Pornocrates
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"My Pornocratie is complete. This drawing delights me. I would like to show you this beautiful naked girl, clad only in black shoes and gloves in silk, leather and velvet, her hair styled. Wearing a blindfold she walks on a marble stage, guided by a pig with a "golden tail" across a blue sky. Three loves - ancient loves - vanish in tears (...) I did this in four days in a room of blue satin, in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction". --Letter from Rops to Henri Liesse, 1879, published in Etudes sur quelques artistes originaux, Felicien Rops, l'homme et l'artiste (1908) by Camille Lemonnier |
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Pornokrates (1879) is a painting by Belgian artist Félicien Rops depicting a blindfolded, largely nude woman being led by a pig on a leash.
The word pornokrates is made up of porne and -cracy, which refers to an age of pornocracy, namely "rule of harlots".
For some the pig with the golden tail represents the image of luxury and lucre steering the woman, whose only excuse is her blindness; for others, it is the image of man, bestial and stupid, kept in check by the woman. This image of the pig, as well as those of the puppet and the pierrot are shared by many of Rops’s contemporaries.
Pornokrates heralds the advent to the art world of the contemporary woman which Rops glorified. She is characterised by her arrogance, her composure and her ruthlessness.
French original of letter to Liesse
"Ma Pornocratie est faite. Ce dessin me ravit. Je voudrais te faire voir cette belle fille nue, chaussée, gantée et coiffée de noir, soie, peau et velours, et, les yeux bandés, se promenant sur une frise de marbre rose, conduite par un cochon à « queue d’or » à travers un ciel bleu. Trois amours – les amours anciens – disparaissent en pleurant. […] J’ai fait cela en quatre jours dans un salon de satin bleu, dans un appartement surchauffé, plein d’odeurs, où l’oppopanax et le cyclamen me donnaient une petite fièvre salutaire à la production et même à la reproduction.
See also
- Pigs in popular culture
- Pornocracy
- Ponocrates, a character in one of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.
