Synopses & Reviews
From the surreal eroticism of Salvador Dali to the kitsch eroticism of Jeff Koons, erotic art has always inflamed opinion and, even today, such images are considered provocative, dangerous, and unwelcome in the public sphere.
Now Alyce Mahon, the feisty Irish art historian, takes us on an imaginative and engaging tour of erotic art in all its forms, including painting, sculpture, video art, installation, performance art, and photography. Mahon explores eroticism from its most romantic to its most explicit: from Impressionist Paris where the naked body signaled the rise of a new, modern world, to the contemporary scene where artists use eroticism to address the politics of race, gender, and sexual orientation. The book examines some of the key movements and moments in modern art history: from the birth of Realism with Courbet in Paris, to the Surrealist subversion of taboo, to Nazi propaganda's use of the heroic nude, to the soft-porn of Pop art, to the vogue for carnality in contemporary art in Los Angeles, Paris, and London. Indeed, Mahon provides a concise history of art in the twentieth century through the lens of eroticism, offering original insights into works of art that do not sit easily within popular notions of taste and that have provoked controversy and calls for censorship. Her discussion includes the work of such European and American artists as Egon Schiele, Hans Bellmer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nancy Goldin, Orlan, Franco B, and Annie Sprinkle.
With over a hundred illustrations, including sixty-five in full color, here is a strikingly written and stimulating history of eroticism in modern Western art.
About the Author
Alyce Mahon was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the Courtauld Institute in London. She is now Lecturer in Modern Art at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. She specializes in twentieth-century art and critical theory, with a particular research emphasis on Surrealism, French art and politics, and performance art.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Eroticism's Intent
Seeing Sexual Desire
The Erotic Tradition
Taboo and Transgression
1. The Rhetoric of the Nude
The Dynamics of Desire
Orientalism
New Masculinities
Female Loveliness
The End of the Age of Innocence
2. The Naked Truth
Painting Modern Life
Bathing Beauties
Male Bathers
3. Primitive Drives
Gauguin the 'Barbarian'
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
German Expressionism
Sigmund Freud, Vienna, and Egon Schiele
4. The Erotic Body between the Wars
Dada Beginnings
Weimar Eroticism
Male Fantasies
5. Surrealism's Erotic Politics
Sade Is 'Surrealist in Sadism'
Negrophilia and Surrealist Photography
Woman Surrealists
6. Erotic Art in Wartime and After
Surrealism in Exile
Modernist Abstraction and Cold War Politics
The Search for the Absolute
7. Eros and the 1960s
Pop Art and the All-American Nude
Andy Warhol
Performing the Erotic Body
8. Visual Pleasure and Identity Politics
Sexual Politics
Same-sex Politics
Race Politics
Ethnic Identity
9. Eroticism and the Culture Wars of the 1980s and the 1990s
Sexual Outlaws
The AIDS Crisis
Post Porn Modernism
Sex and Magic
The Black Male
10. Erotic Fragmentation and Abjection
Gender Trouble
'Bad Girls of Contemporary British Art'
Abject Suffering and Desire
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index