0 comments/ 8377 views/ 0 favorites Peripheral Objects By: Cal Y. Pygia In a previous post, I considered the use of background in photography to both highlight the foreground figure and to establish the metaphorical significance or value of the work. The same purposes for and techniques of using backgrounds also apply to drawings, paintings, and other visual arts as well as to literary art forms such as narrative poems, short stories, novels, and motion pictures. In this post, I will consider the artist's use of peripheral objects, such as props, that appear at the margins of the foreground or in the background itself, including the purpose and uses of such objects. In doing so, I shall allude to the superb art of Édouard-Henri Avril (who also went by the name Paul Avril). Avril (1843 -- 1928) is a French painter and commercial artist; under the pseudonym Paul Avril, he also illustrated erotic literature, including Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô, Gautier's Le Roi Caundale, John Cleland's Fanny Hill, Jean Baptiste Louvet de Couvray's Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas, Mario Uchard's Mon Oncle Barbassou (harem scenes), Jules Michelet's The Madam, Hector France's Musk, Hashish and Blood, the writings of Pietro Aretino, the anonymous lesbian novel Gamiani, and De Figuris Veneris: A Manual of Classical Erotica by Karl Forberg. In Avril's work, which is classical and realistic in style, peripheral objects often enhance the elegance of his settings, many of which are themselves classical, giving to his works an air of both wealth and luxury. These opulent settings, suggesting privilege and, in some cases nobility, if not royalty, contrast with the figures' nudity and with their sexual acts. In one painting, a naked woman, lying supine, her right arm extended upward and bent at the elbow, and her hand over her head, has her right leg elevated, the heel of her sandaled foot almost resting upon the left shoulder of the nude male who, his left hand bracing the woman's lifted leg and his erection inserted into her vagina, seems to walk, more than to thrust, into her, her pelvis being at the same level as his upper thighs and groin. In his cupped right hand, he holds the underside of her left thigh. Like her, he wears sandals, but his pair are equipped with tasseled leather thongs that wraps his calves, whereas her own are half-sandals, which expose both her heels and her toes. His only other garment is a narrow headband. The bed upon which the woman lies is high and covered with a thick sheet. A pair of lavishly embroidered pillows lie beneath her head. Her eyes are closed in an ecstasy that resembles discomfort or even pain. The headboard is rectangular and high; it is bordered by yellow-green tiles that alternately bear am eight-pointed star and a square, lower case "e"-shaped letter that resembles a wall of an incomplete maze, seen from directly above. To the left of the bed, there is a chair upon which milady's pinkish-red, star-spangled gown, bordered by a gold band bearing a line of large black polka dots, and a pearl necklace, have been laid. Above and behind the chair, partly folded over the right side of the headboard, is a brown drape or curtain, although no window is in sight, and, therefore, it is impossible to say whether the curtain belongs to a casement or is a tapestry. There is a suggestion of paneled walls beyond. The floor, before the bed, where the youth stands, fucking his beloved, is sectioned into squares, either of wood or tile, in the centers of the squares of which are alternating circles and diamonds. To the right of the nude young man is an ornate fresco that includes, in its design, a topless woman's head and torso, a caduceus, potted flowers, and various filigrees. Beneath the fresco are a large bowl on a stand atop a pedestal, a large pitcher beside it, on the floor. These peripheral objects suggest that the copulating couple are members of the nobility, and possibly of the royalty, and enrich the glamour of the painting and its subjects. In another of Avril's masterpieces of erotica, another youth, wearing, this time, nothing but a narrow headband, lies atop his beloved, in the missionary position. His erection is visible between her arched thighs. Lying supine beneath him, her legs scissoring his hips, the side of her left foot resting against the side of its right counterpart, and both feet locked around her partner's lower back, she is at the very edge of the sheet-covered mattress, her eyes closed in ecstasy, and her left arm off the bed and dangling toward the floor. His eyes are upon her rapt features, seeming to enjoy her bliss. The bed is very long, extending well below their feet and above their heads. Pillows in ornately embroidered cases are stacked between their heads and the bed's headboard, unused by the lovers, whose expressions indicate that they have but one thing upon their minds--their own pleasure. They are shown in profile, as it were, Avril favoring his viewers with a side view of the copulating couple in action. As a result, the eye, once it has participated in the nudity and lovemaking of the beautiful nude young couple, enjoying the youth's buttocks and erect penis and the woman's arched buttocks and thighs, bare breasts, and lost-in-ecstasy expression, moves, as trained, from left to right and from top to bottom, in a motion not unlike that which would be used to follow the peaks and valleys of the line tracing a corporate stock's annual performance. The peripheral objects thus encountered suggest both sexual obsession and sophistication as well as sensuality, opulence, and aristocracy. The first of these peripheral objects is a green, winged phallus which stands, as it were, upon scrotum-enveloped testicles-become-legs, supported upon bell-shaped bases. It occupies a pedestal that is decorated with a cloth sash. Behind the phallus on the pedestal is a heavy curtain, brown in color, part of which, skirting the foot of the bed, falls, the bottom in a heap, upon a block at the lower side of the bed. Between the curtain behind the phallus-occupied pedestal and a huge flower blossom painted at the head of the bed is a dark section of wall, divided in half by a vertical line, the portion below a darker shade of the gray above this divide. Having "read" the upper portion of the painting, the viewer's eye again descends the curtain at the left edge of the picture, traveling along the bed frame, past the couple who are still busy copulating with one another, to the sheet which, having come loose, halfway along the frame, from the mattress under which it had been tucked, hangs, fluted in wrinkles, behind milady's dangling arm. The half of the frame that is visible is green, but it is equipped with a brown, scalloped edge with raised wooden buttons, or, perhaps, bolts, along its top. At the upper side of the bed, just past the woman's head, a marble bench is positioned, its right side a framework of wooden slats atop doweled legs. A large feather-fan on a stick is propped against the bench. The furnishings and the décor of the chamber suggest wealth and splendor, just as the jade, winged phallus upon the pedestal intimates sensuality and sexual sophistication. Many of Avril's painting depict heterosexual couples coupling, usually in penile-vaginal intercourse or in fellatio or cunnilingus. A few show heterosexual anal intercourse or lesbian cunnilingus or intercourse by means of a strap-on dildo. Avril also painted several orgiastic scenes in which nude figures engage one another in a free-for-all of group sex, but with the couplings, again, usually of either a heterosexual or a lesbian nature. A couple of his paintings, however, depict either a bisexual threesome involving two males and a female or a male homosexual couple. Let's consider the latter, in which males engage one another in sexual acts, together with, or exclusive of, female participation. In one of Avril's strictly homoerotic paintings, which is presented as a side view, a young man, whose only body hair is the sparse growth upon his pubes, lies upon his left side, upon a tousled sheet laid upon a pallet on the stone floor, facing the viewer. His left arm is raised and bent at the elbow, the forearm and hand above his head and below a large, star-spangled orange-brown pillow. His right arm, which lies upon the sheet, is also bent at the elbow, so that the forearm and hand lie alongside his head. He is asleep. The eye travels along his flat chest and his slightly concave belly to pause at the small penis that juts from his groin. Only the faintest suggestion of the youth's scrotum is visible, tucked between his cock and his left thigh. The viewer's gaze, resuming its scenic tour, travels down the legs to a scroll lying, partially unrolled, upon a small table at the foot of the makeshift bed. Its text is Greek. Beside him on the floor, a gray haired, gray-bearded man, penis erect, rises, supporting his weight upon his left elbow and his folded left leg. His right leg is stretched forth upon the orange-brown blanket in which, apparently, he has been sleeping next to his beloved. The elderly man reaches his right hand toward the younger man's genitals as he gazes upon the youth's serene face. It is obvious that the younger man is about to be awakened by his lustful older lover. Back of the sleeping youth's head, a stately rectangular column rises. Behind the column, there is a long stretch of short wall decorated at its top with a border that erupts, at evenly measured intervals, into ovals that bear a floral motif. Behind this wall is another, much taller wall--one of the very walls of the chamber itself, one feels--which is comprised of a lower and an upper recessed expanse. A doorway interrupts the chamber wall, which resumes again at the right edge of the picture. Before the doorway there stands a fountain upon a four-lobed stand. Water jets into the bowl of the fountain from nozzles mounted atop blocks of stone to its left and right. Like many of Avril's other paintings, this one uses peripheral objects--pillows, a column, decorated walls, and an elaborate fountain--to suggest an elegant life, even without there being a bed in the chamber. The scroll adds the suggestion that one, or both, of the men, the young and the old, is, or are, literate and educated. Perhaps the viewer has chanced, as it were, upon a warrior and his ephebe or a philosopher and his catamite, about to engage in early morning lovemaking. In a painting which involves a threesome consisting of two men and a woman, the woman lies upon her back, upon a short table or divan that is draped with a sheet, a blanket tucked or rolled under her head, the side of which blanket falls along the front of the makeshift bed. Her legs are raised, and her ankles rest upon the shoulders of the young man whose erect member has penetrated her vagina. He holds her ankles, perhaps to steady himself. Behind him, the second male, who is about the same age as the other two members of the threesome, has penetrated the first male, whom he is in the process of clasping about the waist. All three figures wear the same article of clothing: the narrow headband favored by the artist as the attire of the well-undressed copulating nobleman or woman. Lying alongside the woman's flank is an object that, in the relative darkness of the heavy shadows cast by her side and by the lover who stands between her legs, is obscure, but may be the spine of a large volume bound in orange-brown leather and adorned with black stars. The foreground characters, occupying the center space of the painting, are the viewer's initial focal points. Stretched behind them, from left to right, are a fountain, a landscape mural, and a marble column. To their left, there is a chair, and, before the hand of the lady's arm, which dangles at the edge of the table or divan, is an odd, tapered object that could be a vase. The fountain is a rectangular, pedestal-like column, out of the right side of which, from the open mouth of a bestial face in bronze, water pours forth, into a long, narrow trough. The landscape mural is vague, with suggestions of tree trunks and branches among indistinct clumps of foliage in gray, olive green, and black. The hazy sky erupts in cobweb-like strands of gauzy material attached between the mural and the column at the right of the threesome's center of activity. Below them, there is a stone floor, cut into large tiles. This painting suggests that, among the privileged aristocracy, ménage-a-trios sexual play is nothing unusual. Rather, it is simply a variation that adds spice to the participants' love lives. As usual, the painting's peripheral objects--in this case, a chair, a fountain with a trough, a mural, a pillar, a book, and a vase--suggest wealth and luxury, depicting the figures as members of the upper class and giving the setting an exotic, vaguely Greek, air. I conclude my consideration of Avril's use of peripheral objects, or props, with an analysis and commentary upon one of his depictions of an entirely lesbian coupling. This one is set beside the sea. In the foreground, at the left side of the canvas, a nude young woman, a look of ecstasy upon her lovely face, reclines upon a rock, her left arm upon an outcropping of stone above and behind her, her right arm resting upon the rocky bed upon which she lies. In her right hand, she holds a golden lyre bedecked with red roses. There is a strip of blank white paper on the sand, below the lyre. A red blanket lies beneath her buttocks. Her head reposes upon a rising mound of rock that forms, as it were, a headboard of sorts to her stony bed, and her legs are parted, the left lying along the contour of a rocky ledge and her right projecting forward, from her perch, the foot resting upon the sandy beach. Behind the rocks there is a tree branch bedecked with leaves. Seated between the reclining woman's legs is a beautiful naked lady of about her same age. Her right leg is folded, its calf beneath her left thigh, and her left leg extends way from her body, along the beach. Her right hand rests upon the sandy shore. Her right hand curves around the other woman's right calf. Leaning forward, she licks the reclining woman's vulva through the dark tangle of her pubes. To the couple's right, at a slight distance, the shore gives way to a bay in which, close to the shoreline, two mermaid couples sport in lesbian play. Their fish tails do not end at their waists, as is traditional in the depiction of such creatures, but at their upper thighs, so that their buttocks and their female genitalia are fully exposed. The closer pair rest upon a rock in the water, one performing cunnilingus upon her mate. The farther pair seem to frolic in the gentle surf, hugging one another. Beyond the mermaids, on the steep bank that rises at the far side of the bay, a temple of Greek design stands among wispy-leafed trees, beneath a sky that is part gray and part orange, as if sunrise or sunset has arrived. At first glance, the sea seems to be part of the actual landscape, but it may be nothing more than a mural, the rocks upon which the human lesbian lies, her lover seated between her legs, a prop to which the backdrop lends credibility. The peripheral objects set the scene as ancient Greece, because of the golden lyre, the temple on the hill, and the frolicking mermaids. The mermaids have symbolic value as well, for, in The Odyssey and other literary works of ancient Greek origin (if not T. S. Eliot's modernist poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), these sirens represent enchanting temptresses who lure men to their doom. Here, they seem to seduce not men, but women. The lyre suggests music, and, festooned, as it is, with roses, not mere music in general, but romantic music, or love songs. The singer, having seduced her listener, as the sirens seduced Ulysses, has set aside her instrument to enjoy the fruit of her labor. The lyre and the flowers, like the mermaids, give an air of romance and enchantment to the painting. For the lesbian couple who enjoy the charms of femininity, sex is not merely sex, but romance; it is an expression of musical and magical love. A review of a small sample of Paul Avril's erotic art reveals that he uses peripheral objects, or props, in his paintings to suggest that his copulating couples or groups belong to the aristocracy; to enrich the glamour his painting's subjects; to suggest, by the richness of his chambers' furnishings and décor, the rooms' wealth and splendor; to intimate the sensuality, sexual sophistication, literacy, and education of his figures; to create an exotic, vaguely Greek, setting; and to impart a sense of romance and magic to his paintings' scenes and subjects. In the process, Avril creates not only erotica, but also enduring masterpieces of stunning beauty and skill that have earned him a place in the canons of fine erotic art.