Antonio Fillol and the visibility of sexual violence

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Loida Roca

“Me limitaba a pintar en él una de esas brutalidades que de tiempo en tiempo

realiza la bestia que el hombre lleva dentro”. ¹

Antonio Fillol

Antonio Fillol Granell (1870-1930) is undoubtedly a significant yet often overlooked figure in the history of Spanish art. Born in Valencia to humble origins and guided by republican ideals, Fillol’s work reflects the paradigms and contradictions of the turn of the century. Fillol committed to the naturalist movement, akin to Zola, used his artistic skill to critically and objectively portray the realities of society’s periphery. These artistic and ideological choices led to considerable controversy. The Human Beast (1897) and The Satyr (1906) stand out as particularly contentious pieces. Noteworthy for their superb composition and sublime realism, these works provoked outrage among conservative critics due to their depiction of prostitution and sexual assault.

The depiction of rape and sexual violence has long been present in art, reflecting a predominantly male artistic imagination. Such violence has often been obscured through various mechanisms, such as idealisation, which represented rape through mythological or historical themes. Major art museums display numerous examples of this under the poetic title of “abductions”, where suffering is evident on the protagonists’ faces, yet their bodies are eroticised, presented naked in line with the aesthetic standards of different eras, posed in suggestive and theatrical manners. This mode of representation facilitates the dehumanisation of women and, consequently, the eroticisation of rape. Notable examples include Rubens’s The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1616), Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina (1621-22), Francisco Pradilla’s The Rape of the Sabine Women (1874), and Jacques-Louis David’s The Abduction of the Sabine Women (1799), among others.

Few artists, like Fillol, have managed to make sexual violence visible rather than eroticising or obscuring it through mythological or historical scenes. An example of such visibility is found in Degas’s Interior (The Rape), painted between 1868 and 1869. This large-scale genre painting depicts the moments leading up to a sexual assault and, like The Human Beast (1897) and The Satyr, avoids the use of nudity to convey the distress of the situation. Far more explicit was Ana Mendieta’s (1948-1985) performative work, Rape Scene (1973), which employed her own body in a stark and brutal manner. Mendieta’s intention was to protest against the rape and murder of a university colleague.

This brief analysis does not seek to engage in the contemporary trend of cancelling iconic works such as those mentioned, but rather highlights the need to reflect on the prevalent representation of this violent use of the female body, whether idealised or explicit.

Returning to Fillol’s oeuvre and considering the use of the female body in art, another noteworthy piece is Flor desechada (Discarded Flower) (1906), which represents a sensual female nude symbolising the loss of virginity. The striking aspect here is that while this nude was accepted without issue by the jury of the 1906 General Fine Arts Exhibition, The Satyr was expelled from the same event for being deemed immoral.

The objectification and use of female bodies were satirically condemned nearly a century later by the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls. In a striking action in 1985, they displayed a large banner featuring an image of Ingres’s The Grande Odalisque (1814) with a gorilla mask. The banner read: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? Less than 5% of artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of nudes are female.” This campaign underscored what had already occurred with The Satyr and Discarded Flower: while women’s bodies, as objects, would always find a place in artistic spaces, their narratives would not. In early 2015, during a conference at Matadero Madrid, the Guerrilla Girls noted with irony that updated data from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York showed only 4% of represented artists were women, while 76% of nudes were female.

Fillol was a socially engaged painter whose denunciation of inequalities was evident in his continued depiction of taboo subjects despite facing significant repression. His work highlighted the specific violence that women endured due to and through sex. It is therefore not surprising that in the contemporary Spanish art scene, institutions such as the Museo del Prado have revisited Fillol’s controversial pieces. Works like The Human Beast and The Satyr have endured censorship and now engage in new dialogues with 21st-century viewers, who, to their surprise, find themselves connected to these works from over a century ago.

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¹ I limited myself to painting one of those brutalities that, from time to time, the beast within man perpetrates.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons