Kiss from a Pose

The story of Salome—both before and since Oscar Wilde’s infamous 1893 play—has always been bound up with visual representation. Indeed, Wilde himself was likely inspired by the works of French Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau (1826–98), who included images of Salome in more than 150 of his drawings and paintings throughout his career. Among these is The Apparition (1876), of which Moreau made several versions, all of them highly intricate scenes with a bejeweled Salome conjuring the severed head of John the Baptist as it hovers—glowing and bloodied—before her. In both Tattooed Salome (1874) and Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876), Moreau depicts the infamous “Dance of the Seven Veils,” with the titular princess illuminated in the foreground and Herod seated upon his throne in the background. In Tattooed Salome, the princess’s nude body is adorned with decorative patterns depicting a lotus flower and a set of eyes on her chest and torso, which were added by Moreau some 15 years after he initially started the painting. Salome Dancing Before Herod returns to this scene, with Herod and his executioner in full view, in an ornate palace likely inspired by the Alhambra in Spain.

The publication of Wilde’s play also had visual dimensions. In 1893, the British magazine Pall Mall Budget commissioned 20-year-old artist Aubrey Beardsley to create an illustration inspired by the French publication of Salomé. The work Beardsley submitted was rejected but subsequently published in another British periodical, The Studio. Ultimately titled The Climax, the work depicts Salome floating in the air holding John the Baptist’s Medusa-like head, with a pool of his blood giving rise to a single lotus flower. (In an earlier version of the illustration, Salome is floating above the phrase “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan, j’ai baisé ta bouche” [“I’ve kissed your mouth, Jochanaan, I’ve kissed your mouth”].) When Wilde saw Beardsley’s work, the playwright commissioned him to create ten full-page illustrations and a cover design for the first English edition of Salome. Beardsley’s black-and-white Art Nouveau style was heavily influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. His sweeping, exaggerated figures, androgynous bodies, and abstract scenes perfectly encapsulate the erotic grotesquerie of Wilde’s play.

American artists also took note of the salacious work. Richard Bruce Nugent, a queer writer and painter active during the Harlem Renaissance, completed a series of paintings and line drawings inspired by the Salome story. Mrs. Herod (1930) shows a seated nude woman in profile, her skin tinted pink and her hair a pale purple. Another work from the series depicts a woman, possibly dancing, with green hair and eyes, her nipples and mouth both a bright yellow. Less morbid and solemn than conventional renderings of the biblical tale, Nugent’s figures are decidedly unadorned, vibrant, and self-assured; their sensuality seems not to signal depravity, excess, or doom but rather a kind of joyous autonomy.

Three decades before Nugent, another Black American painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, also took Salome as his subject. Taking a much different approach, Tanner’s canvas is almost mysterious—Salome is a ghostlike figure draped in transparent cloth, her face obscured by deep blue shadow. What we glimpse is neither her seductive dance nor her necrophilic union with John the Baptist, but perhaps the moment when she is first presented with her reward. Her posture (almost backing away from the severed head) and her gaze (staring directly at it) suggest the simultaneous curiosity and revulsion with which Salome engages the prophet.

Depictions of Salome in the visual arts far precede Wilde’s play, his inspirations, and its legacies. In the late medieval and Renaissance periods, paintings of the biblical princess with John the Baptist’s head were produced by artists like the Italians Giovanni di Paolo, Titian, Caravaggio, and Artemisia Gentileschi, as well as the German Reformation painter Lucas Cranach the Elder. In the 19th and 20th centuries, painters as varied as Gustav Klimt, Joseph Glasco, and Izabela Gustowska have similarly found inspiration in the controversial legend.