The dude who pioneered Australian erotica

January 9, 2024 4:41 PM

Lindsay’s bawdy portrayal of myth and pagan beliefs fueled his art and created controversy in his time. [NSFW]

Norman Lindsay at Wikipedia. Lindsay's works burned in Scranton, NJ. Check out Sirens, a 1994 erotic comedy of manners and morals based more or less on Lindsay.

This post was inspired by chariot pulled by cassowaries' post from earlier today.

posted by cupcakeninja (14 comments total)

Note: Lindsay had some execrable opinions. There’s an article about it that you can find easily enough if you Google around, but it’s inexplicably at what looks to me (I am not Australian) like a quite conservative publication.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:24 PM on January 9

His work is excellent, thanks for posting.
posted by Liquidwolf at 6:06 PM on January 9 [1 favorite]

Just like our porn, but upside down..
posted by Czjewel at 6:23 PM on January 9 [1 favorite]

We visited his home in the Blue Mountains several years ago, mostly because I was a huge fan of his children’s book The Magic Pudding. It has lovely gardens. Lots of fountains and statues of half naked ladies, as you might imagine.
posted by web-goddess at 6:30 PM on January 9 [3 favorites]

Just came here to say that up until this point I only knew of him from The Magic Pudding. Now out of print and perhaps that's for the best given how aforementioned opinions manifest.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:12 PM on January 9 [2 favorites]

Cupcakeninja: I regret to tell you as a New Zealander that Kerry Bolton is even worse than you might think.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:30 PM on January 9 [1 favorite]

Well, he seems… just horrible! Unfortunate but not unique overlap between fun kooky shit and terrible shit. Maybe I’m missing something, but I looked through my links and didn’t see Bolton’s name. We’re you aware of his activities generally and see overlap with Lindsay, or did something in the post specifically prompt you?
posted by cupcakeninja at 2:43 AM on January 10

These works don't even read as erotica to me, but more art in a classical kind of style? To think people burned it.
posted by JHarris at 4:11 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]

cupcakeninja, if you search the two names together you find Bolton writing about Lindsay at some alt-right site, which might be what i_am_joe's_spleen found when following your prompt to Google around for the opinions of Lindsay.
posted by ver at 4:46 AM on January 10 [2 favorites]

Ahhhhhh, thank you, ver, good catch. Hmmm.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:18 AM on January 10

Yep, exactly that is what I did.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:15 AM on January 10 [1 favorite]

It's so frustrating when even an article about specific arts only has the most barely visible tiny low quality images of the work.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:51 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

JHarris, a lot of his work really does fit with Neoclassical, and it's strange to our eyes to think of some of it as erotica, certainly after the rise and subsequent ubiquity of Frazetta's callipygian art that rides the line between erotica and not. Now, some of Lindsay (not so much on the linked pages) is unquestionably Dirty Pictures, whatever you want to call it, but one of the things that always jumps out at me on high quality reproductions is the facial expressions. That man knew what "lascivious" meant, and some of his faces could be used in line version to illustrate that word in dictionaries, almost regardless of state of clothing.

GoblinHoney, agreed. There are some large images floating around (Google Images + image size will get you a little distance), but not to the level of resolution of some pieces I've seen reprinted in books.
posted by cupcakeninja at 1:56 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

He was quite the default illustrator for a lot of interesting projects. I may still have my copy of "The Letters of Rachel Henning" with pen illustrations by Norman Lindsay. The letters were written in the 19th century and published by The Bulletin (Australian periodical) in 1880 and then re-published as a serial by the Bulletin in the 1950s for which Norman Lindsay provided the illustrations, and which was then re-issued as a book with the illustrations in 1962.

The letters are full of amazing lines. From memory, "We have had to economise, so I am resigned to wearing repaired and patched clothing, as I would rather wear repaired and patched clothing, than give up having a house maid. There are ways to economise, but not to the extent that I will give up my maid."

My favourite Norman Lindsay anecdote: The Blue Mountains community had some very fundamentalist Christian communities whose members were advised to avoid the Lindsay property as the plein air proclivities of the household and its visitors meant that there was often activity in the bushes and undergrowth. As a result, the younger members of those communities would dare each other to approach those properties and report back to their comrades as to what they had learnt.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 8:09 PM on January 12 [1 favorite]