Modernism 2

When Goya was painting the Duchess of Alba, she apparently asked if he could paint her naked from memory. He apparently replied he would paint her with his spunk (presumably affectionately mixed into the paint). She then offered that if he did, they could have a nice weekend away together in the country.
When you are standing at the bus stop for the 388 watching the city girls go by when you are clearing off from Clearing on one mid balmy August Friday afternoon in 2012 this is a funny exchange to have in your head. It reminds you that love is brutal, mean and all consuming, and it brings back all kinds of memory, most of it along the lines of that is exactly how I felt too, quite a long time ago.
Sex and Modernism (I include Goya in the modernist sentiment) seems a far more elemental affair pre universal pornography- pre present technology. Goya's Maja looks strangely imagined, like a doll, like an image a man has of a woman as he longs for those thighs. Of course, she was teasing him. That is the brutality of love.
When I got home I opened a package that's just been republished after many years; Le Corbusier's 'Poem de L'Angle Doit'. It is full of fabulous sexy drawings. And when I turned the pages in awe I saw that it was also full of OUR FABULOUS SEXY DRAWING! Bad Corbu is no longer bad corbu at all, but clearly central to Corbu studies as a study in prep for line C4 (FLESH) and it's on our wall!
I can forgive Corbu scribbling over the rather nervy Eileen Grey sanctuary with his murals. It was a beastly thing to do, but modernism, if it did anything, certainly embraced the beastly. Even when Mondrian was abstaining on a diet of carrots ( on being offered a brothel, he remarked that every emission was a lost masterpiece!) he was being beastly. There's just no half measures for those crazy modernists.