Venuses in Red Chalk by Mihaly von Zichy

Here are some fine nudes by the Hungarian/Russian painter and illustrator Mihaly von Zichy (1827-1906).  Zichy was born in Austro-Hungary and studied in Budapest before moving to St Petersburg in 1847.

He stayed in the city and made a name for himself there as an artist and illustrator.  He was the most fantastic draftsman, as these pictures show.  Many of his works focus on the life of the Russian court.  He moved to Paris in 1874 and lived there for three years before travelling back to Hungary then to Vienna and Venice. Following a trip to the Caucasus he resettled in St Petersburg in 1883.

These days he is most famous for his strikingly animated erotic works, many of  which were issued as sets of lithographs at around the turn of the century.  It is probably fair to say that these are some of the best erotic drawings ever produced and we will look at some of them over on our The Seduction of Venus blog shortly.

Agent Triple P always preferred red chalk or Conte crayon for his own figure work in the past.  The warm red tones, especially on coloured paper, work particularly well for nudes.

Flexible Venus 1: Dancer in a lilac tutu

Agent Triple P would never claim to be an aficionado of ballet, although he has attended a fair few in the company of ballet-loving ladies.  We have seen ballet in London, Berlin, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Vienna, Toronto, Hanoi and probably a few other places we have forgotten about.

Whilst Triple P can understand the appeal of ballet he remembers being rather surprised, on attending his first performance, at the amount of noise the dancers made when thumping hard on to the stage.  It took something away from the experience, which is why we think it works better on TV where you just get the music and no thumping!

Although we haven't gone out with any dancers per se we have known  some who have had dance training (quite a lot in several cases) and the thought of dancers has always held a certain erotic frisson for Triple P.  There are four things Triple P finds particularly alluring about dancers: the toned legs and slender figures (we appreciate a skinny girl),  the clothing, the physical poise and, last but by no means least, the demonstrable flexibility.

One girl we knew did regular jazz and tap classes to keep in shape and her legs, although pleasingly soft to the touch had this iron tone beneath the surface like silk riding over tungsten carbide.  Stroking her legs was a true pleasure, especially when she flexed her muscles and you could feel her underlying strength.

There are two attractive aspects of dance dress.  Firstly, the performance wear, which for classical ballet features that strangely attractive garment the tutu. This Russian dancer is wearing a fetching lilac example of the now almost ubiquitous Balanchine/Karinska Tutu whose softer profile was, nevertheless, radical when it first appeared in 1950 as an alternative to the stiffer wired "pancake" tutu.  The success of the tutu, which on reflection is, of course, an utterly ridiculous garment, relies on the emphasis it gives to the dancer's legs.

Dance practice wear tends to be an artfully created melange of all sorts of contrasting pieces of clothing which, nevertheless, needs to allow full movement whilst keeping the legs warm.  One of Triple P's lady friends had got the wearing of legwarmers, skirts, vests, short cardigans and scarfs down to a fine art.  There were so many items of clothing but all so skimpy that they barely made a costume in total.  Which, of course, is the real trick.

Properly trained dancers are usually easy to identify by the way they move, hold their bodies and even the way they stand. Girls who habitually stand with their feet in a "T" position have probably had a lot of ballet training.  Triple P finds this almost unconscious elegance very appealing.

This young lady has had classical training as she is able to go en pointe a technique which requires literally years of practice starting at the barre and great muscular strength (and not just in the legs).

Although the idea is to extend the line of the leg and make the feet look elegant in reality most ballet dancers have terrible feet; the rigours of going en pointe giving them calluses, bleeding toenails, bunions, bursitis and many other nasty ailments.  You have to suffer for art!

This sequence of pictures was recently sent to us by our particular friend S with whom we have been to several ballets in Canada.  A young lady who did a lot of ballet as a youngster she well knows the effort needed to look effortless!

Triple P confesses that every time he sees an attractive ballerina in a tutu his mind always turns to exciting thoughts of flexibility and minimal ballet clothes so this set of photos is most welcome!

Female dancers' flexibility is their most obvious source of erotic appeal, as our Russian girl exemplifies in this final splendid study, but we will look at flexibility and the erotic shortly.

Design for The Red Sultana by Léon Bakst (1920)

This sensuous harem girl is probably none other than Scheherazade herself in this "costume" design by Russian artist Léon Samoilovitch Bakst.  Bakst was born Lev Samoilovich Rosenberg in Grodno in what is now Belarus in May 1866.  He studied art in St Petersburg and Paris adopting the non-Jewish sounding name Bakst (from his mother's family) at the time of his first exhibition in 1889.

Self portrait

In 1898 he began an association with Sergei Diaghilev which eventually led to Bakst becoming the artistic director of the Ballets Russes where he concentrated on stage and costume design.  Incidentally, Rimsky-Korsakov's widow, the formidable, Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova, wrote to Diaghilev protesting about him using her late husband's music for his ballet in 1910.

Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev by Bakst

Although Bakst continued to paint conventional portraits and other paintings gradually he evolved a distinctive illustrative style that had an effect on the Fauvists and, indeed, the whole Art Deco movement. Bakst also travelled to North Africa and studied with the French orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme.  In turn, one of Bakst students was Marc Chagall.

Model (1905)

He worked on productions of, amongst others, Scheherazade (1910), The Firebird (1910) Carnaval (1910), Narcisse (1911), Le Spectre de la Rose (1911), and Daphnis and Chloé (1912) for Diaghilev.  In 1922 he broke off his relationship with the Ballets Russes and Diaghilev, his final collaboration being La Princesse Endormie in 1921.  He died in Paris, where he had spent most of his active life, in 1924.

Costume design for Russian ballerina Ida Rubenstein as Cléopatre (1909)

The featured painting could never have been meant to be a serious costume design, even in somewhere as liberal as Paris in 1920, but it is a splendid confection that exudes a sleepy sensuality.