An unreconstructed libertine who made debauchery into high art or a vile pornographer who tried to justify rape, murder and paedophilia?
From Flaubert to Baudelaire, the influence of the Marquis de Sade on writers is well documented, but a new exhibition in Paris sets out to explore how the 18th-century nobleman has also influenced artists over the past two centuries.
A 52-second video promoting the exhibition at Paris’ Musee d’Orsay shows writhing naked bodies, some apparently biting and crying out in pain.
However, it is no preparation for the subsequent horror depicted in many of the works on display.
The museum even issued a disclaimer for the Sade exhibit.
“The violent nature of some of the works and documents may shock some visitors,” its Web site says.
The “connection he [Sade] found between desire and ferocity, which in his eyes, is inherent in man, completely haunts art,” Sade expert and joint curator of the exhibition, Annie Le Brun, told reporters.
Sade’s notoriety rests on his novel The 120 Days of Sodom about sexual depravity, murder and pedophilia.
The novel — a draft of which was written in 1785 while Sade was being held in Paris’ Bastille prison — details the orgies of four wealthy French libertines who raped, tortured and finally murdered their mostly teenage victims.
The late US writer Andrea Dworkin in 1985 called Sade the “world’s foremost literary pornographer” and condemned the practice of approaching “pornography as if it were an intellectual phenomenon.”
However, Le Brun and cocurator Laurence des Cars say the exhibition looks at the extent to which Sade “steeped in rebellion, encouraged the representation of what cannot be said” in art.
“He sets us a new challenge, raising the issue of what defies representation by establishing its connection with ... the freedom to say everything,” they said.
Described by Sade as “the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began,” his novel was officially suppressed and difficult to obtain during the 19th century.
Le Brun and Des Cars said that although Sade did not discover “violence in love” or invent “sadism,” he did make it an “abiding theme.
The word “sadism,” based on Sade’s name, first appeared in a French dictionary in 1834.
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