Les Femmes damnées

Tickets, The Advocate, January 8, 1981
By James M. Saslow


The gallery circuit was humming at high voltage in November, sparked by an unprecedented show called Les Femmes damnèes at Manhattan's Fitch-Febvrel (5 E. 57th). The phrase, from a Baudelaire poem of that name, was a 19th-century codeword for lesbians, and the exhibit gathered more than three dozen prints on lesbian themes running from the late Victorian era through the 1930s. Such names as Bonnard, Maillol and Schiele showed that women's subjects held at least occasional interest for numerous major artists. Many images were frankly erotic, others unexpected vignettes of copules dancing, taking tea or indulging other simple pleasures "in their own space."