I did not know of the work of Jean Delville. I first saw this image, The Idol of Perversity of 1891, from a private collection, in a show at the Guggenheim some years back. It's Women's History Month, and in the wake of new turmoil in the wake of Allen v Farrow and Cuomo et al, it's worth tracing some of the history of why the stories of women might be devalued.

Delville, a Belgian painter seems to have cycled through numerous painting styles, theories, and groups as he transformed from a rigorous believer in the Beaux Arts tradition of classicism to Symbolism, spiritualism and Theosophy.

The femme fatale, according to the Guggenheim wall label, "incarnated the misogynistic, pseudoscientific views of the late nineteenth century that women were lower beings on the evolutionary scale." Women were closer to animals then men, and so the fatale was more of a beast--and an aggressively sexual one at that-- than a human. Check out the snake that slithers between her pointy breasts. This was no woman but rather a temptress, all the way back to Eve, who served to corrupt and defile.

Think about it: Manet had already painted the Olympia and the Dejeuner sur L'Herbe where women were set off as powerful objects of desire, yet the great 19th century authors, Balzac, Hugo, Zola had already thoroughly demolished the notion of women only being objects of desire and instead often poor, trod upon laborers who had no other way out. Gauguin was leaving for Tahiti but Ibsen had written Hedda Gabler. This duality of the perception of women-- the carnal v spiritual, and alas, virgin v whore--has carried forward to today.

Jean Delville, The Idol of Perversity, 1891,