The Problem of Decadence, part I

If anti-liberals cannot bring themselves to contemplate extreme art, can they ever fully understand human nature?

Félicien Rops, The Supreme Vice, 1884, etching

One of the problems I have had with being an artist and critic outside of the political left is discussing human nature. That seems odd, as the political right prides itself (not without reason) on confronting human nature in a realistic manner. It sees man as a tragic, flawed being, compromised by his drives towards sin and selfishness. This counters Rousseau’s view of men as formed by environment and education, capable of perfection and essentially in his core good, made selfish by the demands of an unfair world and the burden of inheritance of status and chattel. This is the division between the utopian vision of perfectible man (held by liberalists and socialists) and the tragic vision of sinful man (held by reactionaries and the religious). The argument of the right is that all utopianism based on humanism and materialism is at best misplaced and at worst catastrophic because it fails to apprehend man’s essential nature and the imprint of his heritable characteristics, therefore all subsequent inferences and systems that might be constructed must be faulty.

So, critique of the full spectrum of the mind (especially as we find it in the fine arts) should be easier from a perspective unshackled from the unrealistic a priori understandings of the leftist or liberal. Yet, in one particular area the political right seem to have a blind spot. When it comes to carnal desire and the erotic, we find the conservative averting his gaze, whether that be from modesty, prudishness, distaste or fear – that is, the fear of his own base animal drives emerging when exposed to temptation. To be sure the conservative is not the only type of the right. There is the reactionary, who more readily faces the Dionysian drives and their manifestations, but my main concern here is with conservatives who comprise the mass of anti-liberals.

Overall, there is a sort of unrealistic shying away by the conservative, although not from nudity per se. Think of all the tasteful academic scenes of nymphs and Venuses one sees on Western Traditional Beauty^TM style accounts online. Indeed, the first redoubt of the conservative is the training in proportion and anatomy afforded by the art-school life room and the example of the rooms of antique statuary. And yet…

And yet there is a definite squeamishness. When feminists start prating on about the soft, fluctuating woman who bleeds and produces body hair, the instinctive response of the conservative is to scoff or scold or ask that this talk be kept in the bedroom or doctor’s clinic. To be sure, such talk is a cliché – and advanced as something of a power play – but it expresses a truth that many on the right tend to overlook. Likewise, the politics of transgenderism as a social phenomenon and transsexuals as a client group – not to mention biological reality – is something from which the conservative shies away. Surely, as rightists who well understand that biological reality shapes our understanding of social and kinetic reality, shouldn’t these topics also be fairly apprehended, albeit with a rightist perspective on power? Yet, it is artists on the left who address bodily reality in a more adventurous, direct and honest manner. Where is the Ana Mendieta, Jenny Saville, Orlan and Robert Gober of the right?

Such thoughts came to me while looking at an adjacent area: the erotic art of Félicien Rops (1833-1898), currently on display in Zurich (Kunsthaus, closes 31 May; reviewed here from the catalogue). Félicien Rops: Laboratory of Lust centres on the core of the Belgian Symbolist’s output, which was fantasy scenes featuring the female nude. This catalogue is a rare first-rate modern introduction to Rops in English. Most of the Rops literature is in French. His correspondence (which was profuse and often discussed his art) has not yet been translated into English.

Rops started out as a caricaturist and illustrator for various periodicals. He was also a skilled painter of landscapes (executed small scale and in the field) in the style of the Hague School and Barbizon painters. This extended to scenes of social realism, following the work of Courbet and Millet. Some of these pieces are included to provide some context, but it is hard to imagine we would be looking at them in any depth without Rops’s reputation earned in fields more extreme. An evident anti-authoritarian streak drove Rops to transgress beyond social realism, satire and caricature.

Félicien Rops, The Human Comedy, 1878–1881, watercolour, pastel, chalk, 22.5 x 15 cm

In one chilling vignette, a man follows a painted coquette in a nocturnal Parisian street. The woman’s face is a mask, behind which a skeletal death lurks. This was more than a moral danger – syphilis was a common, virulent and untreatable killer which stalked prostitutes and their patrons. Rops was no disinterested observer. He left his wife and child in Belgium while he pursued sexual liaisons in Paris. Rops was a user of pornography and (presumably) prostitutes, as well as having more permanent romantic attachments. The frisson of sexual encounters carrying the potential punishment of a painful humiliating death did not seem enough to curb the appetites of men, among whom was Rops, for whom it became the core of his artistic output.

Rops was an avid printmaker and seems to have used photographic sources not only as designs and used photo-mechanical means to transfer drawings on to etching plates, which he would subsequently refine and elaborate. His demonic fantasies could be very explicit; some could not have been legally sold in his lifetime. Rops’s art rides a narrow line between being fine art on the subject of carnal passion and corruption and actively glorifying those things. At its strongest, Rops’s art crosses that line and becomes as pornographic as hentai, with depictions of satanic copulation and bestiality. He dedicated himself mainly to prints – including many illustrations of Symbolist verse, including Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal – until a stroke in 1890 curtailed his artistic capacity. This exhibition includes a full range of Rops’s imagery in drawings and prints, ranging from the titillatingly raunchy to the outright obscene.

Félicien Rops, Sentimental Initiation, 1887, heliogravure

The credo of Rops was heroic individualism, for himself at least. “There is no such thing as beautiful or ugly. One must only strive to let one’s perception get under the skin of those who think, live and love as one does oneself. That is the whole art! One must not care about anyone else.”[iii] He certainly understood a wide range of experience and outlook. Looking at his dark satanic scenes of debauchery (so powerfully and explicitly made) it comes as no surprise to discover the artist received a Jesuit education. Only an artist who has meditated long and seriously on the power of faith and consequences of sin could have created such evocative designs. His declaration “Naturalia non sunt turpia” (natural things are not shameful) is surely a disingenuous justification for dwelling upon the nude figure. Rops certainly knew the distinctions between innocent and depraved, between natural and perverse.

After such a description, a lot of conservatives will say the subject itself is immoral and degrading and has no value (not even instructive) for the normal person, therefore it is no wonder we do not dwell upon such material. For them, it is perfectly reasonable that Rops’s art was often kept hidden in restricted library collections. Fair enough, but what if a normal person wanted an insight into what drives an erotomane or libertine? Rops’s turbulent rejection of faith – or rather his considered abandonment to the numbing welter of hedonism – should be of interest to those who retain their faith. If you wanted to see what might tempt someone lacking in willpower and character, should there be an interdiction on such art? The old theological argument is that the forearmed pious man can examine these topics with a degree of impunity that a common person does not possess. In other words, it is unwise for the average man to approach such areas for fear of corruption. If, as the right argues, art is made by the elite for the elite, why can’t such material be seen and discussed by an informed counter-elite? Or is such argument merely a specious excuse for indulgence?

In a parallel point, it has been claimed that religious interdictions on pre-marital sex education leaves the uninitiated confused and fearful. Some people who experienced such upbringings felt that such complete rejection resulted in a blank spot that made them doubt or even reject the otherwise positive aspects of their religious faith. Is such a denial of the erotic aspect of life (in the field of art, for example) an honest or rewarding approach for the non-religious conservative or does it indicate a deep fear or insecurity about human desire? The fact that liberals and progressives are willing to discuss sexual desire and the erotic – not withstanding the misguided inferences they make on these topics – means that they appear to the uninformed to be less afraid, more honest and capable of greater tolerance, making them appear overall more reasonable. Can their opponents afford for such a perception to unchecked in art that approaches human nature and behaviour?

Félicien Rops, Satan Sowing Tares, 1882, chromolithograph

What better case study is Rops, master of the demonic and depraved, whose political liberalism and personal libertinage go hand in hand? He himself confessed in a letter to a friend, “I spend my days restraining myself, and I have a furious urge to break free from the shackles of convention with which civilised societies keep primitive natures in check.”[iv] In his lamenting descriptions of the drug addicts, drunks and prostitutes whom he drew one detects an element of voyeuristic delight as well as empathy. For Rops, Woman was always the active protagonist – seducing, tempting, ravishing, inviting defilement – with Man as a puppet or dupe. Woman exercises her freedom as an emancipated citizen, free to consequently rise or fall, dependent upon her individual nature and destiny.

None of this is a call to view Rops as a reactionary or anti-liberal (although those traits do exist within him) nor for him to be claimed by anyone on the right. My point is that if we want to comprehend all of human existence, one cannot simply say that such-and-such an area is too dangerous to scrutinise or explore in a cold-eyed manner. Ultimately, if opponents of degradation and perversity are to gain ground then a simple “this is beyond examination” is not sufficient. From the non-left there also needs to be a clearer and more frank examination (in the arts) of why people are led into dark places through curiosity, confusion and ignorance and can submit to destructive urges. Looking at the transgressive art of Rops is one means to understanding the darkness inside men’s hearts, a subject of importance to all.

Félicien Rops: Laboratory of Lust, Kunsthaus Zurich, 6 March-31 May 2026. Jonas Beyer, Daan van Heesch (eds.), Félicien Rops: Laboratory of Lust, Hirmer, 2025, 208pp, 93 col. illus., pb, English/German text, $55.

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[iii] Rops, 1891, quoted p. 41

[iv] Rops, 1863, quoted p. 29