2 The concept of erotic art

A good proportion of the work of many great visual artists – Rubens, Ingres, Delacroix, Degas, Rodin, Gauguin, Matisse, Magritte, Munch, Klimt, Picasso, Modigliani – is unquestionably erotic. But what is it, precisely, for art to be erotic? It seems that, at a minimum, it must have sexual content. Though sexual content may be either overt or covert, let us first consider art with overt sexual content. Typically, this takes the form of depictions of unclothed or semi-clothed human beings, alone or accompanied, at rest or performing actions of a sexual nature. Yet for art to be accounted erotic, it must do more than represent the naked human body or otherwise make reference to sexual matters: not all art concerned in some way with sexuality is automatically erotic. Anatomical sketches of genitalia, a realistic study of a gynaecologist’s examining room, or a modern comic strip featuring pneumatic bimbos, are not erotic, despite the sexual content they include. Rather, erotic art is art that treats its sexual content in a particular way or projects a certain attitude towards it. Erotic art is art aimed at arousing sexual interest, at evoking sexual thoughts, feelings or desires in viewers, in virtue of what it depicts and how it is depicted, and which achieves some measure of success in doing so. The intent to awaken and reward sexual interest through what is depicted can be taken as criterial of at least central cases of erotic art. The erotic work of art does more than refer to or acknowledge human sexuality; rather, it expresses an involved attitude towards it, whether of fascination, obsession or delectation, and in addition invites the viewer to engage their imagination along similar lines.

Erotic art typically aims not only to activate the viewer’s sexuality but to reflect that of the artist. That is to say, erotic works usually embody a perspective on what is depicted that suggests sexual interest on the maker’s part. Furthermore, the sense of sharing in what at least appears to have been sexually stimulating to the artist often plays a causal role in the viewer’s own stimulation. It is worth emphasizing that the sexual response occasioned by erotic art occurs largely on the plane of imagination, consisting primarily of thoughts, images and feelings, and rarely goes as far as full physiological arousal; the upshot of engagement with erotic art is imagined desire as often as it is real desire.

As suggested above, the term ‘erotic art’, in its primary usage, covers art that is aimed at stimulating sexual thoughts and feelings in its target audience, and which at least minimally succeeds. But this gives way to two secondary usages, according to which fulfilling either the intentional condition or the success condition (somewhat modified) independently qualifies a work as erotic. On the first such usage, a work counts as erotic if it is ostensibly aimed at stimulating sexual thoughts and feelings, even when it does not succeed in doing so; on the second, a work counts as erotic if it succeeds noticeably in stimulating viewers sexually, even when it is not intended or even apparently intended to do so. In addition, for works of art that are erotic in the central sense, it is natural to employ ‘erotic’ as a comparative term as well as a classificatory one. There are works one describes as mildly erotic and those one describes as highly erotic, depending on the degree of sexual involvement they tend to sustain.

Finally, perhaps some works of art reasonably accounted erotic neither aim at nor achieve viewer arousal (in other words, sexual thoughts, feelings or sensations directed towards what is depicted), but are instead erotic merely in virtue of the fact that they facilitate the imagining of erotic states of others, without erotic involvement as such on the viewer’s part – without the viewer identifying with or entering into those states, either in reality or in imagination.

3 Instrumentally erotic art and anti-erotic art

With some erotic art, the evocation of erotic feelings is a secondary aim, employed or manipulated by the artist in order to achieve some further end, such as wry humour (for example, Tom Wesslemann’s caricatures of pulchritude, in his ‘Great American Nudes’ series, or Mel Ramos’s exaggeratedly voluptuous pin-ups), social commentary (Degas’s monotypes of brothel scenes), or psychological disorientation (Magritte’s or Dali’s recombinant sexual imagery). We might label such art ‘instrumentally’ erotic art. As a result of these secondary aims, the excitatory tendency of such works may be weakened or even wholly neutralized. In some limiting cases works are in effect about erotic art – they comment on or satirically appropriate the conventions and mechanisms of normal erotic art – but without being erotic in the primary sense, that is, without being ultimately aimed at sexually engaging the viewer. Such art may be accounted erotic in virtue of the fact that it leads the viewer to question the presuppositions and consequences, social and otherwise, of erotic responses, without inviting or even permitting viewers to have such responses.

Some other cases of works representing sexual matters without appearing clearly erotic serve to illuminate further the boundaries of the category:

These latter artists – Bacon, Freud, Pearlstein, Dubuffet – are not aptly described merely as non-erotic – as is, say, a Corot landscape or Chardin still life – but rather as anti-erotic. Thus in a broader sense they, unlike Chardin or Corot, are erotic after all, that is to say, concerned with sexuality in a way that reflects the sexual interests of the maker and engages those of the viewer, if not in a positive manner. De Kooning’s raw and primitivist images of women also come naturally to mind in this connection as well, though the case can be made that those images project a more ambivalent attitude to human sexuality than those of, say, Bacon – an admixture of terror, awe and admiration.