Porn Or Art: Marquis De Sade Still Shocking Paris 200 Years Later

The recently opened exhibition Sade, attacking the sun at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris carries an unusual warning - a first tip that this is not your normal cultural experience.

“The violent nature of some of the works and documents may shock some visitors,” the museum advises, reminiscent of ads for movies in the 1950s designed to shock - and attract - audiences.

Many in the media have wondered if the exhibition is “art or porn” and some have accused the museum of resorting to “sex sells” tactics in order to seduce visitors.

“High art or vile pornography?” one headline asks. “An unreconstructed libertine who made debauchery into high art or a vile pornographer who tried to justify rape, murder and pedophilia?” posits AFP in an article widely published around the world.

Such observations were particularly widespread around the museum's release of a short promotional video (that you can watch at your own risk) of intertwined naked bodies writhing over a black background as the camera pans back to show the world “Sade” formed by their bodies.

In response to the outrage from various fronts, YouTube banned the video from being viewed by minors due to its sexual nature.

In a seemingly unrelated event, an 80-foot high inflatable green sculpture titled “Tree” created by the American artist Paul McCarthy erected in the ritzy Place Vendome has been removed after it was vandalized.

“A Christmas Tree or a Giant Sex Toy?” was the question asked by critics and passersby, and echoed loudly in social media.

“Vandals deflate giant 'sex toy' sculpture in Paris,” the Telegraph reported.

McCarthy is no stranger to controversy around his work.

Controversy courted de Sade, the notoriously reviled 18^th century French nobleman, writer and libertine who for two centuries has provoked outrage and scandal even as he is still considered one of the most darkly influential figures of European culture.

It's that influence that the Orsay Museum explores in the exhibition which runs until January 25, 2015.

In his BBC column “Who’s afraid of the Marquis de Sade?” Jason Farrago wanders: “The radical 18th Century libertine left a profound mark on our culture. He’s everywhere – but why does he still scare us?”

“Alphonse Donatien de Sade (1740–1814) transformed the history of both literature and the arts, first as an underground writer, and later by becoming a veritable legend in his lifetime. The Divine Marquis's work is a radical questioning of issues of limits, proportion, excess, notions of beauty, ugliness, the sublime and the body image," the museum explains.

Organized by de Sade expert Annie Le Brun, the exhibition addresses topics like “the ferocity and singularity of desire, deviation, extremes, the weird and the monstrous, desire as a principle of excess and imaginary recomposition of the world.”

Along with the well-documented influence of the deviant de Sade in literature from Flaubert to Baudelaire, the exhibition includes many works by important painters and sculptors depicting violent, horrific and explicitly sexual scenes - thus the museum's warnings.

Among the artists included are Eugene Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Francis Bacon, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Pablo Picasso.

"Scene of War in the Middle Ages" by Degas, for example, shows naked women cowering and left for dead by horsemen, which according to the curators puts into images “the ambiguous relationship that can exist between murder and sexuality, as first formulated in de Sade's writings.”

In Picasso's "The Rape of the Sabine Women", where a soldier’s horse is trampling a woman and child, the curators find that “even the horse appears to be smiling sadistically."

The various works are accompanied by quotes from de Sade's writings and presented mixing periods, authors, and styles. “A systematic savagery to the overall presentation,” as described by Le Figaro. “A whirlwind of periods, well known or not known works, artistic or documentary, erotic or pornographic, all mingled gaily.”

The curators have explained how the world of art has been populated by "thousands of scenes of killings, kidnappings and rapes. Crimes already abounded in the mythology of the classical age.”

According to curator Le Brun and co-curator Laurence des Cars, the exhibition looks at the extent to which Sade "steeped in rebellion, encouraged the representation of what cannot be said."

The show has been created to celebrate the bicentenary of his death.

Le Figaro reports that the exhibition had been originally planned for The Louvre Museum. “But management declined. Self-censorship? Anyway, it was bravely reactivated by the President of the Orsay, Guy Cogeval, who loves knocking down the walls of art history.”

“Just around the corner, the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits is presenting an exhibition of Sade’s letters and books, including the manuscript for his audacious and stomach-turning novel The 120 Days of Sodom," the BBC explains. "Both should allow viewers to think more deeply about Sade’s time and ours, and how thoroughly the one informs the other.”