In this video, frequent GLR contributor Richard M. Berrong discusses the catalog of a recent art exhibit centered around a single painting, Gustave Moreau’s Salomé Dancing Before Herod. Joris-Karl Huysmans re-interpreted it as a work of kinky eroticism in his classic French decadent novel, Against Nature. Oscar Wilde then introduced that novel to England in The Picture of Dorian Gray as a work containing “the sins of the world,” and in his French play Salomé, written for Sarah Bernhardt. Wilde added now familiar elements: Salomé’s demand for John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter, her kissing his cold lips when it arrives, Herod’s order that she be crushed to death. The tale of Salomé was launched as a literary archetype of kinky sex and sadomasochism..
