“He paints penises the way other people paint landscapes”: The disturbing genius of erotica pioneer Félicien Ropes | Art and design

DDuring an extremely hot week in Paris in 1878, the Belgian-bohemian artist Félicien Ropes painted a portrait of a woman walking with her pet pig. In the photo, the woman is blindfolded and naked — except for some stockings, long black gloves and a feathered hat — and the pig has a cute pink curly tail. A pornocrat — which roughly translates as “ruler of adultery” — is an eyeworm. Once you see it, it’s hard to forget.

Robes recalls that he composed his most famous work “in a very hot apartment, full of different odors, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive to production or even reproduction.” Viewers of Lust Laboratory, a new exhibition about Ropes at Kunsthaus Zurich, will also discover, to their amazement, or perhaps dismay, that mating and painting were indelibly linked in Ropes’s psyche.

In the late 19th century, Robes created a wide range of drawings, engravings, prints and paintings of such stunning fruition – often decorated with satanic elements – that even Picasso responded to him in awe (in his homage, the Spaniard painted a caricature of a pig-shaped man performing cunnilingus on a woman). Ropes’ works depicted naked witches riding broomsticks, voyeurs wearing top hats, and courtesans riding penis-shaped bicycles. French art critic Felix Fignon described him as an artist who “paints phalluses the way others paint landscapes.”

“Even today’s viewers are sometimes breathless – whether at the sight of a naked woman tied to a cross, a feisty Parisian woman walking her pig, or Eve ensnared by a phallic serpent,” says Anne Demeester, director of Kunsthaus Zurich. Rubes would have loved such a gasp. “Sometimes I do things like this to raise my ass to the level of your faces,” he wrote of his most shocking photos.

Robes was born in Namur, central Belgium, in 1833. The son of a wealthy industrialist, he was an unexpected decadent future. He studied law and married the daughter of a judge who owned a local castle. He could have settled for the life of a country businessman, but art, Paris, and flirtation tempted him. With a sharp goatee and a depressed brow, Ropes had the look of a young Ethan Hawke. He’s perfected a kind of shabby dress style.

His illustrative works, for authors such as Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, turned from realistic subjects to his infamous fictional depictions of d’Emémonde women – whom he called Rubicin. He saw the modern woman as Fatal femaleBut it was the bourgeois men overcome by temptation who were his real target.

His love life matches his art. After abandoning his wife and son, he lived for three decades in a triplex with sisters Léontine and Aurelie Duloc, with whom he had children. He successfully weathered the wrath of the more moral elements of Belle Époque society, and his unconventional domestic situation fostered an extraordinarily successful career: by the mid-1870s he was the highest-paid painter in Paris. He died at the age of 65 in 1898, the same year he was awarded the Legion of Honour. In his last years, he grew roses.

There is a small, dedicated group of Rubes collectors, says Claude Bening, a specialist in 19th-century European photographs at Sotheby’s. “His watercolors and oil paintings don’t appear very often because museums and collectors talk about them a lot. What does appear are his printed works, and if you’re a book lover you’ll see his work on the frontispiece.” A rare and explicit watercolor, Le Calvaire (Les sataniques), in which a woman is strangled by her hair while pinned under the genitals of a crucified devil, sold at Sotheby’s in 2007 for around £160,000. The auction catalog noted: “The devil’s testicles sitting atop the woman’s face like a hood are more comical than frightening.”

There are no problems presenting Robes’ works at international auctions. “There’s eroticism or pornography, but that shouldn’t be confused with art. They’re two different things,” Benning says. “His themes are very risqué, yes, or, for lack of a better word, original. Now, as they were then. And yes, he may have been in shock, but at the same time he does it as a self-respecting artist.”

The Zurich exhibition was organized by Jonas Baer of Kunsthaus Zurich and Dan van Heche, curator of prints and drawings at the Royal Library of Belgium (which has loaned images from its strong collection of 2,000 works by the artist). Secret albums intended for display in a “male collector’s closet” will be on display, including frontispieces for pornographic novels and freelance drawings of sex workers.

How difficult is it to present Lust Lab in the age of conflicting conversations about sex, between #MeToo and OnlyFans? “This is a central question,” Baer admits. “I think it would be important in Zurich to display such frank works. It’s very traditional.” Maybe the penis doesn’t sit easily with fine chocolates and luxury watches. “It’s worth the risk because there are times when you have to discuss sexuality. If you look at the Epstein files, I think you have to talk about how male culture views women.”

The curators aim to introduce Rops on the tour. “He was one of the most accomplished and successful Symbolist artists of his time, working alongside all the famous composers,” says Van Heche. “But at the same time his art is very disturbing and violent and shocking and also wonderful. I think we want to look into his eyes and read it a little bit against the grain, without canceling it out.”