Bow Wow Wasn't: On Two French Masterpieces That Didn't Quite Fit the Bill for McLaren and Egan

Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Le Verrou (1777) [1]

Eugène Delacroix: La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830 / restored 2024) [2]

 

 

I.

 

Having recently viewed the extended remix of Peter Pahor's documentary about the life and work of Nick Egan - Creative Vandal (2024) [3] - I was left thinking about the design decision taken with regard to the cover of Bow Wow Wow's debut studio album. 

 

As everybody knows, See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! (1981) features a brilliant photographic recreation of Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) [4].

 

But what a lot of people - including me - didn't realise before hearing Nick discuss this work was that Manet's painting was not the first or only choice: that at least two other famous French masterpieces were also considered, including Fragonard's Le Verrou (1777) and Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830) ...   

 

 

II.  

 

Le Verrou is one of Fragonard's most famous works. It depicts what is known as a galant scene [5]. 

 

Whether the male libertine is locking the door with consent so that he and his elegantly dressed mistress are not disturbed, or whether he is bolting the door so as to prevent her escape and what we are witnessing is an attempted rape is open to interpretation [6]. 

 

Either way, it's slightly risqué and one can see why it would appeal to Malcolm McLaren and Nick Egan, although, in my view, it would have made a much better cover for the Bow Wow Wow single 'Louis Quatorze' - which famously contains the lines: Louis, Louis's locking my door / Louis's serious, I'm delirious [7] - than for the album, so they were right to reject it.     

 

 

III.

 

La Liberté guidant le peuple is a very well-known Romantic painting by Delacroix that many people - including Egan - mistakenly believe to be a depiction of the 1789 Revolution, when, actually, it commemorates the uprising of July 1830 that toppled the short reign of King Charles X [8].    

 

Everyone loves a bare-footed, bare-breasted woman wearing a Phrygian cap while waving the tricolour and brandishing a bayonetted musket. Malcolm McLaren and his cohorts certainly did - one might recall, for example, that Jamie Reid later adapted this Marianne image for the cover of his 1987 book Up They Rise [9]. 

 

But, again, I think McLaren and Egan wisely decided not to use this image for the cover of See Jungle! It's a bit too punk and political and doesn't quite fit with the aesthetics and ideology behind Bow Wow Wow - which was more about going wild in the country and teenage kicks than it was anarchy and bloody revolution.  

 

Delacroix's picture would have been fine for the Sex Pistols - the young boy storming the barricades is even holding two pistols - but, in relation to Bow Wow Wow, it's probably not even as strong an option as Fragonard's work. 

 

And neither match up to Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, which is the perfect choice: très moderne and still capable of causing scandal and outrage - particularly when the nude female figure is replaced by a fourteen-year-old girl.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Known in English either as The Bolt or The Lock, this painting by Fragonard is an oil on canvas measuring 73.5 x 93.5 cm. It can be viewed at the Louvre.

 

[2] Known in English as Liberty Leading the People, this painting by Delacroix is an oil on canvas measuring 260 x 325 cm. It too - of course - can be viewed at the Louvre. 

 

[3] I was fortunate enough to be invited to an evening with Nick Egan, hosted by Catalina Guirado at Karma Sanctum Hotel, in Soho, earlier this week, and there was a screening of Peter Pahor's film - as well as an exhibition of Nick's latest paintings. See the TTA post 'Live Forever / Fuck Forever' (11 October, 2026) which anticipates this event. 

 

[4] Whilst as art director Egan was responsible for the overall sleeve design and staging the photo shoot, the actual photograph was by Andy Earl. It is now part of the National Portrait Gallery collection. See the TTA post: 'Why I Love Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe' (27 April 2017). 

 

[5] A galant scene [fête galante] is a genre of art that was particularly popular in 18th-century France, blending reality with Rococo fantasy. 

      Such scenes depicted aristocratic figures engaged in lighthearted conversation, music-making, or gentle courtship activities. While most often set in outdoor locations, such as idyllic gardens, some artists ventured into the bedroom or boudoir and works like Fragonard's Le Verrou were rather more suggestive of amorous games and illicit affairs. 

 

[6] Of course, it could be that the man is attempting to leave (perhaps post-coitally) and the woman is holding him back and trying to prevent him unbolting the door. 

 

[7] Lyrics (written by McLaren) from the Bow Wow Wow track 'Louis Quatorze' which featured on the cassette-only mini-album Your Cassette Pet (EMI, 1980), and told the story of a young girl being sexually assaulted at gunpoint (or perhaps of a teenage girl's fantasy of such). It was released in Europe as a 7" single by EMI in 1981 and then re-recorded and released in the same format for the UK market by RCA in 1982. 

 

[8] Speaking to camera in Creative Vandal, Egan twice says that Delacroix's 1830 picture depicts the French Revolution. It's a common error - one that I often made until fairly recently, probably like most people with only a vague knowledge of French history. 

      See Egan discussing his work with Bow Wow Wow at 8:28 - 11:22. His claim that nobody saw the reworking of Manet as having anything to do with sexuality whatsoever is either naive or disingenuous - either way, I could only smile when I heard this. McLaren's projects have always been stylish and subversive - always been attempts to capture the look of music and the sound of fashion - but, above all, they have always been about confronting the English public with sex.  

 

[9] See Jamie Reid and Jon Savage, Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid (Faber and Faber, 1987). A signed and numbered six-coloured silkscreen print of this work produced by Reid in 2007 can be viewed at (and purchased from) fairart.com 

 

 

This post is for Nick Egan and Catalina Guirado.

 

 

Why I Love Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863)

Édouard Manet: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) 
Oil on canvas, 208 x 264.5 cm

Manet's controversial picnic scene, known in English as Lunch on the Grass, might seem fairly innocuous to a modern viewer, despite the nudity of the central female figure and scantily-clad bather in the background - and despite the high regard in which it's held by art-loving members of the dogging and CMNF communities respectively.

But, back in the day, it sparked outrage in the art world, breaking with academic convention in style, in subject matter, and in the size of the canvas. It also provoked a huge public scandal; not only was there a woman in the nip besides two fully-clothed men, but they appeared to be fairly indifferent to the fact - more concerned with their own conversation and appearance, like a couple of queers. What's more, she, the brazen hussy, is gazing directly at the viewer, breaking the fourth wall with a coquettish smile that is as knowing as it is obscene.       

Surprisingly, for such a famous work, there's still a good deal we don't know for certain about the painting; including, for example, when Manet first began the canvas, how he originally got the idea and what sort of preparatory work he carried out. Having said that, we do know that the female nude was Victorine Meurent, a famous model and accomplished artist in her own right, whom Manet loved to paint (she it was who sat for another of his notorious canvases belonging to this period, Olympia).

And we do know that Manet was playfully reworking an Old Master's depiction of a Greek mythological scene. For the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's celebrated engraving The Judgement of Paris (c. 1515), after a drawing by Raphael; an artist revered by the conservative members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, so Manet's très moderne take on this Renaissance treasure was bound to ruffle feathers. In fact, some members were said to be apoplectic, though others found the canvas simply laughable.

Émile Zola, however, thought it to be Manet's greatest work. So too did many other 19th and 20th century artists, including Picasso, who was so obsessed by Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe that he completed 27 paintings and 140 drawings inspired by it.

Punk impresario Malcolm McLaren also liked it so much that, when managing Bow Wow Wow, he commissioned the photographer Andy Earl to recreate the picture with members of the band, including 14-year-old Annabella Lwin taking on the Victorine Meurent role - much to the outrage of her mother, who called in Scotland Yard and had the image removed from the sleeve of the group's 1981 album See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! 

Photo of Bow Wow Wow by Andy Earl 

49 x 38.5 cm colour print (1983) 

Given to the National Portrait Gallery by Andy Earl (1999) 

It's amusing to think that, almost 120 years after being rejected by the Salon, Lunch on the Grass could still upset the elderly authorities and those D. H. Lawrence terms censor-morons; i.e. individuals who attempt to circumscribe the pornographic imagination.

After the Orgy: Rise of the Herbivores

Édouard Manet: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1862-3)* 

When asked, twenty-five years ago, to characterize the present, Baudrillard described it as after the orgy. It was then and remains now a brilliant characterization.**  

Although the orgy in question doesn't refer merely to a feast of the flesh, but, more widely, to modernity's explosive liberation in every sphere, this obviously includes a sexual component and it's this that I wish to comment on here, with reference to what are known in Japan as the herbivore men. 

The problem with revolutions, says Baudrillard, is that they never turn out as expected or as hoped - and this includes the so-called sexual revolution. By freeing sex from its containment within bodies and their organs and thereby allowing it to enter into a state of pure circulation and incessant commutation, it has become increasingly subject to indeterminacy and virtual indifference (in all senses of the word).  

Thus, rather than the promised utopia dreamed of by the priests of love who thought they could fuck their way into the future, we witness a gradual fading away of sexual beings, of men and women, of what we had mistakenly believed to be natural desire, and even of biological function. And we end up with asexual beings and celibate grass-eaters, who have little or no interest in dating, marrying, and reproducing (if pushed, they might express an interest in cloning or parthenogenesis).

And so to the land of the rising sun ...      

Sōshoku danshi is a term coined by the writer Maki Fukasawa to describe those young men who express no wish for a conventional love life, or, indeed, to struggle in the macho world of business. Recent surveys conducted amongst single Japanese males in their twenties and thirties found that two-thirds were happy to be considered herbivores (a figure large enough to seriously concern a government which was already worried about falling birth rates).

According to Fukasawa, such men are not entirely sexless, but they have a non-assertive and casual attitude towards pleasures of the flesh; many choose to have exclusively on-line relations, for example, or to masturbate with pornography; others enjoy the company of actual women, but prefer loving friendships that are free from sexual imperatives and conjugal duties.

Of course, this trend is observable in many advanced societies and is not exclusively a Japanese phenomenon; who hasn't inwardly groaned on occasion with displeasure and boredom at the thought of having to groan with sexual pleasure and excitement; what man (or woman for that matter) hasn't resented the pressure to perform and conform to gender stereotypes?

After the orgy, one just wants to chat over coffee, go for a stroll in the park, order a salad, or roll over and sleep ...

Notes

* For me, Manet's picture provides evidence that there have always been young dandies more interested in discussing fashion and philosophy, oblivious to the appeal of naked female flesh. Arguably, the rather bored young woman peers out of the canvas in the hope of catching the eye of a carnivore.   

** See: Jean Baudrillard, 'After the Orgy', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993). 

This post was suggested by Katxu, to whom I'm grateful.