Customer Reviews

Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siï¿1/2cle Culture (Oxford Paperbacks)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book reproduces hundreds of the most beautiful, eccentric, and unique paintings and sculptures ever made, complete with a marvelously entertaining commentary that "reveals" the sinister, patriarchial threat of each.

The greatest surprise is the obscurity yet quality of these works--you won't see them reproduced in any other art book, yet they are too entertaining and (sometimes) just plain daffy to deserve oblivion. Since subject matter is all that interests Mr.Dijkstra, they are unfortunately all in black and white, but the bold expressiveness of the compositions makes this only a minor flaw.

Almost as rich as this aesthetic feast is Mr. Dijkstra's commentary. Are you amused by 19th Century Puritanical screeds, right-wing condemnation of the Arts, or the Nazis' blather about "degenerate art"? If so, this scholar's views will be a revelation: a dour, fanatical, left-wing perspective! He has great insights into 19th Century culture, psychology, and "sexual politics," and these increase tenfold your enjoyment of the art.

But I was most delighted by his hilarious extremism, his intolerance for anything that won't fit within a microscopic window of "political correctness." The self-righteousness, the delusions (he describes a bucolic scene of frolicking cherubs as a harbinger of the Holocaust) and the choking fury he expends at long-dead paupers are a once-in-a-lifetime thrill. Thank you, Mr. Dijkstra! Beyond a doubt, the most memorable art critique I've ever read.

Dijkstra's book is a wonderful dissection of the sexual subtexts of late-Victorian art, a genre packed with very telling and, by our standards, near-pornographic images under the guise of religious or mythological subjects. Analysing art that was designed to titillate - and frankly, still does - is a difficult brief. But in my view, Dijkstra successfully avoids a "Look how disgusting this is!" tone, and provides an insight into the many female stereotypes in Victorian art: temptresses, vampires, victims, invalids, degenerates, and more. My one major criticism is that the text too blatantly pushes Dijkstra's interpretations of the paintings ("Was this woman [looking at a goldfish bowl] ... seeing something more than just the goldfish swiming aimlessly in a circle? ... Wasn't she also a goldfish herself, and wasn't her environment, to a large extent, the goldfish bowl of her own "useless existence"? No wonder, then ... her melancholy expression"). In my view, this polemic tone weakens Dijkstra's point. The pictures, which are well supported by quotes from contemporary fiction and other sources, speak perfectly well about the weirdness of the late-Victorian male psyche.

As a few of the other reviewers have observed, this is a visual treat served up by a crusading cretin. Well, he's obviously not a cretin, but after the scattergun insults he's hurled at so many of his subjects, it seems only right to answer for these unjustly damned dead folk in kind. Sorry, but the author of this hasn't earnt the right to start patronising past masters, at least certainly not judging by this.

This is feminism as conspiracy theory, the portrayal of culture as sex war, and it's joyless nonsense. The imagery in question is often exotic and edgy - but that's what interesting art does. If Dijkstra understood the art he castigates so energetically - chiefly Decadence - then he might begin to see the argument that perhaps beauty and pleasure are legitimate ends in their own right. Which is surely better than this ideological axe-grinding.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with those who praise the quality of the research in 'Idols of Perversity'. The author leans heavily on a couple of slender sources which are clearly pretty radical for their day as if they show the misogynist character of an entire era. We could use the SCUM Manifesto to portray all women as homicidal loons. But most of us are a little more grown up than that and just laugh at it, as I did with this. Women portrayed powerfully are 'demonised', women not portrayed powerfully are being repressed. Apparently. If any of his subjects fail to provide visuals or commentary to support his screed, Bram happily 'knows' what they were thinking anyhow.

I reluctantly recommend this. Five stars for the lavish - and frequently rare - imagery. One for the politically-correct propagandising - an average of three with one on top for giggles. If you enjoy Symbolist or Decadent art, do buy it, but also look out for the out-of-print 'Dreamers of Decadence' which covers the same area and with more appreciation and less sanctimonious baggage.

If you are familiar with Max Nordau's -Degeneration-, or Mario Praz's -The Romantic Agony-, this book belongs on the same shelf with them. Only this time, it is 90's political correctness & feminism that supply the moralizing. Preaching makes the pictures more interesting.

If you have read Nordau's -Degeneration-, you will find that the most appealing part of that tome to the present day reader will be the fact that it serves as admirable Baedeker to the highlights of late 19th century (mostly French) literature. It does so in the form of a moralistic tract, founded in the public-healthism of Nordau's era, and specifically Cesare Lombroso's attempt to create a "science" of what might be best termed as forensic phrenology. [Lombroso maintained that criminals displayed hereditary "atavistic" traits, and that therefore by looking for facial features he deemed "atavistic," criminal tendencies could be weeded out of the population. Nordau then applied Lombroso's criteria to identify many literary titans as atavistic moral degenerates.]

More people may be familiar with Mario Praz's -The Romantic Agony-, again a tract tinged with moral hostility against the stasis and cruelty of "decadence," that once again serves as a lovely field guide to Symbolist and late Romantic poetry. Praz, perhaps fortunately for his present reputation, sticks with non-falsifiable and purely artistic criticisms.

The point here is that Nordau's and Praz's books in fact add relish and anticipation to the literary works they describe despite their moralistic thunders against them. It's applying reverse psychology to the Paglia/Spenser effect --- for Camille Paglia's -Sexual Personae-, whatever other merits or demerits it may have, has won more readers for Spenser's -Faerie Queene- these past several years than the poem probably had over the past century.

-Idols of Perversity- purports to analyze images from late 19th century art in the light of feminist doctrine, with an eye to the (rather obvious) thesis that these figures represent male sexual fantasies, often misogynistic, and not flesh and blood women. Unlike most other tracts of cultural criticism that start from the moral assumptions of identity politics, Dijkstra's at least has the merit of actually persuading its readers that the hypothesis it wishes to develop is true.

On the other hand, the moralizing tone of the work gives it a place on the same shelf as Nordau and Praz; more so because the book is of necessity handsomely illustrated with dozens of interesting fantasy paintings, many by largely forgotten artists --- the fact, of course, that first attracted my attention to it in the first place. If you have any interest in these pictures at all, -Idols- is a handy reference guide, and Dijkstra's text serves the ironic purpose of making the pictures seem that much more wickedly fun, just as his distinguished predecessors do.

From the standpoint of a study of art, this book is not worth having (even if it's at a good price) in spite of the rarely-often reproduced images. The images are poor. If they had been in color, they would have been worth the publisher's price. This book is not about painting, but rather about the content of paintings. I would rather have had half the paintings reproduced in color and a tenth the commentry edited out. The same point could have been made if a lot of Victorian pornography had been substituted. But the rarity of the chosen works gives them some value as an art study. Just separate the cultural comment (whatever your personal opinion) from the art work if you can.

I bought this book back in 1988 because of the art contained within. I believe the artists portrayed what they saw and felt subjectively in the environment they inhabited. There is a current that wants to dissect art with a knife and scalpel or think that art is for the collective good, functional and so forth. Not everybody perceives art as didactic. I'm sure that what some "progressives" abhorred in these paintings back in the 70's and 80's would now be considered quite iconic in a feminine goth culture. Take the image of woman as Vampire for one example.
The author of this book writes from a purely sociological perspective and does not take into account enantiodromia (the superabundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite).
I see the art as dark Eros, the black sun within the artist himself and the lure of the sinister and decadent.
The best book for art from this period is DECADENCE IN MORBID COLORS by Otto M. Urban.
I personally find the book ,outside the artwork, as an annoyance.
Four stars for the artwork which is inspirational but very benign in this day and age. How about a book on this subject for its own sake?

Students of polymorphous perversity should consider having this book the equivalent of a lifetime membership in an illustrated encyclopedia in artistic themes which use women as a prop. The Index (pp. 429-453) provides page numbers for locating the works of particular artists and the occasional mention of a book like ALICE IN WONDERLAND (Carroll). Great thinkers like Freud, Nietzsche, and Mark Twain are mentioned less than a snake biting its tail: Uroboros, as feminine principle, is covered in nine places on 14 pages, mostly on and between pages 128-148. Charles Darwin, Darwinism, and Social Darwinism crop up more often, but hardly as much as Mythology.

Back in 1986, when Oxford University Press published the first edition, there were economic reasons for having all the pictures in black and white. I prefer color myself, but there is an illustration, VIII, 11. Andrea Carlo Lucchesi (1860-1924), "The Myrtle's Altar," sculpture (ca. 1891) which appears to be about half marble precariously perched above a crown and a necklace containing a crucifix dangling alongside a tree trunk in which the marble portion of the picture is so white and striking that anything which drew attention to the portions of the picture which appear to be a drab gray on page 252 would merely detract from the incredible stare which changes her posture from a form of pouting withdrawal to some serpentine potential to strike:

The eyes of Lucchesi's young lady, snakelike and piercing, are no longer turned inward but display a hypnotic, aggressive quality. She sizes up the (male) viewer with a licentious intensity calculated to produce in him, in Max Nordau's words, "the morbid state of degeneracy which renders a man a woman's plaything and the victim of his own temperament" (Paradoxes, 258).

I am quoting from Bram Dijkstra's book, IDOLS OF PERVERSITY / FANTASIES OF FEMININE EVIL IN FIN-DE-SIECLE CULTURE, page 252, just under the picture. In addition to comments by critics of those times, the book has some examples of the poems written by painters expressing their feelings about their subjects. The poem "Aspecta Medusa" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti was meant to accompany a drawing which does not appear on page 137 where nine lines of the poem appear. The book is organized into eleven topics on grand schemes that frequently mention pictures which are not shown. It does not seem likely that anyone would be able to see everything by looking at the books in the Bibliography, which has sources quoted on pages 403-410, Exhibition Catalogues, Periodicals, and a further series of nonfiction texts on pp. 411-424 including four works by Freud and three volumes (actually containing four titles of published works) by Nietzsche.

That Freud and Nietzsche get so little attention in this book tends to draw our attention away from intellectual slavery to a fixed system and allow an appreciation of the incredibly diverse richness of the ideas available for discussion in a culture that did not adhere to rigid political boundaries, though ideals involving men and women tended to involve great simplifications, even then.

This is the sort of book that can only be the product of decades of passionate interest, study and research -- a once in an author's lifetime effort. I leaned heavily on the big shoulders of this brilliant study in the research for the second chapter of my book, COMPLICATED WOMEN. Dijkstra has seen every painting from the 19th century and has understood them. The book is lavishly illustrated. It's all written with wit and liveliness. This is not a dry book at all. I was enormously impressed and recommend it to anyone interested in art or women's studies -- or in having a new world revealed.

A lot of customer reviews here already have pointed out the art Dijkstra assembles in "Idols" is a LOT more enjoyable and fascinating than his overheated prose. His thesis - that Victorian-era misogyny, racism and other endess flaws led "inevitably" to the bloodbaths of the 20th century - is gibberish. In addition to all sins real - and imagined - platforms for universal sufferage, anti-imperialism and liberal democracy originated within and were established by Western Civilization, so despised by good little Marxists like Dijkstra; these breakthroughs did not come down to us from fat German drunks fabricating human nature and economics. But then again, to achieve at least the appearance of validity, Dijkstra's constricted worldview must relentlessly ignore particulars of history.

In this masterpiece, some bemused wonder is available pondering just how closely Dijkstra's breathless, postmodern condemnation of this art approaches the blue-nose morality of Victorians themselves; their source of moral dominion was Middle-Eastern fairy tale, his is an unworkable social template, a political fable. Different? How? More disturbingly, his "executioner's apprentice" imagery of proper 19th century Europeans yearning to bloody their hands in righteous slaughter more closely resembles the murderous commissars of Marxist regimes, whose crimes are forever excused, for unfathomable reasons, by the same establishment media and academia so enthralled by Dijkstra's kind of lickspittle. It seems atrocity isn't atrocity if the "right" people commit it.

Ask yourself this: When was the last time you heard of a woman stoned to death - west of Cyprus? Go figure...