European art has created some of the most unique and compelling examples of sex as art the world will ever know. The strange thing about European Christians is that their art can be exceedingly sexy but they aren’t supposed to be sexy at all. Saint George could shove his pole down the vagina dentata of the dragon and get away with it, but try that with your shrew wife and there was a huge out cry.
The first time sex appeared in European art without the disguise of some kind of dragon, she needed a powerful protector, the Medicis. They hired Donatello to sculpt a David that coupled frontal nudity with the grace of a girl. This prepared the way for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1485), who’s nakedness coupled poetry with sensuality. Suddenly sex, the common hooker, became a sophisticated exotic dancer in the temple of Art. Through the renaissance she danced rearranging her veil just before it got uncomfortable. The first veil was Greek Mythology – as long as it was Greek it was ok. As long as it was a naked Cupid with his ass in the air, kissing his naked mother, Venus, while fondling her tit, in the Mannerist painting by Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time (c. 1545), – it was ok. Sex managed to dance her way through countless lurid paintings of myths, naked nymphs, raping gods and above all lots of nudity – all things proper society wasn’t allowed to indulge in but artist were hired to paint – sexual fantasies for the repressed, frustrated Christian rich.
My favorite sexy painting, and this time the veil is morality, is Lucretia (c. 1537) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, who painted for the Saxon court, a very small sophisticated and sexually perverse little group. Lucretia is killing herself because she was raped, an example of what a moral woman should do and a very sobering subject. However, the opening of her dress is a vaginal shape from neck to belly, where she is about to plunge the knife. But that’s not enough: both her sleeves are bright orange vagina-like affairs pierced by the flesh of her arms. I thought this couldn’t be the artist’s intent but a shape is a shape and I would say the rape is still going on while Lucretia looks coolly to the side with her diddling finger poised at her crotch. When I googled this painting, I was shocked to find that Cranach did many Lucretia paintings for the court, so many that Sotheby’s nickednamed her Venus in Furs. So we must assume that Cranach knew his audience well and was fully aware that the subversive sexuality of his painting was heightened by it’s moralistic disguise …perhaps the words I’m looking for are beautifully ascetically perverted.
By the time Baroque rolls around, sexy ecstasy was dancing wildly in the streets with only a bit of religion to cover her, her most perverse veil by far – and this time the Church of God was her patron. She was over the top, twisting outlandishly in the robes and attitude of The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1645 – 1652) by Berninni, as she anticipates penetration by the arrow of a lovingly sadistic angel. And the French Court of Louis the XIV had Fragonard, who didn’t think sex needed a veil anymore. She just needed a lot of giggling Cupids to egg her on.
In the Romantic period her costumes ranged from a Moroccan mass murder in the Death of Sardanapalus (1827) to bare breasted Liberty Leading the People (1830) – bare breasted so that men would follow her to their death like rats following the Pied Pipper. To this day in our culture sex always lingers around death, the final climax. With the pre-Raphelite Ophelia (1894) sex floats quietly down river wrapped in the arms of death and we feel a longing to kiss something already gone.
There were always backlashes against sex: neo-classism, realism, cubism: but Europe wasn’t ready to give up her sexual pleasures yet, so a new veil was arranged for her, a political agenda: Good wives were weak, unsexy, and nonthreatening whereas an uncontrolled sexy woman was an evil whore dragging innocent men into the gutter, proving it was not man’s fault that he had mistresses and saw prostitutes. The fashion was to paint women as overtly sexy and therefore evil as possible. Sex became a circus act; she embraced animalism, kissing the famous Sphinx or fucking Leda’s Swan. For one of the more twisted painters, Franz Von Stuck, she had an enormous, evil black python curling around her fleshy limbs. She was a vampire to Munch, and a murderess for Moreau, dancing as Salome with St Sebastion‘s head on a plate. As Judith she smiled while cutting off her husband’s head. Symbolism set the stage for her most unique turn-ons yet. Sex went to places that only exist in the imagination and there she discovered the female body in exotic poses, in fantastic situations on surreal shores, things that only our subconscious could recognize while we lay helpless in the dark, pretending she was a dream.
Sadly, the strip tease really ended when sex got a better job in the movies and advertising, where she lies spread-eagle for money. Now we sit alone in the dark, where we are forced to watch larger-than-life people copulating without us and in a most super-real and intimidating way. I’m not sure that leaves people feeling very sexy when they return to their normal-size life. Sex no longer danced after world war two. She was eviscerated by Bacon and tortured by Beckman but it wasn’t very sexy.
In America she never really caught on: Hopper’s nudes were awkward and Tomas Benton’s subject matter fought with his sexy line. Then Puritan America banished sex from the temple of art. With abstract art they the figure was removed from painting. It’s hard to be sexy without involving the figure. Georgia Okeefe was a little ray of light out in the dessert. Then Minimalism crushed even the wavy line. Sex was down for the count. Dicks shriveled under the cynicism of Pop art. Conceptual art threw out painting altogether. Bravely sex tried to sneak back when Gay became popular. Mapplethorpe was so sexy that the little Puritans ran around gagging. Judy Chicago reduced every famous woman to a cunt on a plate in her Dinner Party piece (1974 – 1979) as if to say to the world, “This is what you do with it, you eat it, you don’t just fuck it.”
I thought that sex would have a come back when there were suddenly so many women artists. The feminist show “Whack!” (2007) at the Geffin downtown LA destroyed any illusion that bodies could be used for anything other than functioning, complaining flesh. There were clinical tapes of women discovering their labia, news footage of girls pretending to be whores for an art project, unattractive nudity, boring discourse on the female with diagrams and subtexts. It was purposely not beautiful and about as sexy as a dish of cold water. Sabotaged by my own gender, I never thought the kiss of Judas would come from my sisters.
There are some artists who verge on sexy: Louise Bougious’s stuffed bodies or Dumas’s autopsied bodies; but these cannot compare with how uniquely and devotedly male artists have painted the nude in the most sexy, twisted and beautiful ways. Why don’t women artists introduce men as sex objects, returning the compliment. Men are sexy in the movies, and in advertising they are sexier than women, but apparently art will never again speak with the double tongue of cool morality and her hot sexy sister, depravity. Too bad, the combo was great.
Artillery Magazine Vol 4 no. 3 JAN/FEB 2010