Bruno Schultz

There is a ton of BDSM art out there, and most of it is pretty mediocre. In general, it seems to be by people who had fetishy interests before they were artists, and looked for another medium to express their fantasies. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it makes for kind of ordinary images. An exception to this is Bruno Schultz (1892 - 1942). Schultz was a Polish Jew, trained as a fine artist in Vienna, and a writer of strange middle-European stories like Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.

He also illustrated his work, and rather discreetly produced dozens of drawings of small, cringing men kneeling at the feet of tall, beautiful, indifferent women. They capture perfectly -- for me, anyway -- a powerful mood of dominance and submission, in a way that Sardax, for example, never quite manages. The women are at ease, relaxed and confident. The men are all hunched over, mouselike.

Schultz was, sadly, murdered by the Nazis, but a substantial body of his work survived the war. One fantastic collection is The Drawings of Bruno Schultz, edited by Jerzy Ficowski, and published by Northwestern University Press. The following images are from that book.