Bruno Zach

Bruno Zach's The Riding Crop is an icon of interwar erotic art. It depicts an athletic woman who stands proudly, wearing gartered stockings tied with bows, and a tightly fitting dress which has slipped down her arms to reveal her breasts. From the front the viewer glimpses the phallic riding crop which is held in the woman's hands behind her back and is only fully revealed when the bronze is rotated. This sensuous attribute identifies the subject as a dominatrix or a mistress. Zach thus succeeds in conjuring a sense of the carefree nighttime sex scene of 1920s Berlin and, more specifically, Zach's native Vienna before the political landscape darkened and Europe was engulfed by the Nazi regime and the Second World War.

In his seminal book, Art Deco Sculpture, Victor Arwas described Zach as a: 'creator of tall, athletic, independent women in bronze and bronze and ivory. He produced highly sophisticated women dressed in leather trouser suits, insolently smoking cigarettes, high kicking can-can dancers, proud amazons, bathers clearly capable of swimming the Channel both ways without pause ... kinky images of women in slips or gartered stockings holding whip or riding crop, swirling skirted girls fighting the wind, haughty women naked beneath a parted fur coat. He showed both the healthy, outdoor pursuits and the dream mistresses of sado-masochistic Berlin, Vienna and Paris between the wars (op. cit., p. 246).

In some respects Zach's model is the sculptural accompaniment to Egon Schiele's sensuous partial nudes wearing stockings or boots, whilst being imbued with the same sense of self confidence seen in Tamara de Lempicka's evocative Art Deco portraits. The bronze finds a pictorial equivalent in the contemporary erotic paintings of the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano.

The Riding Crop is one of Zach's most canonical sculptures. The present bronze is cast in the rare larger size (83cm) of which another was sold at Christie's London on 1 May 2013, lot 58 for £97,875 (aggregate).

RELATED LITERATURE

V. Arwas, Art Deco Sculpture, London, 1992, p. 246