FRANÇOIS BOUCHER

Description

This unpublished drawing perfectly illustrates this eroticism, through the embrace of two naked figures under the eyes of a putto. The young man grabs the woman’s shoulders, ready to kiss her. She turns around to kiss him back and lifts her leg, revealing her penis. This moment frozen by black chalk appears as a stolen moment, and underlines two centuries earlier the conception of eroticism according to Roland Barthes, “the staging of an apparition”. In the eyes of collectors of the time, accustomed to the iconographic codes of mythological paintings, this “appearance” sexualized a heroic, almost chaste nudity, which then covered the walls of the Salons. This representation of the vulva, surprising at first glance, is not uncommon for Boucher. Some of his drawings represent the female genitalia in a frontal manner, and the compositions are then reworked in his paintings, a piece of fabric or an element of decoration being able to cover the incriminated area. Engravings are even printed in two proofs, one where the sex is revealed and the other veiled, as if to satisfy the character of collectors, curious or reserved.