In his excellent 2002 book Transgressions: The Offences of Art, lawyer and critic Anthony Julius outlines the “three defences” of art that has outraged public and critical sensibilities.
First, the “estrangement defence … insists that artworks exist to shock us into grasping some truth about ourselves, or about the world, or about art itself”. Second, the “formalist defence” displaces attention from content to form, and uses formalistic criteria as a justification of the shocking content. (Obviously this works best when the art is good-looking.) Third, the “canonic defence” is contextual and historical, relating the artwork under consideration to the tradition from which it emerges, a tradition it may also challenge.
In Eroticism and Art (Oxford), Alyce Mahon uses a combination of these three defences (though they can be mutually contradictory) in her overview of art and eroticism in the last century and a half in the West. Unlike Julius, she doesn’t go into argumentative detail about the usefulness of any particular defence, but then she’s not primarily concerned to defend such work: her chief project is to provide historical context and a general sense of development in art’s relation to the erotic, from Gustave Courbet’s notorious pudendum portrait, The Origin of the World (1866), to the mutant mannequins of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Tragic Anatomies (1996). Pity she doesn’t know about our own Steven Cohen; he’d have given her a run for her conceptual money.
Of course nudity, particularly female nudity, has always been a part of Western art. But until the latter part of the 19th century, such images were constrained by a set of rules that defined the propriety of what could and could not be portrayed. Manet’s Olympia (1863) was a key example of the breaking of those bounds — the courtesan he portrays looks directly at the viewer, confronting him/her in a way more demure images do not, making the play of sexual desire apparent instead of hiding it under the classical drapery (physical and mental) that formerly codified such desire.
From then on, and especially as the 20th century got going, the erotic seized ever more space in Western art. Camille Paglia would see this as the “return of the repressed”; for centuries, Christian mores suppressed blatant eroticism in art, but in the last century in particular, scopophilia, the compulsive gaze, was reborn with a vengeance in relation to culture. It is no coincidence that the 20th century was the movie century; the century in which, for the first time in half a millennium, images began to replace the written word as the most powerful and wide-spread form of cultural artefact.
Having been repressed for so long, the erotic became an important way for artists to talk about other repressions in society, to attack the status quo, or just to put personal and hitherto hidden desires on display — psychoanalysis, among other things, legitimised such disclosures.
After feminism, sexuality was recognised as political. Mahon sets up the critical frame in a chapter titled “The Rhetoric of the Nude”, then traces the story through its main developments: surrealism’s attempt to liberate the subconscious, the role of erotic art in the counter-culture explosion of the 1960s, and so on. Later chapters such as “Visual Pleasure and Identity Politics” and “Erotic Fragmentation and Abjection” bring us right up to the doorstep of the 21st century, and consider the ways critical theory (such as Julia Kristeva’s) has started to take the measure of such artworks.
Eroticism and Art makes up in sweep for what it lacks in detail. It touches on a huge range of artists and works, and the illustrations are excellent (most of them in colour). The breadth of its information alone will make it an invaluable reference work, the kind of text that is foundational for any study of the field. Before you get into the nitty-gritty with the likes of Julius, get the big picture here.