In John William Waterhouse’s Circe (1892), there isn’t any query that her energy is linked to her seductive nature, whereas John Collier’s extremely eroticised depiction of Lilith (1889), which sees her revelling within the snake that coils round her bare physique, could not be farther from Rossetti’s portrayal.
Artists as numerous as Gustav Moreau, Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch all portrayed the femme fatale, and there was hardly ever any room for ambiguity – these ladies had been harmful temptresses.
Though most artists relied on biblical or legendary imagery, The Impressionists, as one would anticipate given their concentrate on on a regular basis life, transported the femme fatale to the current day.
Trendy-day femmes fatales
Édouard Manet’s Nana (1877), which depicts a high-class prostitute in a state of undress together with her subsequent consumer seated on a settee behind her, is broadly thought to have been impressed by Zola’s character of the identical identify. Nana, who made her first look in L’Assommoir earlier than turning into the topic of her personal eponymous novel in 1880, destroys each man who needs her earlier than dying her personal horrible dying of smallpox. The portray was refused entry to the Paris Salon, maybe as a result of the up to date setting was somewhat too near the bone.
Max Lieberman took an equally up to date strategy in his Samson and Delilah (1902), turning the biblical story right into a modern-day battle of the sexes. Delilah, triumphantly holding her lover’s shorn hair above her head with one hand, whereas crushing him into the mattress with the opposite, is the embodiment of the highly effective, sexually assured girl that so unnerved the lads of the period.
The femme fatale was additionally a favorite topic for sculptors. Some significantly hanging examples could be seen in The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder on the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which explores the intriguing premise that the growing use of color in Nineteenth-Century sculpture was a way of highlighting Victorian anxieties.
