Gerhard Richter-Badende (Bathers) 1967 As I noted in my previous post on the extraordinaryGerman artist Gerhard Richter (seeThe Reader) his constant re-invention, technical mastery and breath of subject matter has created a body of work without parallel in contemporary art.

He has also shown an constant engagement with and re-visioning ofthe work of the Old Masters, including Vermeer, Titian and Ingres. Badende, featuredabove, takes as itsstarting point Ingres’sThe Turkish Bath, one of the most sensual and erotic paintings ever, while Kleine Badendebelow references the same artist’sThe Small Bather.Grey is to Richter what blue was to Yves Klein (Dreams of Desire 48 (Blue), however the smudgedobscurity of Badende actually accentuates the erotic possibilities inherent in the scene. Richter’s third wife Sabine Moritz is the model for Kleine Badende, painted in the blurry photo-realistic style that he is justifiably famous for.

The Turkish Bath-Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres 1862-1863 The French Revolution had swept away the frivolous excesses of Rococo (see Dreams of Desire 64 (Boucher’s Odalisques) and two competing tendencies dominated French during the first half of the Nineteenth Century: the wild grandiose Romanticism of Delacroix and the somber, stately Neo-Classicism best personified by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

Ingres painted a number of important erotic paintings including the Valpinçon Bather of 1808, La Grande Odalisque of 1814 and L’Odalisque à l’esclave from 1839, however his most famous painting is The Turkish Bath from 1862-1863, completed when Ingres was 83 years old.

Portraying a group of nude women in a bath at a harem, The Turkish Bath is suffused with a lush hothouse atmosphere that heightens the erotic charge of the painting. Ingres erotic works would have a major impact upon the Modernists including Picasso and Matisse while the Post Modernist German…

Max Ernst-The Garden of France

If you aren’t already aware, my collection of 69 inter-related poems and short fictions Motion No. 69 is available for purchase in both e-book and paperback. Below is the penultimate sample, (one more tease then you are just have to buy it) read by myself.

Curvature

Just close your eyes,
and open your legs.

The curvature
of your soft, inner thigh,
leading to the downy, raw hollow
seems to me like a promise—
that the door to paradise will open up
wide enough to swallow whole
my entire being.
Do I dare to enter the void
into which I spent my life staring longingly?
Maybe if I bury myself deep enough inside you,
then a curvature will result
in the seemingly,
inexorable, forward flow of time.
And I can return again
to that place
I never wanted to leave anyway.
Floating in the protective…

From the point of view of own planet, the Sun and the Moon appear to be about the same size. This is because the Sun is four hundred times larger than the Moon, but also about four hundred times the distance from Earth. From earliest times this has exerted a strong psychological relationship to the two luminaries, encouraging the belief that they are of equal but different importance. The Sun may be the source of all energies, but it is the Moon that determines the tides and has the most immediate effect on our moods and earthly activities. The Moon in astrological practise is therefore of great significance. In fact in most systems, she is given much more importance than the current frenzy for Sun sign astrology would imply! The Moon’s Nodes are not planets. They are points in space indicating the intersection of two orbits.

The elements to be considered are a) the Ecliptic…