Enfilade

Camilla Smith, “Between Fantasy and Angst: Assessing the Subject and Meaning of Henry Fuseli’s Late Pornographic Drawings, 1800-25,” Art History 33 (June 2010): 420-47.

Abstract: This article examines four sexually violent drawing by Henry Fuseli, assessing how they functioned as personal fantasies and vehicles for institutional criticism It relates Fuseli’s images to the libertine fiction of Sade and London’s illicit underworld, arguing that the artist’s works can be located alongside growing libertine tendencies in a pan-European market. The exquisite dress, nudity, and physical power displayed by his protagonists, combined with pseudo-religious rituals of circumcision, reveal a complex relationship with institutional modes of control and regulation, developed during his ministerial training in Zurich. The restraints as a Royal Academician appear tantamount to the severity of Zurich’s seminary thirty years earlier, and both prove to be factors in shaping his illicit material. Fuseli’s pornographic drawings were not a public, rebellious descent into Sadean nihilism; rather, they exemplify a type of ‘revolt without revolt’ as remote, experimental products of a privileged individual only discovered after
his death in 1825.