluation of all values, enabling man to storm the angel-guarded gates and return victorious to Eden.   

In a letter to his American friend Earl Brewster - which Sagar himself refers us to when discussing the late paintings - Lawrence confides:

"I put a phallus ... in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and is still denied."

So, Lawrence knew very well what he was about and it's puzzling that Sagar should wish to play down the scandalous aspect of Lawrence's paintings. Puzzling also that Lawrence should react with such (seemingly genuine) distress when Boccaccio Story, along with a dozen other works, was seized by the police after being exhibited at the Warren Gallery in London in the summer of 1929.     

Boccaccio Story may very well be a painting of real beauty and great vitality, as one critic (Gwen John) wrote at the time. But so too is it quite obviously obscene in its subject matter of sexual exhibitionism and the carnal desire of nuns; what would be the point of it - and of Boccaccio's tale - were it otherwise? 


See: 

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, (Penguin Books, 2003). Note that the story of Masetto and the nuns is the first tale told on the third day. 

D. H. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, with an Introduction by Keith Sagar, (Chaucer Press, 2003). The letter by Lawrence to Earl Brewster is quoted by Sagar on p. 43 of this work. It can be found in full in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), where it is numbered 3967.

Note that Boccaccio Story is part of the D. H. Lawrence Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (Accession Number 65.242). 

Those interested in reading a related post on Orlan's The Origin of War, should click here.