Le Calvaire (Calvary)

This print represents Rops at the height of his career and notoriety. The context for Le Calvaire and L’Idole was the never completed series Les Sataniques (The Satanic Ones) (1882-84). These works are singled out for their significance in the Oxford Art Online entry on Rops by Edith Hoffmann. It is not difficult to see why. Rops’s technical excellence only serves to highlight the perversity/perversion of what he is depicting: Satan has taken the place of Christ at the Cross. The woman beneath him must die - she is strangled by Satan with her own hair. Rops reverses the more usual role of women luring their (male) victims to a painful death; here she is the victim of Satan and her own lust. The Sotheby’s sale catalogue essay for the original watercolour, noted how ‘there is an element of tongue in cheek… Satan’s testicles sitting atop the woman’s face like a beret… are more comical than frightening’. Although in other prints the devil’s role is ambiguous, here he is the female’s master. Elsewhere Woman is Satan’s accomplice, provoking ‘the most extreme vices and torments in Man, a mere puppet’ (Claudia Royal, ‘Asceticism’s desire: Felicien Rops and the demonised woman’, 1990).

Rops relates intimately to the Decadent literary milieu; Baudelaire was an early admirer; he was followed by Octave Mirbeau, whose literary reputation is almost equally great. Reg Carr in Ancarchism in France; The Case of Octave Mirbeau (1977) claimed that ‘Rops’s portrayal of women as the incarnation of evil tallied too closely with his own experiences for it not to impress him deeply’, and significantly one of Mirbeau’s novels, Le Calvaire, published four years after this prints, shares the same title. Although Rops’s devil has been described as ‘decidedly not Catholic’, it is worth noting how he was admired by literary contemporaries such as Josephin Peladan the ‘occult Catholic’ (whose work he illustrated) and J. K. Huysmans, decadent-turned-Catholic. The major Polish symbolist/ decadent writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski claimed ‘his intaglio prints are a mighty philosophical system’, and linked them with Schopenhauer and Strindberg.

Rops is very much of the late 19th century moment. His main enemy was conservative bourgeois morality; he called the woman descending into Satanism ‘a bourgeoise, the false woman of our era’. Echoing Baudelaire, he wrote: ‘when I say that a painter must be of his time, I believe he must paint the moral sentiment, the passions, and the psychological impressions of the time’. Depicting Satanism broke taboos and conveyed his disgust with mainstream bourgeois values. He did not consider himself a pornographic artist, refusing an offer to illustrate one such book by telling the author ‘If, as you believe, I have ever made some smutty drawings, it is in hatred of the public of which you speak, and in order to lower my buttocks to the level of its face.’

While his literary associations compromised his art in the view of some modernist critics, his legacy was nonetheless considerable. In The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (2008), James Hall links Rops to the early Picasso, in such works as Crucifixion/Embracing Couples, Allegory (1902-3) and the later orgiastic Cruficixion (1930). While a century later, some of the sacred/scatological duality of Andrea Serrano’s Piss Christ is Rops revisited. Rops exerted a still more obvious influence on younger generation artists (much like his absolute contemporary in England, Edward Burne-Jones), including Edvard Munch, Max Klinger, James Ensor and Aubrey Beardsley. Print collectors have always regarded his work highly; while his art historical reputation waned in the first half of the 20th century, it has risen considerably since the 1960s following challenges to the modernist canon and the in many ways irreversible ‘permissiveness’ of that era.

Mark Stocker, 2015