Le Sommeil [The Sleepers], which depicts two women entwined in a post-coital embrace, caused a stir when it was first shown in the 1870s. The police were called in, and the painting was not shown again until the 1980s. But its brief showing had an influence on a number of contemporary artists, and helped challenge the taboos associated with lesbian relationships. For modern audiences it’s a good reminder that people in the 19th century were not ignorant of lesbian relationships, as we tend to believe. And it’s pretty damn sexy, don’t you think?
They called the police on this lesbian painting.
The best part is, the lesbian embrace isn’t even the biggest thing that made the painting so controversial, it was the art style. People in the artistic community at the time were wholly familiar with sapphic relationships being portrayed in art, but were used to these scenes being portrayed in the ‘academic art’ style, which consisted of smooth, simplistic, idealised versions of the nude female form. This often went hand in hand with the depiction of Roman & Greek allegories to illustrate certain ideals (think Cabanel’s Birth of Venus). Courbet’s journey into realism was met by heavy critique from the academic movement, as the women he painted were, well, more realistic. Leaving in details such as the rolls of fat around the ribs acted as a blunt reminder to the audience that these were not euphoric goddesses caressing in ecstasy, but ordinary women having a nap together after making love. Other realist paintings suffered the same controversy, Manet’s Olympia is a perfect example, where the problem was not that the painting depicted a nude woman in an erotic pose, but the fact that she was just an ordinary courtesan, given an identity & portrayed in a place of power & control. Realism humanized the female form in art, & removed it from its previous role as a representation of the ideal.
So what disgusted people about the painting wasn’t so much that Le Sommeil depicted two women, but rather that it depicted two ‘real’ women.
I work at Lowe’s and after my (very long, very hard) shift today I went to buy some rope and my co-worker who is much senior to me asks “how long? Just enough to hang urself?”
today in ‘i wasn’t actually expecting this, but i really should have expected this’: i do a lot of visa application invites for people for work, and the passport first page for just about every country i’ve seen has clear, black text printed on light/white background with maybe some simple pastel-coloured designs. and for the first almost-three-decades of my life, i was happy in the naive belief that all passports around the world were similar; that one day all countries of the world gathered in Geneva or wherever and formed a Passport Design Committee where they all agreed on the general aesthetics for passports worldwide.
then, about two weeks back, i saw an american passport for the first time, and it straight up has a giant-ass flag, an eagle, a fucking ear of corn, and the first line of the constitution on it, the text is on glaring multicoloured backdrop, and while i was caught off-guard by it, it is also completely in line with its country of origin, and also i feel like this tells me everything i need to know about america as a nation.
gayfeline 