This art doesn't redeem the Victorians, exactly, but we can see proof that they were at least as sexually knowing as the average modern subscribers to HBO. Rather a viewer wanders among more than a hundred paintings and sculptures and photographs of naked women, men and children. "Exposed: The Victorian Nude" is not an exhibit of a few daguerreotypes of naked piano legs. Gay's revisionist vision of the Victorians is confirmed by an art show that originated at the Tate Museum in London, and is currently showing at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Writer Peter Gay discovered a different crop of Victorians, however bourgeois folk who were sexually aware, sexually active, just discreet about it. Thus on his wedding night he went into apoplectic spasms when presented with his naked wife Effie's tuft of pubic hair.ĭuring the mid-20th century, pornography became legal, then respectable, and Victorian Puritans were accused of hypocrisy for hiding the legs of their pianos by day, and engaging in unspeakable perversions behind the locked doors of private clubs by night. Victorians even pulled stockings over the legs of their pianos.įamously, Victorian art critic John Ruskin had been to Venice and Paris but had no idea that women possessed a triangle of fur above their genitals. The hems of Victorian skirts touched the floor because the sight of a woman's limb would be shocking beyond belief. The neo-Puritanical Victorian era lasted as long as the reign of Queen Victoria did, 1837-1901 it was a time when a woman had to wear bathing garments for convention's sake - even in the privacy of her own bath. If you've never read eminent Victorian scholar Peter Gay, you'd assume the Victorians were as repressed about naked bodies as Attorney General Ashcroft.
0 kommentar(er)
