he stoops to worship

The Bar Nothing

2012-02-23T18:53:00.002Z

Taken from an original story by E.A. Ellington, and set in Buenos Aires, the dark and intricate noir film, Gilda (1946) starred the post-WWII Love Goddess, Rita Hayworth, as one of the most memorable Femme Fatales of the cinema ever to toss her hair seductively.

With her sleek and sophisticated eroticism, lush auburn hair, and peaches and cream complexion, Hayworth plays the role of Gilda, a hedonistic cabaret singer wife of a South American mobster casino owner, Ballin Mundson (George Macready), who had recently hired gambling drifter and small-time hood, Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), as his casino manager. He is unaware that Gilda and Johnny have been in a previous relationship and where the two are now mutual protagonists in love-hatred for each other.

The triangle sets up an intense rivalry for Gilda’s affections, which sees her torturing and inflaming Johnny’s jealous passions as punishment for previously breaking her heart. She deliberately flaunts her sexuality with other men (real and imagined) so as to manipulate a reaction from cold-hearted Johnny. Of course, it doesn’t help when Gilda, flirting with another man in front of Johnny, utters such immortal lines as “Didn’t you hear about me, Gabe? If I’d been a ranch, they would’ve named me the Bar Nothing.”

In Gilda, Rita Hayworth’s character is a different kind of Femme Fatale than the usual stereotype. She deliberately plays the part in order to get Johnny to believe she is evil and manipulative, so as to achieve her goal of having her love for him reciprocated. There is an aura of appealing, yet frightening, energy around her. One of cinema’s most erotic scenes is achieved merely by Gilda seductively removing a single glove in her singing of the ‘Put the Blame on Mane’ number.

When her husband dies mysteriously, Gilda and Johnny marry for a second time, and their abusive and difficult relationship is only salvaged peacefully in the film’s upbeat finale in order to appease the Hays Code censors, as Johnny, full of remorse for his cruelty towards her, declares his unending love and the two are reconciled.

Gilda is the portrayal of a strong and independent Woman in charge of her sexuality, who humorously disregards society’s standards and uses her cunning to manipulate societal roles to her advantage. While the film often seems misogynistic on the surface, upon close analysis of the character of Gilda, she defies all the rules and in the end saves Johnny from complete destruction.

Rita Hayworth's life was forever affected by her role, as she once reportedly said: "Every man I knew had fallen in love with Gilda and wakened with me." Amazingly, she didn’t even get nominated for an Oscar for this movie. For Columbia Studios, Gilda was a vehicle for getting Hayworth back into work after the collapse of her marriage to Orson Wells. She did not disappoint, giving a flagrant and moving portrait of a natural Woman, a libertine, who appears too sensual and too honest for the crouched male figures who beg to be associated with her.

Credited to StephPhoenixOoORising

The Temptress

2012-02-20T22:19:00.003Z

Circe - The Temptress, 1881

In this modern rendition of the Greek Goddess, Circe, the Belgian naturalist painter, Charles Hermans (1839 - 1924) depicts the Temptress in triumphant pose as she defiantly challenges the viewer with her absolute power and control, while behind her, a helpless male is slumped on a table, an obvious victim of the Sorceress’ lethal potion, waiting to be transformed into another form.

Hermans came from a bourgeois family who encouraged him from an early age in his artistic ambitions. He is best known for his rich and cosmopolitan displays of Parisian society, and for his insightful representations of the lives of monks.

Art and Life

2012-02-18T16:32:00.003Z

Art and Life

Walter Crane (1845 - 1915) was a leading English painter and illustrator, as well as a writer, teacher and socialist. In his art, he showed a great fondness for allegory and symbolism, as displayed in his 1907 work, Art and Life. Here a young man positions a mirror for a beautiful Lady to gaze at and admire her reflection. Art is shown holding a mirror to Life.

Freedom

Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Crane was a prominent figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement, as well as developing a reputation as a prolific illustrator of children’s books, including nursery rhymes. An intellectual of some repute, he was a somewhat contradictory figure: committed to radical socialism through education rather than revolution, while socially being a member of the country house set; and embracing new technology while criticizing it, yet wedded to an idealism of the past based on the values of enchantment, grace, elegance and refinement.

Diana

[The Huntress summons her male followers to their doom?]

Crane refused to confine his inspiration and talent within the frame of art alone. He was greatly interested in bringing art to the masses. Art was for him a visible elevating symbol of life’s potential; a disclosure of something beyond itself - “From the ideals of art, we are led to the ideals of life."

Summer

Recycled Emotions

2012-02-16T19:00:00.005Z

Based in California, the contemporary Pakistani-born artist, Khalil Chistee uses found objects, particularly, unused and recycled plastic trash bags, to create life-sized human figures wracked with emotion.

He deploys his wonderfully textured sculptures as a metaphor for "recycling our identities", or braving the problems of life. Just as plastic remains the same in spite of time passing, so what we fundamentally remain, despite our personal transformations and frailties, is human.

Each of his haunting installation pieces evokes a beautiful emotional presence. Imbued with a sense of fragility and sadness that washes over us, they seem, nonetheless, to point to the possibility of redemption. His expressive sculptures should make us excited to recycle, reuse and renew.

i am particularly struck by his engaging piece, Out of the Frying Pan, from his exhibition, In Pursuit of Spirituality, which depicts a kneeling male in submissive pose before an upright Lady.

Visit the website of Khalil Chistee here.

Demi-Monde Dommes

2012-02-14T22:34:00.004Z

The Riding Crop [credited to slave michael]

Little is known about the Austrian sculptor, Bruno Zach, or Zack (1891 – 1945) other than he flourished as an artist in Berlin in the period between the two wars. After studying in the Vienna Academy and training in a number of the city’s foundries, he began sculpting under the trade name “Tuch”.

He soon developed a reputation as a prolific creator of Art Deco figures that ranged from the sensual to the blatantly erotic. He particularly revelled in the creation of kinky bronze and ivory statues of strong independent and domineering Women from the ‘demi-monde’ of Berlin’s nightlife. They were often depicted in assertive stances that implied a readiness for play, but strictly on their terms.

Perhaps his most famous creation was a 1930 bronze statue called The Riding Crop, which made a world record price of £97,250 for the artist at auction at Bonhams Design. This striking piece reveals a girl with the trademark Zach face and hair style, dressed in an off-the-shoulder negligee, stockings and high heels, and holding a riding crop behind her back.

Stolen Hearts

Another renowned work was his piece, Stolen Hearts, which Zach sculpted in honour of a Lady friend of his who had turned down his proposal of marriage.

Goddess At The Gates

2012-02-11T16:58:00.002Z

The Gates of Dawn, 1890 ~ Herbert James Draper

The Greek Goddess of the Dawn, Eos (or Aurora in Roman), is thought to be an exceedingly ancient divinity dating back to the early speakers of the Indo-European language.

Here in this erotically intense painting by the English Victorian artist, Hebert James Draper (1863 - 1920), she is remembered as the saffron-robed Titan who opened the gates of the east prior to riding her chariot through the sky. According to Greek myth, Eos was ever young and beautiful because she was renewed each morning by stealing away young, handsome men for her pleasure.

Using his favourite Muse, “Florrie” Bird, to pose as Eos, Draper may have been influenced by the poet Ovid’s description of the Goddess: "far in the crimsoning cast wakeful Dawn threw wide the shining doors of her rosefilled chambers" (101).

A painter of historical and imaginative subjects and portraits of his contemporaries, Draper found great favour in his lifetime. Trained in Paris, his style was one of fluent academic craftsmanship, which fell out of fashion in the twentieth century. After nearly a century in obscurity, his work is finally being rediscovered and appreciated once again.

Unfashionable? Just look at the Goddess’ face! She captures our attention even today.

This powerful and sensuous masterpiece is presently on display at the elegant Drawing Room of The Drapers’ Hall in London.

Erotic Excess

2012-02-09T18:34:00.007Z

Born in Naples, and now living and working in New York, Mario Sorrenti is a leading fashion photographer and director best known for his spreads in the pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.

The editorial, Magnificent Excess, lensed by Sorrenti for Vogue Italia in September 2005, features the Australian model Gemma Ward in a series of stunning photographs that acclaim Sorrenti’s vision of Woman as sensual Goddess. Cast in a mood of old baroque masters, his magnificent images portray the historic conflict and erotic tension between sensuality and religion, where the true beauty of sensual Woman is the dominant force.

Holding many awards for his contribution to fashion photography, Sorrenti has exhibited his work in Paris, London and New York, and is part of many international collections, among them the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

My Lady's Skirt Hem

2012-02-07T22:16:00.003Z

Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 1784

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 - 1792) was an influential English portrait painter of the Rococo Era, who painted in the “Grand Style”.

He often portrayed his Women muses in mythological roles, touched with a tender melancholy. One of the finest examples of this genre was his painting of the renowned actress of the time, Sara Siddons as the Tragic Muse. She is seated on a throne that seems to float on a cloud and in a pose that Reynolds borrowed from Michelangelo’s Prophet Joel in the Sistine Chapel. The shadowy figures of Pity and Terror, lurking behind her, add to the theatrical quality of the portrait.

After he had finished painting his subject, Reynolds humbly confessed to the great Lady, "I would not lose the honour this opportunity offered to me of going down to posterity on the hem of your garment", and promptly signed his name on the edge of Mrs. Siddon's voluminous skirt.

Upon exhibiting the work in the Royal Academy in 1784, it was instantly proclaimed a masterpiece.

My sincere thanks to slave michael for kindly sending me this art work.

Secret Revelations (Part 2)

2012-02-05T08:42:00.007Z

The Sirens

A secretive man more engaged with his private obsessions than with the public world, Gustave Moreau had a deeply ambivalent view of Women as shown in his art and in his private life. His works mostly highlight the Mephistophalean Woman who “represents the forces of destruction and chaos”. She is the “unconscious”, an “animal nature”, at once “vegetal and bestial”, and driven by “unsatisfied desire” for the fulfilment of which she is ready to “trample everything underfoot”. Hence she is naturally “fatal”.

Galatea

What one remembers most about his pictures are those Female figures which threaten to disrupt and devour everything. There is something monstrous, violent and tense in them, something that Moreau must have felt in himself, rejected on the conscious level and materialized in his enigmatic and expressive art. It almost goes without saying, of course, that this conscious horror at Woman's “animal nature” was matched by an unconscious fascination and near adoration of Her.

Hercules and Omphale

Whilst many of Moreau’s works are filled with mythical Female characters, in life he was surrounded by two key Female figures: his mother, Pauline, to whom he was extremely devoted in a close reciprocal relationship and his “best and unique friend” and soul mate, Alexandrine Dureux. Moreau lived with his mother until her passing in 1884, while Dureux lived nearby. Moreau never married. His correspondence with Pauline often reads like a series of love letters. He asked for his letters to Alexandrine to be burnt, but never wrote a word about her without stressing her saintly qualities. The gentleness and kindness he prized so much in his mother and in his muse stands in vivid contrast to the Females that populated his paintings.

The Goddess

This contrast between the artist’s singular vision of Woman as temptress or agent of destruction and his circumscribed private world of purest dedication to his mother and Alexandrine blurs the boundary between mythical and carnal imagery in his magnificent dense canvases.

Musée Gustave Moreau, 14 rue de la Rochefoucauld, Paris

After Dureux’s death in 1890, Moreau transformed his family home and workshop into a museum, creating massive ateliers for the display of more than 5,000 of his own works of art, as well as dedicating rooms to his father, his mother and Alexandrine Dureux. Funded and maintained by himself, he left it to the French nation in his will in 1898. It was officially opened to the public in 1903 as the Musée Gustave Moreau. It remains one of the world’s most unique and extraordinary single-artist museums. Andre Breton said about the museum, "This is where beauty and love were revealed to me, through the faces and poses of Women.... I have always dreamed of breaking in there at night, with a lantern, so as to surprise the fairy with griffons in the dark."

The Unicorns

At the end of his life, in 1892, Moreau became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he proved a gifted teacher who encouraged his students to draw on their imagination and talent rather than restricting them to artistic conventions. He believed of his teaching that: "I am the bridge over which certain of you will pass”. His teaching indeed proved inspirational, not only to the next generation, but to the Surrealists that followed and for which he was their precursor.

Oedipus The Wayfarer

Gustave Moreau was a 19th century mystic, who created hundreds of paintings behind the façade of an ordinary looking house in a most ordinary Parisian street. Yet, there was nothing ordinary about this remarkable painter. Defining his art as “passionate silence”, he left a legacy of obsessive, mysterious and haunting work, simultaneously classical and modern, which admirably justifies his reputation as a veritable master of sexual Symbolism.

Dejanira (Autumn)

Here is a charming film gallery of some of the artist's most engaging paintings.

Credited to Accabadora

Secret Revelations (Part 1)

2012-02-03T01:20:00.002Z

Gusatve Moreau (1826 - 1898)

One of the most radical artists of the nineteenth century, Gustave Moreau was a French Symbolist painter who was both fascinated by the Feminine subject and obsessed by the Female form. Throughout his life, Moreau was to be entranced by Female beauty and captivated by the allure of powerful Women from the great mythological and literary stories of the ancient world, erotic and often violent.

Jupiter and Europa

His attraction to heroines and queens, goddesses and temptresses - Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Messalina, Lady Macbeth, Bathsheba, Delilah, Galatea and Salomé - were screens through which he could filter his explorations of the key themes of the Eternal Feminine: obsession, dream, luxury, magic, the Femme Fatale, exoticism and the ideal.

Oepidus and the sphinx

Born in Paris, his comfortable parents imbued in Gustave a love of classical culture from a very early age. At the age of 20, he was admitted to the École des beaux-arts, where he studied for several years. He pursued a career as a painter in Paris from 1850, but a two-year stay in Italy (1857 - 59) proved a significant turning point in his life. In Rome, he studied the great Renaissance artists - Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio and Sodoma - but also devoted himself to the art and narratives of the ancient world. His ambition then was to reinvigorate history painting, a division of painting that had become the preserve of academics. Returning to Paris, he resolutely got down to work and the first of his paintings that swept him from relative obscurity was Oepidus and the sphinx, which he displayed in the Salon in 1864.

Desdemone

After being stung by criticism of the meticulously drawn treatments of classical antiquity and mythology that he had exhibited in the 1860s, he retreated from public view for six years, during which time he reflected on his “art and his iconography”. A man unsuited to his time and in constant revolt against industrial development and realism in art, he drew on his roots in classicism and legend to shape an artistic vision founded on the transcendent and the ideal. He believed that, in order to produce art that signifies at the exalted level he envisaged, the painter must develop the “eyes of the soul and spirit as well as the body".

Messalina

Moreau associated this inner vision with the predominant role of the imagination; following contemporary fashionable ideas, he apparently connected this faculty with "psychological penetration" and the unconscious. Moreau wrote that his “greatest effort was devoted to directing his imaginative energies to channelling this outpouring of oneself".

Salomé dancing before Herod

Sufficiently financially well off during this time that he did not need to please the market, he followed his new idealist vision and returned in triumph to the Salon in 1876 with mystically intense works that were to define his name as one of the earliest modern artists, namely: Salomé, Salomé dancing before Herod and The Apparition.

The Apparition

Using a luminous glazing method of inventive and richly tinted watercolours, his jewel-like ornamented works recall the glories of medieval illuminated manuscripts. His resulting sparkling, semi-abstracted compositions, steeped as they were in spectacle, excess and imagination, retained an enormous appeal and fascination to modern sensibilities.

Dream of the Orient or The Peri

Moreau borrowed motifs from a whole host of ancient civilizations, including India, Persia and Egypt, as well as medieval and classical art. He was particularly fascinated by Hindu traditions, and chose to apply Indian costume to clothe Salome in his masterpiece, Salomé dancing before Herod.

Orpheus

While drawing on the past, his work also pointed to the future. His somnambulistic and sensual paintings were an early precursor to Surrealism. Moreau was to make a significant impact on a number of artists, including the painters, Paul Gauguin, Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse, as well as the writers, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, André Breton and J.K. Huysmans.

Samson and Delilah

Fantasy In Stone

2012-02-01T07:16:00.000Z

Fantasy ~ Fritz Klimsch

An offspring of a generation of artists, Fritz Klimsch (1870 - 1960) was a leading and prolific German sculptor of the first half of the twentieth century. Having decided to become a sculptor at the age of 15, and having won a state prize as a student at the age of 24, it was a long sojourn to Greece that confirmed his decision to dedicate his life to classical statuary art.

On his honeymoon to Paris, Klimsch became acquainted with Auguste Rodin’s work which greatly influenced him, with its liveliness of expression and form. He regarded his fellow countryman, Adolf von Hildebrand as second only to Rodin as the inspiration behind his art.

Working mainly in sculpted Female figures from mythology, his reputation continued to grow and he was appointed professor in the College of Fine Arts in Berlin, a post he held until 1934. With their classic lines and fine features, Klimsch’s sculptures were held in very high esteem in the era of National Socialism and he was a favourite with many prominent Nazi officials from the Third Reich who commissioned high profile pieces from him.

After an Allied bombardment partially destroyed his Berlin studio, he moved to Salzburg and continued his work on various monument projects. However, when the American troops entered Salzburg, they plundered his new studio and thrashed most of his work.

After the war, Klimsch settled in the Black Forest to live in seclusion, producing from then on only a few works in small formats. Shortly before his death in 1960, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit.

Truth Will Out

2012-01-26T18:52:00.002Z

Truth out of the well armed with a whip to punish mankind

~ Jean-Léon Gérôme

This striking picture was created by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 - 1904), a French painter and sculptor who was associated with an artistic style known as Academicism. It depicts Truth emerging out of a well, armed with a martinet to punish mankind, presumably for its wrongdoing and wickedness.

Gérôme explained his work, which he painted in 1896, as an attempt to describe the transparency of an illusion. He welcomed the rise of photography as an alternative to his photographic painting, stating in 1902 shortly before his death, "Thanks to photography, Truth has as last left her well".

A Queen of men

2012-01-24T18:32:00.001Z

The painting, Boadicea Haranguing the Britons, is one of a series of eleven pictures by the English historical and portrait artist, John Opie (1761-1807) for the illustration of Bowyer's edition of Hume's History of England, published in 1806.

Boadicea (or Boudica) was the wife of Prasutagus, the King of the Iceni, a powerful and warlike Celtic tribe from East England. Subjugated by the Romans, when Prasutagus died, he bequeathed his entire property, including his family, to the Roman Emperor in an attempt to secure them from harassment. However, the Romans merely used this as a pretext to prey upon them, and in a desperate response to their vile treatment of her own person, her daughters, and her people, the courageous Queen Boadicea led a rebellion of the Celtic tribes against the occupying Roman forces in 47 CE.

The picture depicts the warrior Queen Boadicea castigating her cowering male Britons to rise up against the hated Romans. After initial successes in battles in Colchester, London and St. Albans, Boadicea and her troops were eventually defeated in a final military encounter in the Battle of Watling Street in the West Midlands, with the devastated Queen, it is reputed, either taking her life by poison, or dying after an illness.

The story of the heroine Boadicea was nearly forgotten until Tactus’ work, Annals, was rediscovered in 1360 and was later to be a literary source of inspiration for another great warrior Queen, Elizabeth 1 of England. Opie’s painting was an expression of the Victorian-era revival of the place of the Celts and Women in the history of Britain.

Imager Provocateur

2012-01-22T08:36:00.001Z

The American photographer and auteur, Steven Klein, is one of fashion’s most influential and cunning provocateurs, even while his career seems to flourish through flouting the accepted rules of the world of style.

The Contender

Having initially formally trained in fine art in Rhode Island in the 1970s, he moved into the field of photography where he began exploring, first in Paris and later in New York, his erotically charged, occasionally disturbingly violent and, some would say, dark unholy themes.

Steven Klein’s photographs are often punishing takes on contemporary pop culture. He is a storey teller with an eye for the dark side of glamour who challenges accepted standards of beauty, fashion and fame. His art goes beyond the conventional boundaries of imagination and expression to embrace nudity, sadomasochism, cross-dressing, gore and sexual oppression, among his arsenal of subversion.

Academy

It is, ironically, his anti-high fashion vision that has made him probably the most commercially in-demand and successful photographer to be found working in the fashion scene today. As well as shooting high profile advertising campaigns for various clients including Calvin Klein, D&G, Alexander McQueen and Nike, he has regularly contributed to magazines including American, Italian and French Vogue, i-D, Numéro, W and Arena.

A Grand Affair

He has created innovative fashion editorials featuring such celebrities as Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, while his works have been exhibited internationally. He has also developed to create video installations for concerts, publish books and direct commercial pieces, while remaining at the forefront of image making. For its part, the fashion industry seems more than eager to submit to Klein’s gentle sadism.

Still from Video Installation, Time Capsule

In his new video installation, Time Capsule (here), Klein takes on fashion’s most feared taboo subject - human decline. Consisting of a lyrical collection of 10 short, slow moving films shot on set in New York over two days, it shows the actress and model, Amber Valletta, aging by chilling degrees from 20 to 110. In documenting her transformation from priestess to crone, his objective was to show that life is cyclical: past, present and future, unfurling simultaneously.

"It is the story of a woman; a woman reflecting forwards and backwards in time. She ages in a non surgical way," Klein explains. "This is the character: I chose to put her in one room so you could see her metamorphosis, without seeing the room change. This is the journey of a woman."

You can visit Steven Klein’s studio here.

La Femme Moderne

2012-01-19T21:15:00.005Z

When the great French painter, Édouard Manet displayed his new work, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) before a Parisian audience in 1863, the reaction was one of bewilderment, criticism and rejection.

One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, Manet depicts here the juxtaposition of four obviously modern figures - a Female nude and a scantily dressed Female bather on a picnic, along with two men fully dressed in contemporary clothes - thereby rendering the strange and almost unreal pastoral scene obscene in the eyes of polite society of the day.

The work provoked public notoriety and condemnation at a number of levels.

Traditionally, it had been acceptable to paint nudes in allegorical settings or as mythological creatures, but not in a contemporary setting. Furthermore, this was the first time that a painting showed a nude Female sitter with clothed male sitters.

The three main characters were real people – relatives and known associates of Manet – and not anonymous muses. The fact that the sitters were so recognizable in a very explicit scene also affronted people at the time.

Another controversy arising from the painting was its large canvas measuring 7.5ft by 8ft. Large-size paintings were normally used to depict important events of mythological, religious or historical importance. Manet blatantly ignored this tradition by using a large canvas to present his scene of ordinary life.

However, what most infuriated and appalled Parisians was the central Female nude who was seen not as a nude in the classical traditional sense, but merely as a Woman undressed, and not sufficiently idealised in the classical mythology realm to elevate her from everyday ordinary existence.

Much like Rodin’s The Thinker, the dominant Female figure adopts a pensive pose, as in seemingly ignoring the two male companions, she turns her head toward us and invites our opinion – a gesture which was frowned upon since nude models usually averted their gaze to show their shame at being nude. The nude holds the viewer steadily in her almost aggressive gaze, made all the more conspicuous because she is the only figure who does so. By engaging the viewers directly with the painting, she forces us to question the morality of what is happening (or has just happened) in the scene.

It is unquestionably the presence of the nude that controls the viewer’s emotional response as she challenges male dominance through her ultimate ‘otherness’. The unabashed, unclothed Female - the archetype of the modern Woman – is clearly the dominant force in the painting’s pastoral scene.

Manet himself jokingly nicknamed his picture "la partie carrée" (“the foursome”). His deliberately provocative work reflects both his refusal to conform to artistic convention and his initiation of a new freedom from traditional subjects and modes of representation. In this way, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe can perhaps be regarded as a pivotal creative event in the birth of Modern Art. The Manet has inspired dozens of reinterpretations over the past 150 years.

Confession

2012-01-16T23:03:00.002Z

While the British painter and illustrator, Sir Frank Dicksee (1853 - 1928) is best known for his interpretations of Pre-Raphaelite poetics, he also painted pictures with a modern slant. The Confession (1896) is a typical ‘problem picture’, the exact meaning of which is left deliberately elusive by the artist.

The young Woman is evidently in the last stages of consumption, her thin pale hands as transparent as her creamy, diaphanous gown. The man with clenched and knotted hands presents as a troubled, almost haggard, figure covered in dark shadow. His apparent distressed emotional state is in dramatic contrast to the calm demeanour of the fading Woman.

While she displays a controlled detachment - almost liberation - from life’s problems that are rapidly losing their significance for her, he for his part is psychologically overwhelmed by the telling that has transpired between them.

This wonderfully enigmatic painting poses for the viewer the unanswered question of who, in truth, is confessing.

Build My Gallows High

2012-01-14T16:59:00.009Z

Out of the Past is a defining 1947 film noir directed by Jacques Tourneur and adapted from Daniel Mainwaring’s evocatively titled novel Build My Gallows High.

This quintessential, slick noir of underworld intrigue and passion is a brilliant cinematic exposition of the nature of temptation, regret, retribution, and redemption. With its convoluted storey line, wonderful visual style and use of flashback narration, the film featured Robert Mitchum as the doomed, double-crossed ex-private eye Jeff Markham who, desperately trying to flee his past, falls for the irresistible, icy and chameleon-like brunette Femme Fatale, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). He had been hired to trail her for ruthless gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), after she had stolen $40,000 and fled to Mexico. It is the past’s death-grip on the present that dominates this remarkable film and its doomed characters.

Kathie is a fascinating construct who embodies American post-war male fears that Women, having contributed mightily to the war effort and moved into "men’s work," would abandon the domestic sphere entirely, causing all manner of social mayhem. The self-consumed and erotic enchantress is a smouldering menace, so magnetically sensual and so poor-me manipulative, who relishes nothing more than to catalyze the primal urges in the males around her. She is the ruthless and lethal object of romantic fascination for both lead men.

Jeff memorably described how he was instantly smitten when he first met the seductive Femme Fatale dressed in white, but casting a sultry silhouette as she entered from the bright white, hazy outdoors into a dark Mexican cantina: “And then I saw her, coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn't care about that forty grand”. The duo are soon making love on a moonlit Mexican beach, and Jeff’s ex-business partner later gets gunned down by Kathie, who then remarks sensually, “Don’t you see, you’ve only me to make deals with now.” Aware she is behind a series of murderous manoeuvres that have smashed any chance of hope or happiness in his life, Jeff replies, “Build my gallows high, baby.”

Realizing that Kathie is “like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another”, Jeff is finally overcome by the pressure of life on the run. He makes a deal with the cops and leads her towards a police roadblock, but Kathie discovers his betrayal and calls him a “dirty, double-crossing rat” before shooting him dead. Moments later, this most amoral Femme Fatale of all film noir, the personification of the Goddess-bitch archetype, crashes into the roadblock and perishes in a hail of gunfire.

Courtesy Felixxxx999

Après la Nuit

2012-01-12T18:58:00.004Z

A stunning fashion editorial, Yasmin Après la Nuit, which showed in L’Officiel Paris magazine's October 2011 issue, was photographed by Bryan Adams and featured the beautiful British-Iranian model, Yasmin Le Bon.

It was themed on Night Porter, a controversial 1974 film with sado-masochistic undertones, directed by the Italian Liliana Cavani, and starring Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde. The fashion shoot removes the hard edges associated with the film to reveal Le Bon in eye-catching photos as effortlessly seductive and cunning in an array of gorgeously strong outfits.

Astarte Ensorcells

2012-01-11T07:15:00.001Z

Astarte was a Syrian Goddess of fertility and love, famed as a symbol of rebellion against the Old Testament prophets. In his painting, Astarte Syriaca, the British Pre-Raphaelite artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 - 82) romantically evokes the divine power of Women. Partially based on Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, the painting (originally entitled “Venus Astarte”) was a full-length portrait on an immense six foot (1.83m) canvas.

The painting drew criticism when it was displayed, due to its erotic content. Victorian audiences were shocked by its overt sensuality. Astarte's hands, like Botticelli’s Venus, are positioned to draw attention to her fertility, while her “twofold girdle” highlights her voluptuousness. The work was also regarded by some commentators as a covert denunciation of patriarchal Victorian Christianity.

However, Astarte carries as much a private as a public message, namely Rossetti’s obsession with his beautiful Muse, Jane Morris, the wife of his fellow Pre-Raphaelite William Morris, with whom Rossetti was conducting an adulterous affair. The two torch-bearing male attendants placed symmetrically in the background speak of the Goddess’s – and by implication Jane’s – power to ensorcell men. She is both an incarnation of the Goddess of love and the personification of the Fatal Woman.

With her frontal gaze and elegant pose, cloth sensually against her skin and falling from her shoulder, Astarte Syriaca communicates a profound, bewitching presence.

The painter-poet composed an accompanying sonnet in praise of his divine Astarte:

Mystery, lo! betwixt the sun and moon

Astarte of the Syrians: Venus Queen

Ere Aphrodite was. In silver sheen

Her twofold girdle clasps the infinite boon

Of bliss whereof the heaven and earth commune:

And from her neck's inclining flower-stem lean

Love-freighted lips and absolute eyes that wean

The pulse of hearts to the sphere's dominant tune,

Torch-bearing, her sweet ministers compel

All thrones of light beyond the sky and sea

The witnesses of Beauty's face to be:

That face, of Love's all-penetrative spell

Amulet, talisman, and oracle -

Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery.

Ms Adler I Presume?

2012-01-08T06:37:00.002Z

In the mythos of the Sherlock Holmes canon as fashioned by its literary creator, Sir Author Conan Doyle, the generally ascetic, asexual hero of Baker Street appears to have been associated with only one love interest of note. The American adventuress, Ms. Irene Adler was an important character in the original Sherlock Holmes 1891 short story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’.

Despite appearing in only one of Conan Doyle’s books, she holds a unique position, unrivalled even by the great detective’s arch adversary, James Moriarty, of being the only one of his foes to have actually beaten him at his own game. While brilliant Sherlock may have been distinctly lacking in carnal lusts, what did turn him on it seems was an intelligence equal to his own.

In the current award-winning BBC TV series, Sherlock, the Scots writer and producer Steven Moffat gives the character of Irene Adler (played by the alluring Lara Pulver) a thoroughly modern twenty first century make-over as a high class Dominatrix, known simply as ‘The Woman’.

In a superbly written, fast-paced and exhilarating story line, graced by quick fire and witty dialogue, a courageous Ms. Adler shines as a self-described "recreational scolder" who, equipped with a knowledge of “what men like”, flirts shamelessly with Holmes (played by the wonderfully enigmatic Benedict Cumberbatch) for her own calculating and nefarious ends. For his part, she does not bore him. Indeed she excites him because she is the first mind he has encountered that is so genuinely brilliant to him.

While there are some tantalising interactions between the super sleuth and the manipulative Dominatrix - including Adler completely naked apart from high heels and diamond earrings, teasing Holmes with her svelte form and a gleefully brandished whip – what truly impresses in their layered, nuanced relationship is the crackling frisson and sexual chemistry between the pair, as they power-play beautifully off one another towards the episode’s dramatic finale.

Slightly troubling perhaps in what is otherwise a quite brilliant production was Moffat’s departure from the Conan Doyle original in revealing Adler to be an ultimately vulnerable Femme Fatale figure who, due to her emotional attachment to Holmes, fails to outwit him in a criminal plan that proves to have been masterminded, not by her, but by his nemesis, Moriarty.

Victorian Amazons

2012-01-05T18:37:00.005Z

Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836 - 1902) was a gifted, insightful and urbane artist of the late nineteenth century Victorian age who painted memorable depictions of French and English contemporary social life and fashion. Having established himself as an artist in Paris, he was forced to flee his native France following the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 for London, England, where he prospered.

With his keen observation of fashionable society, Tissot explored the complex, often vexing aspects, of contemporary relations between the sexes, while subtly toying with Victorian codes and mores of respectability. His beautifully rendered narrative vignettes portrayed in exquisite detail sexually charged interactions that were often infused with hints of trouble - vanities, indifference, immorality, rivalries, or impending separations - and which created an intriguing edge to his style of vintage Victorian art realism. Reflecting his fascination with Femininity and Her accoutrements, his paintings were replete with images of Women and their latest fashions, their elegant accessories (males and otherwise), and the subtle complexities of their social etiquette.

In despair following the untimely death in 1882 of his much younger and very beautiful Irish-born Mistress, Kathleen Newton, Tissot returned to Paris and re-established himself in the French art world with an ambitious series of 15 pictures entitled La Femme à Paris, which celebrated the popular notion that the Women of the French capital were a breed apart - modern and attractive Females who personified the city itself.

One of these works, which personally appeals, was a fine art portrait entitled Ces dames des chars (The Ladies of the Cars), 1885. It is an etching based on a painting featuring three exotically-garbed and whip-carrying Women - called at the time "Amazons" - racing horse-drawn chariots around an indoor ring at the Hippodrome de L’Alma, a popular Parisian entertainment facility. Combining modernity and glamour, the Female performers epitomized the spectacular leisure-time activities available at the time in the City of Light.

Although critics panned Tissot’s paintings as “vulgar” and “too French” or "too British", they proved very popular with both wealthy patrons and the general public.

The Praise Of Venus

2012-01-02T17:10:00.005Z

Venus and Tannhauser, c.1896 ~ Lawrence Koe

Tannhäuser was a thirteenth century German poet and an active courtier in the court of Frederick II of Austria.

Based on his Bußlied, Tannhäuser became the subject of legend, first attested in 1430 and propagated in poems and ballads from 1450. The legendary account describes how Tannhäuser discovers the Venusberg, the subterranean home of Venus, and spending a year there worshipping the Goddess. Missing his earthly home, Venus grants Tannhäuser permission to return, but he is unable to find contentment and in the end is drawn back to the erotic power of Venusberg.

The British poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his dramatic and lyrical poem, Laus Veneris, describes Tannhäuser as possessed of a masochistic longing to be devoured by the Goddess Venus in the form of a Female Medusa.

Laus Veneris

For she lies, laughing low with love; she lies

And turns his kisses on her lips to sighs,

To sighing sound of lips unsatisfied,

And the sweet tears are tender with her eyes.

Ah, not as they, but as the souls that were

Slain in the old time, having found her fair;

Who, sleeping with her lips upon their eyes,

Heard sudden serpents hiss across her hair.

Their blood runs round the roots of time like rain:

She casts them forth and gathers them again;

With nerve and bone she weaves and multiplies

Exceeding pleasure out of extreme pain.

Yea, all she slayeth; yea, every man save me;

Me, love, thy lover that must cleave to thee

Till the ending of the days and ways of earth,

The shaking of the sources of the sea.

~ Algernon Charles Swinburne ~

[extract]

Pain Then Comfort Some

2012-01-01T00:36:00.004Z

Danny Malboeuf (b. 1960) is a self-trained artist / illustrator and musician from North Carolina, USA.

Working mainly in acrylics, he paints in an allegorical figurative style that combines surrealist, symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite sensibilities. Inspired by literature and music, Malboeuf’s art deals with mythological and religious themes, while frequently incorporating sci-fi and pop-culture imagery.

The Angel of Comfort

[enlarge for full resolution]

Portraying mainly Female figures, his paintings are so intensely symbolic in expression and packed with so much meaning, the viewer cannot help becoming ensnared by their decaying, bittersweet morbidity.

Take, for example, his compelling work, The Angel of Comfort: the angelic Woman dressed in black appears to be offering comfort to a clearly vulnerable male, but the rope and chain attached to the tree, and the terrorised faces of the captive figures at its roots (look carefully), denote a prison or torture chamber of sorts, which suggests (to this predisposed submissive anyway) that the act of comforting had been preceded by the act of pain, and more besides!

However, in describing his artistic obsessions as “God, girls, consistencies and contradictions”, the artist offers the following cautionary advice to those viewers in earnest search of meaning from his paintings: “What is the meaning behind a particular piece? They all mean something, but I never know exactly what while I’m painting them. Maybe it’s the visual equivalent of speaking in tongues.”

A senior member of, and a four-time award winner with, deviantART, Danny Malboeuf has exhibited his work for the past twenty years in numerous joint and one-man exhibitions, including shows at the Huntington Museum of Art and the University of North Carolina. His paintings can be found in private collections in Europe, America, and Asia.

Here are two more intriguing examples of his futuristic Pre-Raphaelite paintings infused by the forces of the dark side.

Burial of Sade

Praise the Low

Seeing Out The Old

2011-12-29T17:21:00.006Z

It feels appropriate somehow to see out the old year with a selection of charming vintage FemDom illustrations.

I wish to take this opportunity to thank the following authors for kindly listing my FemDom Arts blog at their websites during 2011. Your support is very much appreciated.

Divine Mistress Eva Luna

Ma’am Yes Ma’am

Femdom Resource

Mrs Birch

Lady Governa

Old Man Equine

Cricketed’s Blog

Domination, Submission, and Love in Life and Dreams

Disciplined Behaviour

A special word of gratitude to Sardax for permitting the posting of some of his wonderful images.

Thanks also to everyone who commented here from time to time and for picture contributions to my Tumblr blog.

Wishing you all a very happy and peaceful New Year.

At Her Command

2011-12-28T15:59:00.001Z

Venus Demanding Arms from Vulcan for Aeneas, 1732

In the Aeneid, Virgil recounts how Venus, the Goddess of love, orders her unprepossessing husband, Vulcan, the god of fire and forging, to make a set of armour for Aeneas, her half-god son, when he was about to go to war in Latium.

The outcome of Aeneas' victory was the founding of a Trojan settlement on the Tiber from which, according to the legend, the Romans descended.

The painting is by the French rococo era artist, Francois Boucher (1703 - 1770).

Deviance and Innocence

2011-12-26T19:06:00.013Z

The Italian cult figurative artist, Saturno Butto, has recently released a wonderful art print entitled The Sisters in which he portrays, in his trademark classical Baroque style, two real-life siblings as allegories of contrasting human desires.

One of the sisters is depicted wearing a black leather face mask and might be described by normative society as deviant, while the other sister wears a garland of white flowers upon her head, representing virginal innocence. On a closer inspection, however, the viewer is struck by the conflicting demure silk gown of the masked sister and the expression of utter defiance of the wreathed sister. The artist’s evocative painting suggests that the destinies of the two sisters are inextricably linked, with the human skull resting on the fireplace perhaps symbolising their ultimate shared fate.

The picture is reflective of Butto's abiding interest in exploring dualities of the human condition in his work.

Pride Of Place

2011-12-23T21:44:00.003Z

For the Austrian Symbolist artist, Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918), The Woman was the leitmotif of his work and was always at the centre of the picture expressing a self-contained wholeness. As the pillar of the world, She stands tall, distant, inaccessible – whether portrayed as the Goddess figure, the seducer, the priestess, the sorceress, the Femme Fatale, or the Great Mother. The less accessible, the more alluring; and because She is inaccessible, Klimt paints Her again and again.

His art nouveau style represents a profound and enduring personal fascination with the Feminine. Beauty, art, and The Woman are for him one and the same.

In his early 1883 work, Fable, Klimt was already giving pride of place to Woman. His allegorical rendering of The Lady Eve has been described as the epitome of pure Womanliness. Here the compliant animals are positioned as ornaments at the feet of the wonderful, sensuous heroine, who accepts their obeisance as Her due.

As the prototype of Woman, Eve was to be painted by Klimt in every conceivable position. An archetypal force, She is the anima which is ultimately unattainable.

Lady Krampus

2011-12-21T21:48:00.002Z

The word ‘Krampus’ originates from the Old High German word for claw (‘Krampen’). In the Alpine regions, Krampus is a mythical incubus-like creature of Yuletide folklore who accompanies the good and gift-giving St. Nicholas (Santa Claus) to scold and punish people for their errant behaviour. In some rural areas, the tradition also includes Krampus administering corporal punishment with a birch rod.

Unsurprisingly, the myth wove its way into the world of FemDom with representations of the Female Krampus who punishes recalcitrant males although, sadly, images of The Lady Krampus are few and far between.

Enthralling Echoes

2011-12-16T21:20:00.009Z

The Floor Planers, 1875 ~ Gustave Caillebotte

There are few things in life more appealing to a submissive soul than the sight and sound of a traditional hardwood floor.

Divine Mistress has announced that the beautiful oak floor of Her Playroom is to be sanded and varnished, the better for Her lowly slave domnei to be held in thrall by the echoes of Her stiletto shoes and boots, while he waits patiently in anticipation and trepidation for that which is to be inflicted upon him.

Vintage Illustrations 5

2011-12-14T19:08:00.000Z

Alphonse Friaux (a pseudonym of an artist named Milewsky, sometimes spelled Milewski) was an obscure European – possibly of Polish descent – fetish artist who worked during the early 20th century.

A dominant theme of his talented femdom spanking illustrations in the 1920s and 30s was that of strong Women exacting corporal punishment to hapless males, often depicted with a look of studied concentration, or crazed glee.

Angel Of The Slain

2011-12-11T18:01:00.002Z

Mary Evelyn De Morgan, née Pickering, was a late-Victorian artist who lived and worked in a period marked by cataclysmic changes. Throughout her career as a painter, she used literary allusion and allegory to express her strongly held views on contemporary spiritual, social and moral issues, as well as her interest in mythological heroines to construct her images of Victorian Womanhood.

The Great War of 1914-1918 unnerved this idealist, whose life up to then had been devoted to art and beauty. Despite her horror of war, the religio-symbolic aspect of De Morgan’s art came into its own with World War 1. Again she used the language of spiritual allegory to paint a series of pictures representing violence, pain, loss and, finally, redemption.

One of these is her 1916 work, The Field of the Slain, in which De Morgan translates historical realities into an expressive allegory of the consequences of war. The central figure is an angel dressed in brown. A cluster of disembodied male heads are gathered in her dark drapery.

While the mood of the painting is melancholic, it also suggests the rich maternal embrace of Mother Earth opening her arms to receive the bodies of the slain. De Morgan’s angel welcomes the risen dead and shields them from further harm. Her pose is reminiscent of Renaissance images of the Madonna della Misericordia who acted as an intercessor for the dead.

Innuendo

2011-12-09T17:11:00.006Z

Double Indemnity (1944) was director Billy Wilder's classic film noir masterpiece - a cynical, witty, and sleazy thriller about adultery, corruption and murder. Graced by a typically innuendo-laden Raymond Chandler script, the film tells the tale of a Los Angeles insurance agent, Walter Neff (played by Fred MacMurray), and his entrapment and destruction by the fatal sexual magnetism of the ex-nurse, Phyllis Dietrichson (played by Barbara Stanwyck).

The film’s two central characters share an unholy love and an almost perfect crime. Both are duplicitous and callous lovers - a beautiful, shrewd, predatory and dissatisfied Femme Fatale housewife (with blonde bangs and an enticing gold anklet) and the likeable, smooth-talking insurance man. Their calculated, cold-blooded scheme to brutally murder her husband for purposes of lustful desire and financial gain, because of a double indemnity clause in his accident policy, ultimately fails. Their fraudulent, almost perfect crime leads to guilt, suspicion, betrayal, duplicity, and thrilling intrigue.

As the Femme Fatale figure, Stanwyck is no voluptuary, no garter-belt maw of erotic death, but an atmosphere. Like an animal, Neff recognizes her by smell, not by common sense (“How could I have known that murder sometimes smells of honeysuckle...."). Stanwyck's Phyllis has the urgent edge of destiny, the Woman who has been waiting for his arrival, and now that he has arrived, becomes his tarot for the future.

She is acutely aware of her surroundings and the weaknesses of men. The instant when Phyllis realizes that Neff has been overwhelmed, she begins to play her game of ‘hard to get’. The consummate ease with which she is capable of manipulating and controlling male behaviour is wonderfully underlined in this superbly crafted scene from what is, arguably, the definitive film noir.

Courtesy of The Filmprojector

Risky Business

2011-12-07T19:18:00.003Z

Here are some delightful images from a fashion editorial called "Negocios Riesgosos" (or in English "Risky Business") for Harper's Bazaar en Espanol & Mexico, November 2011, featuring the model, Yulia Kharlapanova and photographed by Benjamin Kanarek. Definitely a case of NSFW.

Embrace Of The Feminine

2011-12-05T07:16:00.005Z

The marriage of the great Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) to her fellow painter, Diego Rivera is one of the most famous alliances between artists. The couple had a passionate but stormy relationship, filled with great love and also painful betrayals. They both had incredible artistic vision and talent, but whereas Diego's work would be more public and monumental in his day, Frida's was more personal, intimate in scale and, ultimately (thanks to the Neomexicanismo Movement which promoted her work), more enduring.

In her life, Frida experienced both great physical pain (the effects of childhood polio and 35 operations as a result of a serious bus accident) and emotional pain (Diego’s womanising and her miscarriages) which she gave personalised expression to through her art. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds.

Kahlo’s 1949 painting, The Love Embrace of the Universe - the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl, contains many elements derived from ancient Mexican mythology. In the center of the painting, Kahlo represents herself as a Madonna-like figure, sitting contently in the earth, and cradling her husband in a love embrace that illustrates the combining relationship of Women and men. Although the Woman is the dominant and nurturing figure, the man has the third eye of wisdom in his forehead, so they are both dependent on each other.

Embracing the human couple is the Aztec Earth Mother, Cituacoatl, made from clay and rock. The outermost figure, the Universal Mother, embraces Cituacoatl. In the foreground, Senor Xolotl, represents Xolotl, a being in the form of a dog who guards the underworld.

In her evocative and introspective painting, Kahlo presents Woman and man, life, death, night, day, moon, sun, all in a recurring dichotomy which is deeply intertwined and held together by two powerful mythological Feminine beings.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

A Gentle Cruelty

2011-12-02T23:52:00.004Z

Siren

Known for his digital dreamscapes featuring Woman-child figures set in elaborate Rococo style interiors, the British-born and Toronto-based pop surrealist painter, Ray Caesar creates elegant yet haunting works that are a reflection of his continuous path to self-discovery. Fantasy, escapism, human cruelty and disguise are reoccurring themes explored within his dramatic narratives.

Second Sight

Caesar has discussed openly that he suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (a form of multiple personalities) which he explains as arising from a difficult and traumatic childhood. He dissociates parts of his personality "into dolls, into furniture, into inanimate objects”, describing his periods of dissociation as an "extended daydream."

Silent Partner

In later adult life, he was to work as a graphic artist in a hospital for sick children where he documented disturbing cases of child abuse, surgical reconstruction, mental illness, and animal research. Coupled with inspiration from surrealist artists such as Salvador Dali and Frida Kahlo, Caesar’s experiences at the hospital continue to influence his work.

Side-Saddle

His digitally created dreamscapes (“I do not see myself as an artist”, he says, “I make pictures”) feature engrossing doll-like Female figures with delicate features and porcelain complexions. Caesar’s craft is an advanced extension of a childhood obsession - playing with dolls. With some sprouting tails, tentacles and other animal appendages, all of his hybrid Female characters wear elaborate costumes that reference fashions of the Victorian age, while often incorporating futuristic elements.

Day Break

Caesar’s other worldly and playfully fierce Femmes, conjured from the mesmerizing shade of his psyche, have the look of childhood innocence, but with just a hint of evil lurking round the corner. With their piercing, knowing gaze exposing an inner strength that is in contrast with their fragile physical appearance, they emerge from deep within the picturist’s vast imagination into simulated realities, carrying macabre secrets and hidden truths.

Self Examination

Ray Caesar’s fantastic world of Femmes, radiating an enigmatic serenity with an implicit menace, evokes a sense of uneasiness and discomfort, while alternatively flooding the senses and heartening the soul.

Homecoming

Visit his interesting website here.

Vintage Illustrations 4

2011-12-01T07:22:00.001Z

Paul Klamm or Paul Kamm (born 1891 in Berlin) was a German FemDom artist of the 1920s and 1930s of whom comparatively little is known. His work was largely published under the name C. Soulier and featured in such BDSM publications as "Reigen", "Berliner Leben", "Die Ohne", and "Der Junggeselle".

Klamm’s mainly F/F and F/M drawings centred on strict dominatrices who subjected their helpless slaves and submissives to body worship, feminisation, corporal punishment and enema play.

Optical Illusion

2011-11-27T18:26:00.003Z

An architect by training, Oleg Shuplyak (b. 1967) is a talented Ukrainian oil painter and art teacher who uses hidden images to turn his artworks into mind-blowing optical illusions.

Created through strategically placed objects, colouring, shadows, and composition, the artist’s paintings project the faces of well known people, such as Salvador Dali, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. Objects and characters are aligned perfectly in such a way they create outstanding illusions.

This fine example of his work, entitled Reading Dali (2011), captures more than what meets the eye and has a peculiar D&s appeal for me for some inexplicable reason.

Noir Perfection

2011-11-25T15:25:00.002Z

A mesmerizing picture by the iconic German-Australian photographer, Helmut Newton, published in Vogue France, 1981, for Yves St. Laurent, which is an all-time personal favourite.

The evocative black and white image captures a number of wonderful elements: a compelling classic noir ambience; the intensity of purpose of the kneeling male in his devoted act of Female service; the studied pose and aloofness of the immaculately tailored Lady with her whip-like fur; the creeping shadows of the two central players on the blank wall; and the voyeuristic intrusion of the public on the private spheres.

A perfectly sublime photograph that stirs my submissive spirit.

Circe and Her Swine

2011-11-23T19:27:00.006Z

Louis Chalon (1866 - 1940) was a French painter, illustrator, gold and silversmith, and bronze sculptor. The themes of his paintings were mainly classically inspired. He also illustrated numerous books, including works by Balzac, Bobbaccio and Rabelais. Chalon’s sculpture focused on mythological subjects, while many of his Female subjects were femme-fleurs – Women symbolizing flowers.

In Homer’s epic, Circe, a beautiful enchantress, dwells in luxury upon a mythical island. The sole remaining ship of the hero Ulysses lands upon this island, and, after seeing the smoke from her fireplace, he sends a search party to her castle seeking succour. Encouraged by her beautiful singing voice, the men beseech entry. Circe is more than happy to welcome them into her home, and prepares a delicious meal for them, adding to it a potion to cause them to forget their homeland.

Once they have partaken, she strikes them with her magic wand, causing them to be transformed into swine, which she then locks into sties and feeds acorns and other pig food. The captive males retain their human minds and are conscious of their changed forms, but powerless to speak or do anything.

In Chalon’s 1888 print depiction, Circe and the Companions of Ulysses, the regal sorceress sits triumphantly over the subjugated male-swine prostrate at her feet.

Bonds Of The Flesh

2011-11-21T21:12:00.005Z

The Women and men of Roberto Ferri (b. 1978), a young talented Italian artist from Taranto, with their slender bodies, perfect muscles and intriguing poses are inspired by the great Baroque painters (in particular Caravaggio) and other Old Masters of Romanticism, Academism and Symbolism, all of whom Ferri studied.

Angels and demons, spiritual aspirations and the bonds of the flesh, purity and lasciviousness are some of the recurrent themes in Ferri’s oeuvre. His dark paintings translate into images that are the dreams or (perhaps) the nightmares of each of us. His rich and colourful compositions are full of mysterious and fantastic figures portrayed in a beautiful form.

Sharing a similar Baroque-inspired opulent style with the work of Saturno Butto, Ferri’s art is a mediated and introspective hymn in celebration of the greats of classical painting. Its visual impact on the viewer is something akin to a blow to the solar plexus.

You can discover more of Roberto Ferri at his website here.

Exit Of The Femme Fatale

2011-11-18T22:52:00.009Z

The 1949 British film noir, The Third Man, is rightly regarded as a masterpiece of the big screen, particularly remembered for its twisty Graham Greene storyline, atmospheric cinematography, outstanding performances, and unique musical score.

Set in post World War II Vienna, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), an American pulp fiction writer, travels to meet up with his old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles). However, when he arrives he learns that Lime has been killed in a suspicious accident. He become involved in a complex mystery with Lime’s ex-girlfriend, Anna Schmidt (the Italian actress, Alida Valli), and soon it becomes apparent that Lime, far from being dead, is very much alive as a charismatic but diabolical villain.

Like many Women in film noir, Anna is the object of unrequited love, and, being aware of Martins’ interest in her, she manipulates his affection, while maintaining her allegiance to the unrepentant Lime to the bitter end.

In one of the best exit scenes of the cinema, Holly waits hoping to engage Anna but, being the hard edge Femme Fatale that she is, she treats him with utter disdain, showing him exactly what she thinks of him. A superb ending that is graced by Anton Karas’ unforgettable zither music.

Courtesy of hafizaguncesi

Acrasia

2011-11-17T23:02:00.008Z

This mesmerising work by the British Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Melhuish Strudwick (1849 - 1937), is a vision of Acrasia kneeling with her victim knight in the garden of the Bower of Bliss. Acrasia is the magical enchantress in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the sixteenth century poet’s masterpiece (Book II). The poem, published with the help of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1570, was a symbolic glorification of Queen Elizabeth I, England, and the English language.

Acrasia seduced men and transformed them into beasts. The defeated knight, who has succumbed to Acrasia’s charms and sipped her fatal potion, lies listlessly in her arms, and at her mercy. His black armour is scattered with rose blossoms, his shield rests futilely in the branches, and his sword lays idle upon the ground. Beyond the bower, a lake glistens in a golden sunset. From amongst the branches of the apple trees, Acrasia’s handmaidens sing a haunting melody along to the melodious chords of their lutes and harps.

Inspiring the imagination and appealing to the senses, Acrasia (c.1888), with its lush texture and vivid colouring, radiates a transcendent expressiveness.

Goddess Luna

2011-11-15T21:34:00.006Z

In many ancient cultures, the moon was a symbol of the Divine Feminine. Luna was a Roman Goddess of the Moon. In earlier Greek mythology, she was known as Selene, born from the Titan ‘Golden Age’. In post-Renaissance art, Selene is generally depicted as a beautiful Woman with a pale face, wearing robes and with a half-moon on her head. Often, she was shown riding a silver chariot with milk-white horses or serpentine dragons across the heavens.

Goddess Selene and Endymion

The Goddess of the Moon’s great love was a human mortal, the shepherd prince Endymion. Knowing that he will age and die being a mortal, she appeals to Zeus who gives Endymion a choice, and he chose to sleep forever so that he may remain as he is.

Placed in a state of eternal slumber in a cave near the peak of Lydian Mount Latmos, Endymion is visited nightly by his heavenly bride. Despite his condition, Selene bears him 50 daughters. Well, she is a Goddess after all!

Statue of Luna, Roman Goddess of the Moon

This posting is dedicated to my Goddess of the Moon, The Divine Eva Luna.

Isabel Bayrakdarian: "Song to the Moon" by Antonin Dvorak

with the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra
(Courtesy win081)

Backyard D&s

2011-11-13T17:23:00.002Z

Some beautiful imagery from a fetishized fashion editorial entitled Backyard Love. The Finish photographer Ville Varumo captures models Julia Johansen and Joseph Turnbull in a modern day romantic drama of Romeo and Juliet that is infused with wonderful D&s poses and styling. (source: the ones2watch here, March 2011)

Fatal Embrace

2011-11-11T02:13:00.005Z

Born and reared in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sascha (Alexander) Schneider (1870 - 1927) was a painter and sculptor. Having first studied in Dresden, Germany, he became associated with a circle of artists that formed around the Symbolist, Max Klinger, one of the last "artist princes" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Schneider achieved public recognition when he collaborated with one of Germany’s most popular writers, Karl May, in creating cover illustrations for his novels. He became a professor in Weimar after which he moved to Florence, Italy, where he dedicated his work to the beauty of the male body and gave up the "painting of ideas". When the First World War broke out, he went back to Germany and lived in Dresden until his death.

The homoerotic content of much of Schneider’s artwork proved controversial with museums and collectors. Many of his pictures juxtaposed naked figures with angels, demons or monsters. In his painting, A Feeling of Dependence (or Emotion of Dependence), created in 1920, a naked male stands subdued in chains while a black monster of shadowy outline, turgidly opening and shutting its smouldering eyes, fixes the chained human form in preparation for a fatal final embrace.

Beware Ladies With Sticks

2011-11-08T18:22:00.013Z

La Galana, guerrillera de La Mancha
by Carlos Isidro;

Peninsular War hero, Juana Galan

In 1820, 20 year old Juana Galan, working as a barmaid in Valdepenas, Spain, was not expecting a surge of French soldiers to come storming through her town. But on June 6 of that year, that is exactly what happened. At that time, most of the men folk were off fighting the Emperor Napoleon's forces elsewhere in the nation. Juana, unfazed by the nasty French riflemen, began organizing the Women in her locality to form a trap for the approaching army.

When the army arrived, Juana and her friends were ready. They dumped boiling water and oil on the French troops, which by all accounts left a lasting impression on the invaders. Then Juana, armed with only a batan, beat back the heavily armed French cavalry with her squad of daring Women, almost none of whom were armed with guns.

The French retreated, giving up on capturing not just Juana's town but the entire province of La Mancha, leading to ultimate Spanish victory. Today, La Dama Galana is revered in Spain as a national hero and a symbol of resistance, strength, patriotism, feminism and hitting silly males with a stick.

Statue of "La Galana" in Valdepeñas, Spain,
by the sculptor Javier Galán, 2008

Adonis Tamed

2011-11-06T15:10:00.002Z

The American fashion photographer Herb Ritts (1952 - 2002) was known for his black and white photos and portraits of similar style to the sculpture of classical Greece.

Here the Goddess Aphrodite (modelled by Christy Turlington) tames her hypertonic Adonis (published Valentino 1995).

Pushing The Vanilla Envelope

2011-11-04T17:00:00.004Z

Down through the years, fashion has shown the capacity to push the envelope in breaking down social barriers.

Majority vanilla opinion would contend that bondage and fetish hold no place in mainstream markets but in fact, both subjects are often used in marketing fashion. It used to be only for the brave and daring, now bondage and fetish are pushing their way into many an editorial in mainstream fashion publications and finding their way onto the highstreet. The taboo, in many ways, is not so taboo anymore.

While a difficult subject to do well, bondage and fetish fashion is increasingly adopted by leading designers and photographers. Here are some of my favourite images.

Emma Summerton, Vogue Italia, October 2009

Contour Neck Corset by Steven Meisel, Vogue Italia, September 2011

Aymeline Valade in Fit To Be Tied by Tom Munro, Vogue Paris, No.125

The crossing over of the leather harness into mainstream fashion

as modeled by Masha Novoselova, who inspires our inner fetishist

Constance Jablonski, leather-clad milkmaid – underwear as outerwear

Naomi Campbell, Vogue Russia, April 2010

Female in the guise of batman from a photoshoot entitled

“Femme Fatale” by Petra Collins and Laura Lyn Petrick.

A super-sultry black and white shoot of Bianca Balti,

Vogue Germany, February 2010.

Italian Marie Claire: October 2007 : Photography : Steen Sundland

Swarovsky Crystalized : Featuring Cincher Belt : Photography : David Slijper.

The Contender, V Man Magazine : Photographer Steven Klein

S&M Style Shoes, Aoi Kotsuhiro, Exotic Regrets Collection

Equus Eroticus

2011-11-01T07:14:00.002Z

Noriko, a Traditional Geisha Girl Sayeko, The Slave Huntress

"Old Man Equine" is an imaginary character that came into existence out of a Japanese man's fantasy to be a horse mounted by beautiful Women. The Japanese title of his web site is pronounced as "Jo-say-joe-i-ji-dye", which literally means 'Female Dominance Age', and was the title given in Japan for the Italian movie La Matriarca (released as The Libertine in the U.S.).

Wheeled

Regarding himself as someone who draws and paints for personal pleasure rather than as a commercial artist, Old Man Equine’s desire to be ridden by beautiful Women started early in life and was first given artistic expression in his adolescence when he depicted his pony play fantasy on paper – a creative period he describes as akin to “graffiti”.

Napoleana Crossing The Alps

He began to seriously draw pony play and other FemDom pictures at the age of 19 soon after he left his family home to live in Tokyo. Drawing first with pencil, or sometimes with pen and ink, he developed on to working with computer graphics and in particular Photoshop, as a drawing / painting tool, from 2000 onwards. Taking existing separate photographs of a Woman and of a man (not necessarily of a FemDom subject matter), the artist uses a complex compound layering process and other graphic techniques to create his “daydream” image.

The Cherry Blossoms Derby

For example, his drawing, The Femdom Garden Party (which the artist kindly gave permission for me to use as an avatar for this blog), was motivated by a painting called The Crimson Rambler by an American Impressionist artist, Philip Leslie Hale, depicting a Woman sitting on a balustrade and which was used as cover art for a mystery novel book. The work “led me to a fantasy of a garden party in which men play horses for Women”.

The Crimson Rambler, 1908

The Femdom Garden Party

For Old Man Equine, “the process of drawing / making pictures is more important than the resulting product because I have the most exciting, pleasant time when I am making it. Drawing / making pictures is for me a time-consuming undertaking which involves intense periods of work which I describe as ‘drawing fever’”.

Fantasy of a Psychologist

For the artist, pony play is the ultimate expression of his deeply felt desire for Female Domination.

“To me, pony play or "equus eroticus" is the epitome of the Female Dominant - male submissive relationship. In this game, he is put into constant oppression under her. She controls him mentally as well as physically. He is without any free or independent will, just doing what she wants. She commands him not by words but by physical stimuli; kicks and squeezes, sometimes with reins, spurs and a whip. Thus, she totally owns him, and he is totally owned by her.”

Riding Mistress, Santa Fe Style

i would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to Old Man Equine for sharing this biographical information and for his kind permission to feature here a selection of images from his distinctive and beautiful artwork. You can visit his site here or at Links.

Waterfall II

Music Lesson

2011-10-28T15:12:00.008+01:00

In this entertaining painting (artist unattributed), The Lady clearly has her own ideas as to who is really in charge and how the music lesson should be conducted; which leads on rather nicely to introducing the intoxicating Russian soprano, Anna Netrebko, as she performs Quando m'en vo from the opera, La Bohéme, by the Italian composer, Giacomo Puccini.

Her beautiful, dark and distinctive voice, together with her elegant and alluring stage presence, have prompted critics to hail Netrebko as "Audrey Hepburn with a voice".

Courtesy of Oneguinn 65

Equine Dominance

2011-10-25T18:44:00.003+01:00

In this gripping black and white drawing, The Lady on the Horse, 1900-1901, the Female figure is mercilessly dominating, as seated on an all-too-real rocking horse, she crushes men’s bodies like tiny broken puppets scattered on the nursery floor. A co-identity seems to exist between the Woman and the horse, as they exude an unbridled, primal energy towards their shared act of domination.

The work is by the Austrian Symbolist artist, Alfred Kubin (1877 - 1959) known as “the priest of the Hells” and the “Austrian Goya”. He had a tortured and conflictual soul having suffered agonising experiences of Female loss – his mother died when he was 10 years old and his stepmother two years later. Further complicating his fragile mental state, Kubin was seduced at 11 by a pregnant woman while, as a young man, he was afflicted by the loss of his fiancé.

These events profoundly shaped Kubin's life as a young adult. At 19, he tried to commit suicide on his mother's grave; while later, in the army, he had a nervous breakdown. A visionary who expressed modernity's spiritual toll and anticipated some of the horrors of the 20th century, Kubin's Kafkaesque drawings map the shadowy corners of the unconscious. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the theme of Death as represented by Woman takes a significant place in his works.

On a happier note, the artist would go on to have a long and happy marriage and a peaceful life in the countryside of Zwickeldt, where he continued to dedicate himself to his art.

The Gibson Girl

2011-10-21T17:53:00.008+01:00

Charles Dana Gibson (1867 - 1944) was an American illustrator and painter who became famous when he created the immortal Gibson Girl.

Modelled on his wife, and representing an ideal of American Womanhood, the Gibson Girl graced the pages of nationally read magazines such as Harper's, Collier's Weekly, and Life.

From "The Weaker Sex" 1903 series of 80 drawings

With her hourglass figure, her expertly upswept hair, her elegant fashion sense and her decidedly self-confident air, she was everything American Women in the early 1900s aspired to be. In the company of men, she clearly held them captive to her obvious charms.

It is She alone who chooses

"At the Beach" ~ all types of different men are drawn

to the striking Woman in their midst.

A superb graphic artist, Gibson's pen and ink drawings of beautiful and assertive young Women were hugely popular and were used in advertisements for corsets, shoes, clothing and also in postcards.

"Love in a Garden" ~ men put to work

"They are only collecting the usual fans and gloves" ~ a caricature showing Gibson Girls waiting for their escorts to perform a ritual of masculine chivalry of the period (recovering items of the Womens' paraphernalia that were set aside when they ate).

i hope you enjoy this selection of my favourites Gibson illustrations.

The Sleep of Surrender

2011-10-19T07:22:00.007+01:00

This wonderful painting by the Flemish and European Baroque master, Peter Paul Rubens (1577 - 1640), of the biblical Samson and Delilah is alive with colourful movement, vivid sensuality and turbulent drama.

While the Jewish hero slumbers on the lap of the seductress for whom he has a fatal passion, she for her part calls in a male servant to shave off the seven braids of his hair, thereby rendering him emasculated, deprived of his legendary strength and subdued as a soon-to-be captive of the attendant Philistines.

Samson is completely oblivious to his surroundings, perhaps because he feels unwittingly secure in the arms of Delilah, while her expression is one of sensuality, triumph and pity. A statue of Venus and Cupid presides over the erotic scene.

Here, from Camille Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson Et Delila, first performed in 1877, the immortal 'La Divina' sings the beautiful aria, Printemps Qui Commence in which Delilah longs for Samson's return.

Courtesy of ClaudineShim

Golden D&s Oldies

2011-10-16T18:51:00.008+01:00

Here is a Sunday selection of some of my favourite photographic stills from the golden oldies.

In Howard Hawk’s 1946 noir classic, The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart is all tied up before the seemingly disinterested beauty, Lauren Bacall.....

.....while from the same film, Martha Vickers puts the boot into the neck of the murdered seedy bookseller, Theodore von Eltze, for good measure.

In A Night in Casablanca (1946), the legendary comedian Groucho Marx assumes a bottom position to try out a spy contraption for a spot of Woman Worship.

In another noir classic, Scarlet Street (1945), the hapless Sunday painter Edward G. Robinson moves from canvas to toenails in his infatuation for the amoral, fast-talking Femme Fatale, Joan Bennett.

Barbara Stanwyck, in the 1941 American screwball comedy movie, Lady Eve, plays a masquerading socialite who has Henry Fonda, a wealthy heir to a drinks company, exactly where she wants him.

And, lastly, in a memorable scene of kinky sexual chemistry, an abject Marlon Brando kneels before his wife, Kim Hunter, at the bottom of the fabulous staircase in a Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

Grand Style

2011-10-14T16:38:00.003+01:00

An iconic fashion photographer, the American-born Steven Meisel (b. 1954) is a man of many beautiful pictures. He is regarded as one of the most respected and successful photographers in fashion and entertainment, having obtained popular acclaim for his work with both US Vogue and Italian Vogue (in which he has photographed every cover for over two decades), as well as for his photographs of his friend Madonna in her book, Sex.

His vast portfolio has also included regular projects for Vanity Fair and W in the magazine world and for Calvin Klein, Prada and Versace in the advertising world. As one of the most powerful photographers in the fashion industry, Meisel is credited with "discovering" or promoting the careers of many successful supermodels, including Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington.

His fascination for beauty and models started at a young age. He ignored common childhood possessions like toys and immersed himself in fashion magazines (Harper's Bazaar and Vogue were his favourite sources of inspiration for his early drawings), and became obsessed with pictures of high-class, beautiful women. Notoriously reclusive, he is known for keeping himself hidden under layers of clothing and hats. (An endearing trait that he shares with my Divine Mistress Eva Luna!).

These images are from a Meisel editorial in Vogue Italia (March 2010) entitled “In Grande Style”, featuring the Danish model, Freja Beha Erichsen. Endlessly successful in his many different photographic shootings, Steven Meisel remains to this day relevant, innovative and occasionally controversial.

Bewitched

2011-10-11T23:27:00.005+01:00

Luis Ricardo Falero (1851 - 1896) was a Spanish artist who trained in Paris as a portraitist and scientist. He developed a deep interest in the supernatural and had a fascination for painting highly detailed renderings of the Female nude in mythical and fantasy settings.

Faléro’s wonderful work, The Departure of the Witches, is signed and dated (1878) but not titled: and it is known by a number of modern names including The Vision de Faust, or Faust’s Vision.

Here, Falero’s dramatically presents Faust’s dream as he and his male companion, Mephisto, encounter a group of bewitching and sensual Females, who lead them captive on a journey to a communal gathering in the Brocken Mountains, the sabbath of Walpurgis Night.

A truly captivating vision.

Beau FemDom

2011-10-09T17:14:00.009+01:00

The French artist, illustrator, writer and designer, Laurent Lebeau, has been active in the FemDom fetish scene since 1993.

Based in Los Angeles and New York, he has exhibited his art in Europe, the USA and Japan. His work has graced the pages of leading Female Domination magazines and has been collected by Mistresses and FemDom clubs all over the world.

Lebeau has organised many successful fetish parties including the Night of the Queens in New York City.

His distinctive fine graphic style features generally young Women dominating their slaves and submissives in fantastic scenes of Mistress-service, corporal punishment and feminisation-sissyfication.

You can discover more about the artist at his website here.

Demimondes and Pigs

2011-10-07T17:56:00.004+01:00

Closely associated with the literary movement of Symbolism and Decadence, Félicien Rops (1833 - 1898) was a Belgian painter and engraver who flourished in Paris and was known for his decadent and sometimes blasphemous artwork.

His most famous painting, Pornocrates (1896), is deliberately ambiguous and can be interpreted at a number of levels. Seen in terms of classical iconography, the semi-nude blindfolded Lady may be considered as an allegory of Dame Fortuna who allows herself to be led by lust (cochon, the French word for pig, which as with Italian, in a wide sense means lustful).

The work's title, Pornocrates, refers to pornocrats - a corrupt democracy led by governors who rule by the primacy of physical gratification over ethics and education. Under the feet of the main subject, the dominions of the pornocrates are represented as sculpture, music, poetry and painting. The arts are trampled down and subdued by lust, bestowing a moral meaning to the otherwise erotic and libertine appearance of the painting on a first viewing.

Courtesy of the wonderful Femdom Artists website, i came across this equally fascinating image (artist unattributed), which has interesting and humorous parallels with Rops’ iconic work. Judge for yourself.

Uninvited and Scorned

2011-10-05T21:23:00.002+01:00

This gloriously sumptuous painting, The Uninvited Guest, is by a relatively unknown British Pre-Raphaelite artist, Eleanor F. Brickdale (1872 - 1945).

The picture’s scene is of the aftermath of a lavish wedding featuring a procession of richly-dressed people of apparent high rank. To the right, a solitary male cupid figure gazes upon the exiting wedding entourage, almost physically detached from the concerns of the bridal couple and their guests. Perhaps in suggestion of a marriage of convenience, the lowly male as the representation of love is the uninvited guest. Note how he is depicted forlorn among stinging nettles and prickles growing by the path from the church.

A second male figure is cast in submissive mode in another of Brickdale’s flamboyant paintings, The Pale Complexion of True Love, which takes its title from Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It – “a pageant played, Between the pale complexion of true love, And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain”.

Power and Entrapment

2011-10-03T07:16:00.002+01:00

Remedios Varo was a Spanish-Mexican para-Surrealist painter who was the child of a deeply religious mother and an atheist engineer father. Influenced by the two forces of mysticism and science, her highly original art challenged the predominantly misogynist portrayal of Women by male Surrealist painters in creating magical heroines which she used to explore the Female psyche. Varro’s Women are often depicted in interior environments that are transformed into places where extra-ordinary, fantastic and inexplicable events take place.

In her wonderfully allegorical work, Celestial Pablum (1958), a golden-haired young Woman seated in a tower floating among the clouds grinds star matter into a pablum that she spoon feeds to a crescent moon in a cage, thereby gaining access to celestial realms. She is a cosmological representation of the nurturing and creative power of Mother Nature. Yet, her natural and supernatural potency seems somehow compromised by the unguarded staircase which descends into the thick clouds below, suggesting a sense of isolation and entrapment.

Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963)

The Strange Woman

2011-10-01T09:13:00.007+01:00

The Woman many critics and fans alike regard as the most beautiful ever to grace the cinema screen was born Hedwig Eva Kiesler in Vienna, Austria. As a leading Hollywood actress of the 1930s and 40s, Hedy Lamarr was famous for playing the first cinema nude (Ecstasy 1933), as well as being the co-inventor of a sophisticated frequency-switching system for torpedo guidance that was two decades ahead of its time.

In the 1946 production of The Strange Woman based on the novel of the same name by Ben Ames Williams, she starred as a scheming sadomasochistic Femme Fatale heroine who stops at nothing to control the men in her life. If noir looks at the darkness of the human soul, this is one of the darkest journeys into human sexuality.

Set in the early 19th century, the film takes place in the prosperous coastal logging town of Bangor, Maine, where the beautiful Jenny Hager (played by Lamarr) shakes up the town’s propriety with her acts of 'good' as often as she uses her sexual allure to get what she wants.

Freed by his death from her drunkard father, she soon manoeuvres herself into a position to marry a middle-aged rich local businessman, Isaiah Poster, who is twenty years her senior. While making a fine life for herself with her husband’s wealth, she continues to consider all other men fair game. Jenny soon becomes attracted to her old childhood friend and new stepson, Ephraim.

She writes Ephraim a letter telling him how lucky he is to have a “nice young mother” and that she will “demand obedience and love.” She teases him that if he refuses her, “I will punish you by not kissing you good night” and ends her letter with the line “…come home and see what a fine parent I can be. I do think families should be close, don’t you? Your loving mother, Jenny.” She tells him that she'll marry him if he murders his father. But, unknown to Ephraim, Jenny is already scheming to win the affections of businessman John Evered, even though he's pledged to marry her best friend Meg. The film ends in the predictable noir outcomes of deceit, tragedy and death.

This video tribute is a selection of still photographs celebrating the renowned physical beauty and brilliant inventive mind that was Hedy Lamarr (1913 - 2000).

Courtesy of 4262009AP

Something Old, Something New

2011-09-27T19:27:00.001+01:00

i have posted some of my favourite FemDom and LFA images at Tumblr (here and at Links) in honour of my Owner, Mistress Eva Luna. Some of the images are to be found here at this blog, while some are from other sources on the Internet.

As you will see, the imagery is somewhat subdued and understated in tone, aspiring to elegance and refinement wherever possible, and reflecting my liking for the emotional, spiritual and psycho-sexual expressions of D&s.

Should you have any images in this vein that you would like to share (no graphic or overly-explicit images please), they would be most gratefully received and acknowledged. Thank you.

A Streetcar Named Desire

2011-09-24T19:38:00.006+01:00

Credit: Eliot Elisofon/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

A haunting submissive image from the original 1947 Broadway production of Tennessee William’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire. In a touching moment, the primal and sensual Stanley Kowlaski kneels before his wife Stella.

The emotionally-charged scene from the 1951 film production of Stella (Kim Hunter) descending the stairs to her distressed husband (Marlon Brando) captures - in every sense - the languid heat and steamy ambience of the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Courtesy of tristanladyhawk

Sacred Fire

2011-09-22T22:26:00.008+01:00

(Please enlarge for a complete resolution)

La Princesse du Feu Sacre is a truly beautiful painting by the Polish artist of fantastic realism, Wojciech Siudmak (b. 1942).

The pensive princess reclines on her luxurious throne, while the source of her power, the sacred flame, burns brightly in the background, illuminating the entire magical scene. A male attendant stands watch over the royal Lady, while what appears to be a court jester and a naked slave are lying submissively (and fast asleep?) at her feet.

Interpret it as you please, but i know which fantasy inspires me.

Under The Rod

2011-09-20T19:43:00.008+01:00

One of the features of FemDom art is that many of its finest exponents, for understandable reasons, choose anonymity behind one or sometimes several pseudonyms, thereby restricting the full crediting and celebration of their work.

One such is the artist “Gregor” who created a wonderful sequence of black and white images to illustrate a FemDom story with the title, “The Whiphand”, the author of which was “the ghost of Severin”, both names being a clear nod to the classic work Venus In Furs.

The story is an account of a Mistress-Wife and submissive-husband starting out on married life together. The Dominant Woman, Madame Cressada Laverge (the old French word for "the rod"), contractually binds her subby hubby, Malcolm Masoque-Laverge, to a carefully pre-planned regime of marital enslavement, obedience training and physical punishment in a household setting that includes the supporting characters of a strict Governess, a trainee-Dominatrix niece and two masochistic nephews.

The stylish illustrations are exquisitely executed and noteworthy for the obvious disdain with which the imperious Madame Laverge exercises her absolute authority, control and rule over her subservient husband.

The story opens with the following striking passage which sets the tone for the development of this memorable D/s relationship:

“Husband,” her liquid, throaty voice commanded, “Read this to me again.” She leaned over and her electric, full-bosomed assertive beauty dazzled his adoring senses as he read his own hand-written words:

'I, Malcolm Masoque-Laverge (once Malcolm Masoque) this day unconditionally and devotedly yield myself to the complete authority of Madame Cressada Laverge, my wife and absolute Mistress. I vow that: I am to accept her decisions in all matters as final. I am to comply with her every wish, to obey her every command and to always be faithful in heart and deferential in manner to my beloved Mistress. I am to submit my body, mind and soul to her strictest discipline, and expect severe punishment for the slightest disregard of her authority. Said punishment will be administered to me in whatever form my Mistress feels best befits her mood and the occasion'.

(Signed) Malcolm Masoque-Laverge.

The Choice of Enslavement

2011-09-17T03:41:00.013+01:00

Allegory of Wisdom and Strength (The Choice of Hercules), ca.1580

~ Paolo Veronese

Consulting the oracle of Apollo as to how he could expiate a wicked, murderous act which he has committed, the Greek hero, Hercules, is advised to enter the service of Omphale, the foreign Queen of Lydia.

Although Hercules is the son of Zeus and famed for his invincible strength, he chooses enslavement and learns to submit to a regime of feminisation devised for him by Omphale, which includes the spinning of wool and the wearing of female clothing.

Here in a richly allegorical work by Paolo Veronese, a sixteenth century Italian Mannerist painter, the cowering warrior figure, represented by brute Strength, places himself under the ownership of the Queen, represented by triumphant Wisdom. Omphale is portrayed contemptously stepping on top of ultimately worthless earthly possessions, signifying the fundamental change to Hercules' heretofore worldly existence.

i love the depiction of the nonchalant Dominant Queen who seems to be almost leading away her newly-acquired subjugated slave.

In time, Hercules' subservience and obedience to Omphale, as well as his valiant deeds for her, are rewarded by the Queen’s love for him and marriage.

Golden Shower

2011-09-15T07:22:00.004+01:00

A number of the great artists, including Titian, Correggio and Rembrandt, have portrayed the ancient Greek myth of Danaë and the Golden Shower.

According to this legend, Danaë is the daughter of Acrisius, King of Argus and Eurydice who, because he has no male heirs, has been foretold by an oracle that he will be killed by his daughter’s son. Fearful of this prediction, Acrisius imprisons Danaë in a bronze tower so that she would remain childless. There, Zeus (in Roman mythology: Jupiter) comes to her in the form of a Golden Shower which impregnates Danaë. She gives birth to a son called Perseus who would grow up to become the great Medusa-slayer hero.

Acrisius throws Danaë and the baby Perseus into the sea in a wooden chest. At the request of Zeus, Poseidon calms the sea and the mother and son survive, and are washed ashore. Years later, the oracle’s prophecy comes true when Perseus accidentally, but fatally, strikes the aging Acrisius on the head with his javelin at an athletic game.

Danaë ~ Jan Gossaert, 1527

As depicted by the Flemish Renaissance painter Jan Gossaert (1478 - 1532, better known as Mabuse), the semi-naked Danaë receives Zeus in the form of golden rain from on high. Unsuspecting of the divine visitation upon her, she is presented as a somewhat passive figure before the omnipotence of the highest in the pantheon of the gods.

Danaë ~ Gustav Klimt, 1907

Compare this work to the depiction of Danaë by the Austrian symbolist master Gustav Klimt. The Klimt painting of the myth is highly erotic in nature. The Golden Shower that is Zeus is flowing freely between the legs of the red-headed Danaë. Her expression is in turn one of arousal and enjoyment. As the symbol of love and transcendence, Danaë is covered only in a veil in the colour of imperial purple, which serves as a reminder of her royal lineage. She is a Dominant Female figure, engaging with and controlling the divine pleasurable experience purely on her own terms.

And, finally, in this reverse gender vintage illustration, a Goddess bestows the divine gift of her Golden Shower to a prostrate male mortal.............

Female Supremacy

2011-09-11T17:14:00.002+01:00

Often confused with the late nineteenth century Austrian artist, Raphael Kirchner, who drew glamour postcards of saucy Ladies popular with soldiers in the First World War, there is no surviving evidence of the life of Rafael Kirchner save his few seminal drawings depicting a domestic and public order of Government by Women.

It is thought the drawings were used as illustrations in an obscure book, entitled L’homme Chien (Man Dog), by Pierre Dumarchey. In this idyllic gynarchic universe, the Rule of Women holds absolute sway, while their males are the subjects of submission, compliance and physical chastisement.

The Worship of Laura

2011-09-08T20:53:00.004+01:00

Courtesy of wthte

If film noir is the genre of obsession, then the 1944 silky smooth classic murder mystery, Laura, is perhaps its finest expression. Directed by Otto Preminger, this exquisite Twentieth-Century Fox production is elegantly stylish, with an intelligent and unpredictable plot that is saturated with suspense, along with lush Oscar-winning black and white cinematography and a haunting David Raskin musical score.

It is a powerfully intense study of psychological, kinky obsession in which a strangely fascinating Female insinuates herself into a circle of influential, but decadent and morally-corrupt, upper-class male friends. Laura Hunt (played by the ravishing actress Gene Tierney) is a beautiful, independent, single, executive living and working in New York. By dint of determination, charm and hard work, she has succeeded in the advertising business. She can afford a luxurious apartment, a maid, a car and a country retreat.

Laura has a sensual, captivating quality that appeals to everyone she meets. But as this film reveals, male attraction soon turns to adoration and adoration to obsession, and before her wedding to a handsome playboy, she is found murdered on her apartment floor. Enter stage left, the fumbling Lt. Mark McPherson, the detective assigned to the case, who discovers that all is not what it seems.

As he learns more and more about the infamous Laura, he finds himself becoming increasingly infatuated, while desperately battling to find the elusive culprit of the crime. He becomes wholly enthralled to the striking portrait of the late lamented Laura hanging on her apartment fireplace wall. We see Mark becoming more and more despondent about the murder victim until the film's most famous scene shows him falling apart in worship of her portrait. It has been observed many times that since portraits survive those they depict, they are a form of immortality; therefore they can defeat death.

The film’s notoriously labyrinthine plot takes a dramatic turn when, halfway through, Laura shows up alive one night at her front door and continues to cast her spell on all around her. Unlike most examples of film noir, Laura has a happy ending, yet remains to this day a quintessential, enduring and fabulously beautiful film classic.

Captivating Muse

2011-09-05T21:34:00.003+01:00

This beautiful illustration of Female Worship is one of an amazing series contained in the book, Tales of Hoffman, which was first published by Henry Piazza in Paris in 1932, and in the same year in English by George Harrap in London. It is by an Italian designer and futurist artist-painter, Mario Lamboccetta, who gained some notoriety as an illustrator of cabaret magazines in Paris during the Roaring Twenties.

The Prussian-born French composer of The Tales of Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach, did not live to see his glorious final masterpiece performed, dying four months before its premiere in 1880. It is not known which scene from the opera Lamboccetta’s illustration portrays, but i like to think it refers to Hoffmann’s encounter in Act 2 with the temptress, Giulietta, in Venice. The poet cannot resist her beguiling charms and, at her request, gives her the gift of his reflection, only to be abandoned by the courtesan and left trapped by his infatuation.

From the same Act, here are Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca performing in rehearsal the famous aria Barcarolle (Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour).

Kneeling Before The Queen

2011-09-03T01:44:00.005+01:00

This painting, Poliphilus Kneeling before Queen Eleuterylida, c.1643 - 44, is the work of Eustache Le Sueur, a co- founder of the French Academy of Painting.

The picture’s subject matter was inspired by one of the most famous examples of European early printing, Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream, an elaborate allegory written in the mid-15th century by Francesco Colonna, who is thought to have been a monk.

First printed in Venice, in 1499, in an elegant page layout with refined woodcut illustrations in an Early Renaissance style, the romance describes a journey undertaken by Poliphilus through a dreamlike landscape in his quest for his spiritual love, Polia.

On his journey, Poliphilus encounters five nymphs who bring him to be presented to Queen Eleuterylida. Le Sueur’s painting portrays Poliphilus rendering homage on his knees to the Queen, who is seated on her magnificent high throne. The Ladies of her court are ranged on both sides. The perfect social order and everyone in their proper place.

At the end of Poliphilus’ mysterious adventure, he is finally reconciled with Polia by the Fountain of Venus.

Of Fetish Black & White

2011-09-01T07:17:00.006+01:00

Antonio Biella is a contemporary Italian artist who from an early age showed a keen talent for drawing. Trained as a cartoonist, he developed a successful career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books.

In 1997, on discovering the fetish magazine, Secret, he began to explore fetish aesthetics. To date, he has produced three portfolios of fetish images which have been published in a number of fetish magazines.

Drawing here on some examples of Female Domination illustrations from his artwork, Biella’s pictorial language reveals a distinctive black and white imagery in the Art Nouveau style. His stylish drawings evoke a sense of reflectiveness, and even fragility, beneath the surface play.

You can find out more about the artist at his web site fetishion.it

Enchanting Submission

2011-08-28T21:01:00.008+01:00

This charming Giclee Print, A Woman Seated on the Grass (c. 1695), is by the French seventeenth century court illustrator, Nicolas Bonnart.

While the cupid figure is doing its best to create a romantic atmosphere between the two principals, the kneeling Cavalier is not sufficiently distracted as to forget his submissive etiquette before the Lady who affects a suitably disinterested demeanour and air.

The Amazon

2011-08-26T22:44:00.010+01:00

The works of Franz von Stuck (1863 - 1928), the German Symbolist and Art Nouveau artist, were characterised by his wonderfully intense interpretation of strong mythological and literary subjects. His painting style was notable for its large dominant forms, often featuring sensual Female nudes, and reflecting his interest in and talent for sculpture.

Immensely influential and highly regarded in his day, von Stuck’s art is powerfully infused with a heady fin-de-siècle mix of decadence, sin, eroticism, and existential conflict. One dramatic example of his work is his 1905 painting, Wounded Amazon. In Greek mythology, the Amazons were either an ancient legendary nation of Female warriors or a contemporary land of Women at the outer edges of the world.

Here, on the battle field an Amazonian warrior has been wounded in the breast when fighting the centaurs - mythological creatures who are half-man, half-horse. Despite her wound, the Amazon, wearing only a pair of red sandals and what look like leather leg coverings, holds aloft her large red circular shield in a gesture of defiance and triumph. She is the embodiment of Female power in the face of great adversity.

i dedicate this posting of the courageous Lady Warrior to any Mistress or Dominatrix who may be presently feeling imposed upon by life's trials and tribulations.

Song of the Sirens

2011-08-23T03:07:00.005+01:00

In Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, the Greek hero Odysseus (Ulysses by his Roman name) is warned by the Goddess Circe that in order to travel the long journey home to Ithaca following the fall of Troy, he will have to pass by the Mediterranean island of the sirens. Ulysses, knowing of the sirens' musical power to entrance and ensnare passing sailors, commands all his men to plug their ears with wax so as not to be carried away by the sirens’ beautiful song.

He himself, secretly desiring to hear their melodic sound while keeping the ship on course, tells his companions to tie him to the mast and not to release him no matter what his order to them.

“You must bind me with tight-chafing ropes

So I cannot move a muscle, bound to the spot,

Erect at the mast block, lashed by ropes to the mast.

And if I plead, commanding you to set me free,

Then lash me faster, rope on pressing rope.”

The Odyssey, Book XII.

The Pre-Raphaelite artist, John William Waterhouse used this myth to create an inspirational and compelling composition, entitled Ulysses and the Sirens (1891). When the ship approaches the sirens' island, their sweet song floats across the water. Appearing as birds, the sirens flock around the ship; the men gazing up at them in awe. Ulysses himself, arms and legs tense, leans towards the mythical creatures with curious longing.

The song of the sirens seduces Ulysses, promising him knowledge and power if he but follows the sound. Ulysses is overtaken by the mesmerising sight and song, and struggles desperately, begging his men to release him except his ropes keep him in place and the entire crew sails safely away and out of the sirens' captive range.

This red Attic vase from the British Museum (ca. 480 - 470 BC) is thought to have inspired Waterhouse's dramatic painting. The theme of the Song of the Sirens was to prove a recurring source of inspiration and interpretation in later art, film and music.

"Call of the Siren" from the album Ocean: Songs for the Night Sea Journey by Jennifer Cutting.

Vocals by Polly Bolton. Images from the motion picture, Ithaca. Courtesy of FabularFilms.

The Sandys Sneer

2011-08-19T17:27:00.016+01:00

Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (1829 - 1904), better known as Frederick Sandys, was an English painter and illustrator of the Victorian era whose art style was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite school, although he was not a member.

His work was characterised by the technical excellence of his draughtsmanship and a penchant for Femmes Fatales who seduced, entrapped and destroyed men, such as Helen of Troy, Morgan Le Fay, Medea and many others, Often the Women in his pictures were depicted bearing the famous "Sandys' Sneer".

His most vivid and dramatic work was Proud Maisie (1868), a crayon drawing of his common law wife, Mary Emma Jones, and inspired by Walter Scott’s poem of the same name. A successful image of a wilful Dominatrix and Femme Fatale, Sandys was to replicate it at least thirteen times in various media.

The English poet, playwright and noted masochist Algernon Charles Swinbourne wrote of the subject of the drawing: “A woman of rich, ripe, angry beauty, she draws one warm long lock of curling hair through her full and moulded lips, biting it with bared bright teeth, which add something of a tiger's charm to the sleepy and crouching passion of her fair face”.

The composition of Proud Maisie was anticipated by Sandys in Love's Shadow, a painting of 1867 in which a haughty and ice-cold temptress is seen in much the same expressive pose of sexual desire, but this time biting a nosegay rather than her hair – a Victorian Woman with attitude.

Another striking illustration of the “Sandys Sneer” was his sullen, flame-haired Helen of Troy, 1867.

While enjoying a reputation as an illustrator of books and magazines, Sandys never became a popular painter. The dominant influence upon his art was the lofty conceptions of tragic power as exercised by beautiful and self-assured Women.

Prima Dominatrix

2011-08-17T07:17:00.004+01:00

The remarkable bronze and ivory portrait bust Lamia (1899) was created by Sir George James Frampton (1860 - 1928), a notable British sculptor and leading member of the New Sculpture movement.

With its melancholic subject matter of the Femme Fatale, so beloved of the late nineteenth century Symbolists, Lamia is a worthy precursor of the Dominatrix archetype that was to become an integral feature in the development of the sadomasochism aesthetic of the twentieth century.

Frampton's bust is composed of polychromatic materials: the skin is made of ivory and the clothing of bronze; while the costume is decorated with opals, symbolic of shifting passions and ill fortune.

The Female figure is not the sorceress of classical tradition, but rather the Lamia of John Keats' narrative poem (1819) - a beautiful serpent-like creature who assumes Female form to win the love of the mortal Lycius.

While first living together in secret, Lycius comes to desire Lamia in marriage and to make their love known to the world. But when her true nature is exposed at their wedding, she vanishes forever and her husband succumbs from grief at his terrible loss,

The Lady Lamia can be viewed for worship at the Royal Academy of the Arts, London.

The Tale of Lamia:

The god Hermes, in amorous pursuit of a nymph, encounters Lamia. She has the form of a serpent, but the mouth and voice of a Woman. Lamia promises to restore to him the nymph, whom she has made invisible, if he will in turn restore her to her former human shape. Hermes promises, the nymph appears, and Lamia, after violent convulsions, sheds her skin and a beautiful Woman is revealed.

She travels to Corinth where she meets and seduces Lycius, the young philosopher of whom she had dreamed and whom she had loved. Living together secretly, Lycius soon expresses his desire to marry Lamia. Distressed by this idea, Lamia pleads with him to change his mind, but eventually submits to his wishes.

Lycius arranges a wedding feast to which he invites all his friends. Lamia invites no-one, but, without giving any reasons, begs him not to invite the philosopher Apollonius, his former tutor. Lycius leaves to deliver the invitations and Lamia magically transforms the palace into an elaborate arbour set with a lavish feast.

The guests arrive, marvelling at the house they had never noticed before, and Apollonius comes uninvited to the feast. Able to distinguish illusion from reality, Apollonius sees through Lamia's disguise; he fixes his gaze upon the bride and Lycius feels her terror. He denounces Apollonius who replies that he will not see him made a serpent's prey. As he repeats the word "serpent" and her true nature is disclosed, Lamia vanishes with an awful scream. Lycius, unable to accept the loss of his fantasy, dies in a frenzy of grief.

Vintage Illustrations 3

2011-08-14T07:58:00.002+01:00

Another instalment in the Sunday morning series of vintage and vintage-themed illustrations for your pleasure; this time on the theme of "The Kneeling Supplicant".

The Condemned

2011-08-11T22:41:00.011+01:00

In this haunting painting, the predicament of the naked, kneeling and bound male figure cast in neo-classical relief is brought into sharp focus by the contrast of white skin against the darkest of backgrounds. Entitled Il Condanatto (The Condemned), the work is by a contemporary mainstream Italian artist, Daniela Astone.

While it does not have a specific FemDom reference, nonetheless, the symbolism of submissiveness is striking and compelling. It is a wonderfully evocative picture that grips the viewer in a prevailing sense of fatalism, foreboding and finality.

slave domnei

2011-08-09T22:04:00.013+01:00

This evening my Mistress Eva Luna made the following announcement: “slave's name has officially been changed to ‘slave domnei’ by deed poll. A ceremony to mark the renaming is in order and shall be arranged in the near future”.

This joyous development arose from a recent discussion between U/us on the parallels between the modern Female Dominant - male submissive relationship and the cultural movement of chivalry that flourished across Europe between the 10th and 12th centuries in which a class of male warriors gave public expression to their need for submission by venerating and deferring to Women and worshipping Female values as an ethical code of conduct for their lives.

The term 'domnei' is an Old Provencal word meaning the attitude of chivalrous devotion of a knight to his noble Lady who has selected him because of his pleasing personal qualities. [Origin of DOMNEI. OProv, fr. domna lady; also, alteration of the Latin 'domina' meaning 'lady', 'mistress'.]

Thank You for this treasured gift, Divine Mistress.

For a fascinating insight into the ancient culture of chivalry from a D/s perspective, i invite you to read this posting from the blog of the artist, philosopher and poet, Blanche Black.

Clear and Clean Line

2011-08-07T09:45:00.004+01:00

Hata Deli was a (possibly German) BDSM artist of F/M and M/F drawings who was active in the 1920s and 30s.

Little is known about the artist’s life. His drawings, notable for their clear and clean line, are in the art nouveau style, reminiscent for me of the artist Aubrey Beardsley.

With their obvious focus on the dominant Female top in comparison to the rather anodyne male bottom, Hata Deli's F/M artworks are cherished among fans of FemDom / malesub art.

Rendering

2011-08-04T18:48:00.009+01:00

Xrenderer is one of the increasingly popular FemDom artists to be found on the web today.

His unique 3D rendering style in computer generated images of the Mistress-slave dynamic is of the very highest quality. His images, a few of which are presented here, are full of subtle touches, displaying wonderful texture and interesting use of light.

i particularly like the first of his images entitled Dance For Me, Slave! (Please enlarge for a full appreciation.)

The artist seems to have taken a deliberate decision to be elusive and appears not to promote his work through a dedicated website, or through the usual media outlets.

In order, the titles of the four images featured are: Dance For Me, Slave!, Exchange, Scarecrowe and Humbled-Servant.

Queen of Lola-Land

2011-08-01T01:32:00.015+01:00

Eliza Rosanna Gilbert (1818-1861), better known by the stage name Lola Montez, was an infamous dancer and actress born in Sligo, Ireland, who led a remarkable and, in many respects, incredible life. A renowned beauty, she was an audacious, self-made Woman possessed of a quick mind, a fiery temper and a relentless ambition for self-promotion.

.
Lola Montez (1847), painted by Joseph Karl Stieler for
King Ludwig I of Bavaria and his Schonheitengalerie (Gallery of Beauties) in Munich

Having been ordered by her mother at 19 to marry an aged judge, she eloped instead with an army officer whom she married in 1837. However, the life of a dutiful wife in Victorian Ireland, and later India, suited her not one whit, so she left her marriage and set off for Spain to study Flamenco dancing. There she picked up Spanish, and reinvented herself as "Lola Montez", the daughter of a matador. She correctly intuited that exotic dancing was her ticket to fame and freedom, and she took her act all over Europe, picking up numerous lovers, causing outrage to upstanding moral people, and generally cutting a swath through proper society along the way.

Lola pictured with the whip she reportedly carried on her person,

as a perfect accessory to her temper. A Cupid figure bears a crown for her.

Lola had affairs with Franz Liszt, Alexandre Dumas, and many other rich and powerful men, but her most scandalous liaison was with the King of Bavaria, King Ludwig I. The ageing King had fallen in love with her, buying her a large house and settling an annuity on her. Lola exerted great political influence for a time; ministries rose and fell at her bidding and she won support from radical university students when she sought to introduce liberal reforms.

In 1847, Ludwig created her Countess Marie von Landsfeld, but the Bavarian aristocracy and middle class refused to acknowledge her. Following an outbreak of street riots against her influence, Ludwig was presented with proof of Lola’s background and infidelities. The King gave way but also insisted on abdicating the throne. Lola fled to Switzerland when her Bavarian rights were annulled.

Lola found her greatest career success in her mid-30s when she left the shores of Europe for America. The West was wild with gold fever and she opened a successful saloon in a little booming town there called Grass Valley where she gave the first performances of her highly sensual 'Spider Dance'. Offstage she dressed in the Byronic mode (while claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron), wearing black jackets and wide rolling collars. Described in a local newspaper as “a tigress – the very comet of her sex”, she made a striking appearance strolling along the San Francisco streets, with two greyhounds on a leash and an enormous parrot upon her shoulder. She constantly smoked small cigars, forced her way into gambling joints forbidden to Women, and played tenpins with any male daring enough to take her on.

Letters discovered after Lola's death hint that this saloon with its notorious and powerful guests was all part of a bizarre grand plan to gain influence and assistance in order to "capture" California from the rest of the USA, cause it to declare independence, and then be rechristened "Lola-land," with herself as Queen.

Lola Montez by John Millar Watt, 1961

After another failed marriage, Lola travelled in 1855 to Australia where she resumed her career by entertaining miners during the gold-rush, perfoming to packed houses in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. When the Ballarat Times attacked her notoriety, Lola retaliated by publicly horsewhipping the editor, Henry Seekamp. The "Lola Montes Polka" composed by Albert Denning was later rumoured to have been inspired by this event.

Returning to America, she seems to have become repentant of her salacious reputation and began delivering a series of moral lectures there and in Britain. But by then, Lola was showing the tertiary effects of syphilis and her body began to waste away. She spent her last days in rescue work among Women. Aged 42, she died on 17 January 1861 following a bout of pneumonia and was buried in Greenwood cemetery, Brooklyn, as Mrs Eliza Gilbert. In Nevada County, California, she had a lake and a mountain named after her (although not a state, alas).

The dramatic life of this fascinating passionata has been an inspiration to many a modern burlesque dancer and showgirl. Lola Montez is one of those iconic tigress Women whose name and look has survived for generations.

Curtesy of Musicintheglen

Come To The Well

2011-07-28T05:09:00.002+01:00

Jacek Malczewski (1854 - 1929) was one of the most famous, creative and intriguing painters of Polish Symbolism.

During 1905-1906, he painted a seemingly innocent series of bucolic Polish peasant scenes depicting rosy Women at a well. Known as The Poisoned Well (Zatruta Studnia) series, the five painting belie a much more sinister meaning; for they each portray smiling Women playing sentinel at a well where manacled men are enticed to drink to their death.

Reflecting the artist's somewhat menacing view of the Female anima, the Women are like harpies sitting, waiting and laughing as the thirsty males are lured to their fateful encounter with destiny.

Comic Erotica

2011-07-24T08:39:00.008+01:00

With his technical mastery of etching, the Liege-born artist Luc (Lucien) Lafnet (1899 - 1939) was the heir of the great Belgian etchers of the previous generation, including Félicien Rops, Henri Thomas and Fernand Khnopff, and like them he was naturally drawn to a Symbolist aesthetic.

A prize-winning graphic artist in his early career, he married and moved to Paris in 1923, where he was drawn to forbidden erotic subject matter. As a consequence, much of his erotic and comic art was published in a clandestine or semi-clandestine manner, often under pseudonyms such as Viset, Lucas O., Grim, and Jim Black. He illustrated erotic literature and BDSM stories including F/f, F/M and M/F spanking stories, as well as some enema art.

While probably his best known black and white FemDom illustrations were those for Dresseuses d'Hommes written by Florence Fulbert (1931), his coloured drawings for a publication of Rétif de la Bretonne's La Pied de Fanchette (1769) had a distinctly Art Deco appeal. In the book's story, the protagonist is a Woman who uses the charm of her feet to advance herself socially. i particularly like these images because of the obvious shoe/foot fetish of de la Bretonne, after whom the term retifism was named.

In contrast to his erotic work, Luc Lafnet devoted a considerable amount of his energies between 1935 and 1936 in creating Stations of the Cross for various churches. He also did artwork for mainstream comics such as the popular Belgian magazine Le Journal de Spirou. In 1939, the artist was enlisted in the Second World War and died in uniform in the same year, aged 40.

Straw Man

2011-07-22T00:24:00.001+01:00

The Straw Manikin (El Pelele) painted by the Spanish Romanticism master Francisco de Goya (1746 - 1828) belongs to his last suite of tapestry cartoons, a series made for King Charles IV after Goya's appointment as Court Painter.

Based on a light-hearted carnival scene with a long iconographic tradition in Spanish art, the sketch features four young Women wearing the traditional maja headdress and laughing-face masks, as they gaily play at throwing a life-size mannequin in the air. The latter's movement is the result of their caprice. With its head sagging, the mannequin is portrayed as a helpless victim in a symbolically cruel game.

Here man is treated as the mere plaything of Feminine wiles. The comical blanket-tossing is used by Goya as a clear allegory of Women's domination of men (although it has also been interpreted as an allusion to political life of the time, characterized by sudden appointments and dismissals) – a theme that was frequent in the artist's work, such as in his engravings from the Los Caprichos and Los Disparates series.

Ultimately, Goya’s original sketches came to be appreciated as works of art in their own right. While the cartoons were deposited in storage and effectively relegated to oblivion after the weavers had made their copies, Goya sold his exquisite sketches as “cabinet paintings”.

i love the artist’s depiction of a humiliated inverted body painted with pathos and tragedy.

The Be-Littlement

2011-07-19T07:23:00.015+01:00

The Woman and the Puppet (1927) by the Belgian painter Jean Leon Henri Gouweloos (1865 - 1943).

For his audacity in espying the awesome beauty of the reclining nude Female, the fate to befall this inquisitive dapper male was that of objectification and be-littlement.

That's one interpretation of this charming painting that personally appeals anyway.

Her Holiness

2011-07-15T04:24:00.008+01:00

This painting, entitled Lucretia Borgia Reigns in the Vatican in the Absence of Pope Alexander VI, is by the British artist Frank Cadogan Cowper (1877 - 1958), who was known as "The last of the Pre-Raphaelites".

The work is a recreation of an obscure and scandalous incident from the history of the Popes. In 1501, Lucrezia Borgia, the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), had taken his place at a high profile meeting in the Vatican court. Cowper has imagined this suggestive moment in which a cardinal and a nobleman part Lucrezia’s dress so that a Francisan friar can kiss her shoe. The room in the Vatican in which Lucrezia Borgia appeared still exists.

Embarking on a foreign adventure to raise funds for one of Lucrezia's three marriages, Alexander had left the administration of the Vatican and the Church in her hands. A beautiful woman of twenty-one, acting as the head of Christendom, did not shock the cardinals of the Curia, accustomed as they were to the excesses of the corrupt Borgia papacy.

Described in her day as a “pearl among women”, Lucrezia has been cast in the role of history’s most notorious Femme Fatale as portrayed in numerous artworks, novels, films and in opera. How she became so infamous is something of a mystery since, in actuality, little is known about her as a person or her involvement in the ruthless affairs of state conducted by her nepotistic father Rodrigo and brother Cesare.

Probably more of a pawn than a lead actor in their political machinations, Lucrezia Borgia was not just the physical beauty she was reported to be at the time. She was intelligent with a taste for the emerging art and literature of the Renaissance, while in her later life as Duchess of Ferrara, she proved herself to be a highly competent administrator. Ending her days in pious and respectable living, Lucrezia's reputation as an infamous Femme Fatale, in truth, became her more in death than in life.

Ode To Mistress Eva

2011-07-13T07:35:00.019+01:00

ODE TO MISTRESS EVA LUNA

Gazing up at Her he dares to wonder

Where does this utter joy come from

That burns brightly within his heart

And why it is these jumping flames

Of the purest ecstasy torch his soul

Now Your punishing arm rises high

Whipping of fiery life upon his skin

Drawing him closer still to the edge

Enticing his ever deeper submission

You raiding the recesses of his mind

Your guiding hands strumming him

Teaching him Your secret mysteries

Spoken promise of Your plan for him

To be looked after, loved and owned

By She alone who holds fast his soul

Breathing Your warm life through it

For he now seeing the essence of it all

Surrenders unconditionally to Her will

his two palms opened wide before Her

Resigned to where Her path shall lead

So he possesses many ways to tell Her

Yours is the healing breath of his body

The blood that flows through his veins

Your sweet lingering kiss branding him

While softly caressing his lonely heart

Enwrapping him in blessed Supremacy

As T/their shadows gaily lick the walls

his silent tears are each a-shimmering

Finding release from their rising swell

Only then his heart and mind awaken

To Her vision of newer days to be that

Better person to himself and for others

~ slave c ~

Vintage Illustrations 2

2011-07-10T06:41:00.003+01:00

Another Sunday morning selection of vintage and vintage-themed illustrations for your pleasure; this time featuring the traditional birch-rod.

Beauty: Thy Deadly Sting

2011-07-08T01:11:00.006+01:00

[For a full appreciation, click on the image to enlarge]

British-born Ray Caesar is one of the most celebrated digital artists of the Pop Surrealism Movement.

Here in his extraordinarily captivating painting, Descent, the viewer is beckoned to gaze upwards at a fantastical doll-like Female figure. The allure of Her porcelain-skinned beauty is in striking contrast to the deadly mile-long tentacles that bloom from under her delicate petticoats. She is. surely, the ideal surreal representation of the archetype Femme Fatale.

Caesar’s enigmatic art inspires an urgent sense of yearning within the viewer, lulled and drawn into the artist's mysterious picture worlds, to explore the simultaneously beautiful and grotesque of his wonderful supernatural creations. His haunting Female portrayals are reminiscent of the Victorian age, which the artist regards as "his time".

“As an artist, the feminine is a more accurate picture of the nature of the soul… of my soul…that which gives birth to creation." ~ Ray Caesar.

Visit the website of Ray Caesar

Treating The Fetish

2011-07-05T04:08:00.001+01:00

Richard Hegemann was a German fetish artist who created a relatively small, but impressive, body of BDSM-themed artwork in the 1920s.

Using pseudonyms such as A. Hegener and P. Rollman, or signing works with just the initial R.H., it is probable that Hegemann was in fact a Female artist from Berlin who created drawings for her own pleasure and as gifts or commissions for like-minded friends. In the early 1930s, a number of her fetish and spanking illustrations were published in reputable German publications of Sexual Research Institutes.

In many European countries, including Germany, in the 1920s and 30s, spanking fetishism was considered to be a serious sexuality disorder that required therapy to be properly treated. Unsurprisingly, the artist eventually ended up in psychotherapy. There, her psychologist persuaded her to entrust him with her surviving drawings, as well as getting her to convince some of her fetish artist friends to do the same, thus amassing a large private collection for himself.

Hegemann's spanking, enema and male cross-dressing themed art primarily features scenes of Dominant Women controlling and punishing hapless males. In addition to (mostly pencil) drawings, she also did some coloured works in watercolour.

Simple Lines

2011-07-01T06:47:00.003+01:00

Very little is known about the FemDom artist who goes by the name of Ugari. He appears to have produced a single series of illustrations before disappearing from the scene without trace.

His wonderful drawings feature a strong and beautiful Woman in situations of total control and domination over vulnerable and helpless males.

His work is characterised by a charm and elegance that is distinctive for its clean line and simple style.

Any additional information on this intriguing artist would be gratefully received.

The Whipping Queen

2011-06-25T15:35:00.002+01:00

Intended as his great masterpiece, Erich von Stroheim’s last silent film, Queen Kelly (1929), is perhaps the most famous example of an unfinished work in cinematic history. The great director enjoyed mocking the opulent and decadent lifestyles of the aristocracy.

The film is set in the fictional European city of Kronberg and it tells the story of the Prince Regent, Wolfram (played by Walter Byron), who is engaged to be married to Queen Regina V (played in a mesmerizing performance by Seena Owen). Supreme ruler, Regina’s word is law and he is a mere plaything for her pleasure. The wild, but wimpish, Wolfram strikes up a flirtation with the saucy, tempestuous convent-girl Patricia Kelly, played by the legendary actress, Gloria Swanson. Enthralled by her beauty, the prince kidnaps Kelly from the convent, takes her to his room and professes his love for her.

Von Stroheim stages the primal conflict between the two Women in such a lavish operatic style that it's almost impossible not to get caught up in the underlying emotions. The possessive Queen is determined to have the prince all to herself, whether or not he loves her. In a breathtaking sequence, when the Queen has caught Kelly and her betrothed in bed together, she banishes her rival from the palace, whipping her unmercifully, as the Queen’s amused male courtiers laugh at the spectacle. Regina then puts Wolfram into prison for not wanting to marry her.

The film fell afoul of budget issues due to Production Code censorship, an unhappy Swanson and, most damagingly, the advent of motion picture sound.

Beauty In Image-Making

2011-06-22T22:36:00.004+01:00

The renowned American photographer, Craig Morey, has been shooting photography professionally for over 30 years. Beginning in 1988, while working on assignment for Penthouse, he began creating a series of black and white images of the nude which subsequently appeared in numerous publications in the United States, Canada and Europe, and which today adorn hundreds of web sites. Morey also began to find beauty in fetish or bondage imagery, with his use of ropes and bodies in his work.

While Morey is best known for his erotic black and white photography of fine art Female nudes in the “classic” style, he has also embraced digital colour photography in recent years. A fine example of this development is a set of beautiful photographs he shot in his German Fashion Shoot 2004, some images from which are shown here by kind permission of the artist.

“For me, image-making is driven by passion. And I believe the strongest passion we have as humans is the passion for contact with the Other. The sight of a human face or body is confirmation of the mysterious miracle of our own existence. We are hard-wired to respond to such images. All I'm trying to do is capture some of that mystery.” ~ Craig Morey.

Artist’s website: moreystudio.com

Erotic Ex-Libris

2011-06-21T03:46:00.002+01:00

An ex-libris [Latin for "from the books of..."], or a bookplate, is a small graphic label or print which is pasted to a book, often on the inside front cover, with the purpose of identifying its owner. In general, ex-libris are commissioned from artists by persons wishing to mark the ownership of the volumes of their library in a more decorative and elegant way than by just writing their name inside.

The earliest known examples of printed bookplates are German, and date from the 15th century. It is estimated that over a million ex-libris have been produced between 1470 and today. Basically a European custom, it has spread widely to Asia (Japan, China, in particular) and somewhat to Latin America. Eastern Europe has an especially rich tradition in graphic arts, and some of the best ex-libris produced in modern times are by Russian, Czech, Slovak and Southeast European artists.

Today, contemporary ex-libris are often made by artists more for exchange between collectors than for marking the ownership of books. They tend to be closer to limited editions of free graphics than to bookplates. But real ex-libris for use in books are also commissioned, collected and studied widely.

An erotic bookplate is essentially a private object, which a person pastes into her/his books, or which can be exchanged with fellow collectors of erotic literature. The subject of an erotic bookplate is usually decided by the artist and the owner together.

This selection of erotic ex libris images have been chosen for the stylish appeal of their D & s undertones. For such typically miniature works of art, the level of intricacy is both surprising and delightful.

Of FemDom Elegance

2011-06-17T07:17:00.000+01:00

A favourite artist of my Mistress Eva Luna, Bernard Montorgueil was the pseudonym of a French BDSM and spanking illustrator and author of short stories, whose works were originally written and published in the 1920s and 1930s.

His artwork, which was mostly based on fantastic Female domination themes, was commissioned by a private client after the Second World War and was first circulated underground in the 1950s as four series of drawings together with four texts ("Madame de Varennes","Le Quatre Jeudis”, “Dressage” and “Barbara”). It was only after his death in 1977 that they were republished in limited editions in France, Germany and The Netherlands. His original illustrations were in black and white, and were later colourised probably by an artist employed by one of the republishers.

Bernard Montorgueil's artwork is a splendid and refined expression of male masochism. While today his work is widely available on the internet, his depictions of Feminine and beautful Ladies in complete control of male slaves must have been somewhat of a novelty at the time.

Elegant and opulently dressed Women rule absolutely here. The captive males are kept as their instruments of personal service within the household setting - mere toys for the amusement of their Mistresses, who use the exposed and vulnerable bodies of the slaves for their own pleasures and at their own whims.

For this inspired artist, virility succumbs to a sublime Feminine Dominance that is graceful, humiliating and sensual.

Lady On Red

2011-06-14T19:16:00.008+01:00

This evocative painting (1898) of a major English mythological tale is one which constantly beckons for the sheer beauty of The Lady portrayed. {Enlarge the image for a better appreciation}

Painted by the British Pre-Raphaelite artist, John Collier (1850 - 1934), the fabled Lady Godiva is an absolute Goddess here - lithe and humble in her nakedness, yet letting the red dressings of her beautiful horse embody her class, honour and courage. While she appears to be hanging her head in shame, she is in fact a Woman of singular will and determination who is testimony to the power of self-sacrifice in achieving a great public good.

The Story: According to the popular thirteenth century legend, The Lady Godiva, an eleventh century Anglo-Saxon noblewoman and landowner, took pity on the people of Coventry, who were suffering grievously under the oppressive taxation of her husband, Leofric, the Earl of Mercia and Lord of Coventry. Lady Godiva appealed again and again to her husband, who obstinately refused to remit the tolls. At last, weary of her entreaties, he said he would grant her request if she would strip naked and ride through the streets of the town.

Lady Godiva took him at his word and, after issuing a proclamation that all persons should keep within doors and shut their windows, she rode through the town, clothed only in her long hair. Only one person in the town, a tailor ever afterwards known as Peeping Tom, disobeyed her proclamation in one of the most famous instances of voyeurism. In this later story, Tom bores a hole in his shutters so that he might see Godiva pass, and is struck blind. In the end, Godiva's husband keeps his word and abolishes the onerous taxes.

The Spider's Web

2011-06-11T09:02:00.007+01:00

One of my favourite paintings is Along Came A Spider (2008) by Scotland’s most successful contemporary artist, Jack Vettriano. The nostalgic aura of this delectable figurative oil painting is reminiscent of the film noire genre and typical of the artist’s distinctive style of romantic realism.

An elegant and seductive Woman languidly relaxes on a couch with a man in the background. Wearing a black cocktail dress and long black gloves, she is supremely confident of her power over the silhouetted male figure in attendance, who is a study in stoic isolation. Clearly, she is no damsel in distress but rather a very strong Woman in serious and contemplative repose, prepared to wield her power unflinchingly.

The painting uses Vettriano’s practised still-life technique of freezing a moment in time between characters whose relationship we can only guess at. It is a moment of high expectation and intense excitement where movement and confrontation is about to happen. Vettriano’s wonderful painting hints at an unfolding encounter between the coupling that is clandestine, forbidden and sensual.

You can view more of the artist’s work at his website here

Lady Flo Triumphant

2011-06-08T20:41:00.004+01:00

The colossal work of marble, Florence Triumphant Over Pisa (c. 1575), is to be found in the Bargello Museum, Florence. It was created by the Flemish-born artist, Giambologna (1529 - 1608), a court sculptor to three successive Medici Grand Dukes and an artist whose influence, as an heir to the great Renaissance tradition, on European sculpture was second only to Michelangelo. In fact, the piece was originally conceived as a pendant to Michelangelo’s Genius of Victory, but dreading comparison to the legendary artist, Giambologna deliberately slowed down the completion and exhibition of his work.

Commissioned by Duke Cosimo 1, Francesca de Medici, the marble statue with its refined sense of action is a typical allegory of Medician political propaganda of the time. The city of Florence is personified as a powerful but elegant Female, triumphing over the crushed male figure of Pisa, the nearby rival city then under Florentine rule.

There is a sense of graceful and seductive permanency about this magnificent D/s-themed marble sculpture.