14/11/2025
If you're shocked by these blasphemous 19th century prints of naked Satan-worshipping women surrounded by giant flaming c**k statues...good. The artist would be pleased. Félicien Rops (1833-1898) delighted in scandalising his audience.
And clearly so do I, because these works will be on display at as part of 'Blood Is Thicker: Jason Greig' opening Nov 29. Curated by Aaron Lister and I ( ) the exhibition places the work of legendary New Zealand printmaker Jason Greig in conversation with some of the weirdest, darkest works in art history.
Rops is just one of them. A leading provocateur of the Decadent movement in late-19th century France, he championed perversity and moral decline as both symptom and subject of modern life. Inverting Christian iconography, Rops used erotic and satanic imagery to expose the hypocrisies and moral decline of bourgeois virtue.
But Rops didn't just depict decadence-- he lived it. He spent his later years living in an incestuous menage-a-trois with two sisters who ran a successful Paris fashion house. "The love of brutal pleasures," he wrote, "has glued to our faces a sinister mask."
He looked into the abyss not to moralise, but to reveal what already festers beneath the skin of civilisation. More than a century later, you just have to read the news to see how right he was. There are still plenty of Grade A perverts out there today who would be quick to condemn these artworks as obscene or evil...while quietly indulging their own brutal pleasures behind closed doors.
🩸Blood Is Thicker: Jason Greig opens at The Dowse on Nov 29. A partnership project between and
