I don’t know, but I used to do that a lot. I give a pass to people who handle fruit in the grocery stores. I understand that. A lot can be determined by giving a peach or a plumb a slight squeeze, or a melon a knock with the knuckles. Every good cook knows that. Smell is important, too, as this requires one to place the fruit or vegetable dangerously close to the nasal sinuses, which can be considered abhorrent to some northern European and north American cultures. But packaged goods? I used to do that. I think it comes from when I was a kid. Holding a toy and looking at it from all angles fired the imagination.
As an adult, I did the same. I used to touch famous paintings in museums in Europe. Bad, I know. I set off a few alarms. But I did it so that I could say I did it—I ran my fingers across the brushstrokes of a Monet or Renoir; or the wild, fiery, manic knife-strokes of Van Gogh, thick with passion. He literally laid it on with a trowel. Used to drive my wife nuts. She stopped going with me. When I came back to the states, we didn’t go to museums for awhile. Orlando has Mickey Mouse, people don’t go there to see a Vermeer, for the powerful mouse leaves no vacuum for other culture. Anyway, I got out of the habit. Nevertheless, I still might touch a sculpture now and then well aware that the oils on my hand may slightly discolor the marble. But security is a lot more efficient nowadays and American guards aren’t known for slaps on the wrist.
But to run my fingers along the back of the thigh just under the gluteal fold of Apollonie Sabatier’sFemme+piqu%C3%A9e+par+un+serpent%2C&oq=Femme+piqu%C3%A9e+par+un+serpent%2C&gs_l=img.3..0i19j0i30i19l2.8971.8971.0.10201.1.1.0.0.0.0.131.131.0j1.1.0….0…1.2.64.img..0.1.131.X92uiI8ujdk ample derriere in the Musee d’Orsay is a memory that I cherish. She had a salon in Paris that, along with her beauty and intellect, attracted the brightest artists, writers, musicians and composers, actors, directors and stage designers in Europe. She was Baudelaire’s number one Fluer du Mal and he threatened suicide because she wouldn’t make love to him. He had the sympathy of his cohorts. Clésinger, in love with her like all the others, sculpted her reclining on his couch, life-size, and obviously writhing in the throes of orgasm. And he took his bloody time about it. He left nothing out, right down to lovingly sculpting the small amount of cellulite at the back of her upper thighs.
Afraid that his work was too pornographic for the annual showing at Salon de Paris, he attempted to disguise his subject’s condition by calling the work, Femme piquée par un serpent, (Woman Bitten by a Serpent), a reference to Eve in the Garden (and the highest honor to Sabatier; proclaiming her the prototypical woman, the perfect one that all others were made from—right down to the cellulite. Yes, we get the joke, Monsieur Clésinger. I think we all know what snake you’re referring to.
The Salon of 1847 refused to accept Clésinger’s opus, not because of the writhing, per sé. But because of the celulite. The argument was that, although the Salon tolerated nudes of Goddesses and allegorical Biblical figures in the past, this was by no means a Goddess. Goddesses did not have celulite and therefore the sculpture was pornographic—a three-dimensional depiction of a lowly mortal, and mortals could not be shown in the nude. It took a two-year trial to settle that. And another to years for Clésinger to win on appeal. I ran my fingers over those small indentations at the back of Mlle Sabatier’s thigh that got Clésinger in so much trouble because I liked the story, I liked what had been written about her, and I liked the numerous famous paintings she had posed for. I might confess to being a bit in love with her myself.
It’s a weird fetish, I know. But where I live now, there are no museums. There are too many priorities that need addressing, before one can afford to stock an art museum of famous works. So, the museums can rest easy, they are safe from my exploring fingers. But I understand the need to touch the things one desires. It brings yet one more sense into play and thus makes the experience just a bit more real. For just one moment in time—moment that can become a memory cherished for years afterward, you possess that one beautiful, otherwise unattainable thing.
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