Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'Lascivious' (1985) - A Guest Post by Sally Guaragna

 

Fig. 1: Stephen Alexander: Lascivious

 Oil on canvas (c. 1985) 

 

 

Stephen Alexander's aureate canvas entitled Lascivious depicting a rather shy and youthful-looking faun sharing a coital embrace with a flame-haired and sexually more experienced nymph, is, sadly, lost to the world: destroyed by the artist's sister in an act of malice that displayed sororal spite, philistine contempt for culture, and a previously unsuspected streak of puritanism [1]. 

 

The painting, which, as the title indicates, is essentially a reimagining of one of Agostino Carracci's erotic prints (c. 1590-95) [2], also betrays the influence of Van Gogh with its dynamic starry night sky and use of warm, radiant golden-yellow [3] (Alexander was at the time an avid reader of the Dutch artist's letters and kept a postcard featuring Vincent's self-portrait with a bandaged ear by his bedside). 

 

We also discover something of D. H. Lawrence's painting style in Alexander's canvas; see for example Lawrence's Fauns and Nymphs (1927) which features a golden-brown satyr embracing a large-breasted sun-nymph; and see also Lawrence's 1928 painting entitled Close-Up (Kiss), which may have influenced Alexander's compositional decision to simply produce a headshot of his mythological lovers (as well as the picture's golden-yellow colouring). 

 

Like Lawrence, Alexander seems primarily concerned with the invisible forces of desire that work upon the flesh and distort and deform bodies, caring little for anatomical fidelity. Deleuze terms such an art of sensation - an art that is neither representational nor symbolist.  

 

Lascivious is not, therefore, the work of an innocent Sunday painter; it's a philosophical gesture born of Alexander's libidinally material - essentially pagan - worldview. Very deliberately and with joy - though perhaps not with great subtlety or success - he promotes a Lawrentian concept of phallic tenderness in a manner that is not so much all'antica (despite the mythological theme) as très moderne.

 

Figs. 2-4

For details see note [4] below. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The digial image shown here is taken from a photo of the painting in the artist's possession.

 

[2] Agostino Carracci (1557-1602) was an Italian artist recognised internationally as one of the finest engravers of his time. 

      Between 1590-1595, he produced a financially rewarding series of fifteen erotic works known as the Lascivie, inspired by a notorious earlier set of prints known as I modi (c. 1524-27) engraved by Marcantonio, after drawings by Giulio Romano and illustrating various sexual acts and positions.

      Whilst enhancing his reputation amongst wealthy collectors of such works, Carracci's prints elicited censure from the Church which inveighed against works of an openly sexual nature even when they were given a mytho-classical veneer in an attempt to make them appear less salacious and the men who took pleasure in contemplating the images seem cultured rather than just pervy.

 

[3] Alexander discusses his love for the colour yellow (with reference to the works of Van Gogh) in a post on Torpedo the Ark entitled 'How Beautiful Yellow Is' (1 May 2024): click here.

 

[4] Fig. 2: Agostino Carracci, A Satyr and Nymph Embracing, print from an engraving (150 x 102 mm), British Museum, London. One of fifteen in the series Lascivie (c. 1590-95).

      Fig. 3: D. H. Lawrence, detail from Fauns and Nymphs (1927), oil on canvas (95 x 80 cm). 

      Fig. 4: D. H. Lawrence, Close-Up (Kiss) (1928), oil on canvas (45 x 37.5 cm). 

 

Art critic Sally Guaragna has written two other posts for Torpedo the Ark. Click here to read  Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'When the Moon Hits Your Eye' (5 May 2023) and/or here to read Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' (6 August 2024). 

Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' - A Guest Post by Sally Guaragna

Stephen Alexander:  

I Want to Hold Your Hand (2024)

 

Stephen Alexander's disturbing self-portrait accompanied by Myra Hindley is a stark reminder of the fact that evil lurks around every corner and that the radiant innocence of childhood offers no protection; as the parents of the young girls murdered in Stockport last month discovered to their horror [1].

 

It also reminds us of the fact that the Swinging Sixties began not only "Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban / And the release of the Beatles' first LP" [2], but with the Moors murders - just as it ended in an equally brutal and depraved manner with the Tate-LaBianca murders carried out by the Manson Family in the summer of 1969. 

 

The fact that the photo of the artist as a child is for the most part entirely genuine - taken in 1966 at Southend-on-Sea - only adds to its power. The only change made (non-digitally) is the replacement of the head of Alexander's sister with that of a woman dubbed by the press as the most hated woman in Britain. 

 

Alexander explains: 

 

'I cut out the famous police photograph of Hindley taken shortly after her arrest in 1965 and pasted it by hand directly on to the photo of my sister. I wanted it to look like a mask being worn. A mask more terrible even than the one worn by Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), because it depicted the face of a rather glamorous young woman who, with her peroxide blonde bouffant, reminded me of a much-loved aunty in the 1960s whose hand I would happily hold.'    

 

Alexander's is a great image; one that, in my view, deserves to be hung alongside Marcus Harvey's controversial 1995 painting made using casts of an infant's tiny hand to create a giant mosaic of Hindley:   

 

 

Marcus Harvey: Myra (1995) [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] On 29 July 2024, a mass stabbing occurred at a dance studio in Southport, Merseyside. Three children were killed, and ten other people - eight of whom were children - were injured, some of them critically. A 17-year-old male was arrested at the scene and charged with murder, attempted murder, and possession of a bladed weapon.

 

[2] Philip Larkin, 'Annus Mirabilis', first published in The London Magazine, Vol. 9, No.10, (January 1970): click here. 

 

[3] Marcus Harvey's 1995 painting Myra caused a lot of fuss when it was displayed at the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists at the Royal Academy of Art in London from 8 September to 28 December 1997: four members of the RA resigned in protest at its inclusion; windows at Burlington House, where the Academy is based, were smashed; the painting was vandalised twice (by fellow artists); and a children's charity accused the RA of the 'sick exploitation of dead children'. Even Hindley wrote from prison to ask for her portrait to be removed from the exhibition.

 

 

To read another post by Sally Guaragna - reflections on my 'When the Moon Hits Your Eye' photo (5 May 2023) - please click here. 

Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'When the Moon Hits Your Eye' - A Guest Post by Sally Guaragna

Stephen Alexander: When the Moon Hits Your Eye (2017) 

 Caspar David Friedrich: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818)

 

For me, whilst Stephen Alexander's amusing photograph entitled When the Moon Hits Your Eye has a surreal aspect provided by its incorporation of a big pizza pie [1], it is clearly rooted in German Romanticism, nodding as it does to the mid-period work of Caspar David Friedrich [2] which typically features a contemplative figure seen from behind and silhouetted against an allegorical landscape.

This compositional device - known as a Rückenfigur - is often used to convey man's insignificance before the vast expanse of nature; that is to say, his sense of isolation and existential anxiety when confronted with the sublime (i.e., inhuman beauty on an overwhelming scale). 

 

As one commentator rightly notes, in using this anonymous and indistinct figure seen from behind, artists are able to create "a metaphorical bridge for the viewer" [3] by which they are able to insert themselves into the image. The Rückenfigur functions thus as an avatar, as well as symbolising the heroic archetype of Man Alone. 

 

Alexander makes clear, however, that the figure in his image should primarily be conceived as a wanderer - a key term in his philosophical lexicon, as it is for many artists, poets and thinkers who work in a post-Romantic tradition. One recalls the words of Nietzsche, for example, with which I would like to close this short post: 

 

"He who has attained freedom of spirit to any extent cannot regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveller towards a final destination, for such does not exist." [4]          

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have since discovered that Alexander's picture does not, in fact, make use of a pizza; the 'moon' is actually a pancake. It remains a witty and surreal use of food in order to create a work of art. 

 

[2] Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a 19th-century German landscape painter, generally considered the most important artist of his generation. His work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world coupled to a Gothic sensibility. 

      It has been suggested by the American art critic Thomas Bonneville, that Alexander's image actually owes more to the work of the English painter (and visionary) Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), who certainly loved a moonlit landscape. However, whilst this might be the case, I can find no evidence to support this claim.

 

[3] Laura Thipphawong, 'The Mysterious Appeal of the Rückenfigur' (2021) on artshelp.com: click here. 

 

[4] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I. 638. It's important to note, however, that Nietzsche's wanderer is not some kind of hypercultural tourist. Indeed, paradoxical as it sounds, his form of existence is what Heidegger terms dwelling.