It’s normally the eyes of a painting that follow you around the room, but in the work of eighteenth century Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, it’s the hair. And sometimes the arse.
Fuseli is most well-known for ‘The Nightmare’, a terrifying painting of a lil demon sitting on a sleeping woman’s chest. Disturbing, fantastical, horrifying. There’s not so much macabre horror in this show of intimate, erotic, far out drawings, but the works would have been just as shocking to the audience of the time.
The opening room is filled with portraits of his wife Sophia. She reads with her hair locked in a million tight little curls, stares out at you in a pierced pearloid beaded headdress. She teases her hair into huge, angular geometric shapes, smooth lines and jagged angles. To modern eyes, the hairdos look futuristic and robotic, back then they must have been totally surreal. There are visible nipples and pubes, Fuseli toys with dangerous moral iconography - these are intentionally private, intimate works. They’re a visual diary of a close kinship, of a creative wife performing for her creative husband, and them making strange, personal love letters to one another in the process.
They’re arse-tastic, horny, elaborate explorations of the male gaze
But it all takes a turn for the erotic in the next room, which is filled with drawings of high class courtesans up to no good, and a whole bunch women seen from behind. They stand against mantelpieces or walk out of doors, their huge modern dresses creating swooping arcs, their hair like geometric decorations on top of fluid shapes. They’re arse-tastic, horny, elaborate explorations of the male gaze.
And it gets hornier. The courtesans wear masks and twisting headdresses, they engage in unseen acts with hidden men, they sharpen knives and fix their makeup. One drawing show a woman dangling her long plait to the outreached hand of someone stuck in a well, another finds a prostitute walking a man on a leesh, then there are three naked women smothering a faceless naked man. And all with those sharp, angled hairdos.
The copious wall texts are keen to hammer home that he was such a brilliant draughtsman, but a lot of this is rough and rushed, and really not that brilliant. But there is a fascinating, surreal, weird allure to a lot of his drawings.
Fuseli’s erotic works aren’t just simple pornography. They’re anxious things, depictions of dominant women who ignore and control men, awkward drawings of love and desire. They’re visions of an eighteenth century sexuality that wouldn’t be out of place on a twenty-first century dating app. Henry Fuseli would have loved Feeld.