Museum of Fine Ass: Sexuality in Art
Lily McElhone (she/her)
In the last year, the internet has seen a dramatic increase in both supply and demand of online erotic content, and in turn, severe pushback by social media executives and legislators alike to keep sexual content off of sites such as Instagram and Patreon. This has sparked conversations around what we consider obscene or pornographic, and how we should be responding to the proliferation of explicit content online and in real life. While this is a topic worth exploring, there’s not an awful lot I can say that hasn’t been said more eloquently by someone else, so I’m not going to get into the politics of it all right now. I will indulge in, however, a small exploration of five erotic artworks that stick out in my mind as noteworthy. I realised halfway into writing this that all of these works are by men, which is a curious subconscious decision for someone who spent basically her entire art history degree obsessing over the gender politics of art institutions...
1. Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. 1647-52. Italy.
This sexy slab of marble, Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is the central sculptural group in an aedicule, or an ornamental shrine, in the Santa Maria della Vittoria church in Rome. Its placement in the category of ‘erotic’ art is tenuous at best, but this is exactly why I think it deserves a spot in this slutty little article. The piece depicts a moment from St. Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography in which she experienced transverberation, or religious ecstasy—a euphoric state of heightened consciousness and spiritual awareness bestowed upon mortals by God—in the form of an angel stabbing (fucking) her repeatedly with a golden sword. This is what she wrote of her experience:
“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails […] and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God.
I don’t personally understand how anyone could read this as anything but erotic, but maybe that’s just me.
Everything about Bernini’s sculpture screams sensuality, heightened drama, and opulence. The way St Teresa’s head tilts back with her eyes closed and mouth agape, the illusion of movement in the folds of her robe, her hand grasping at the stone beneath her, and the smirking angel’s hand delicately lifting the saint’s robe as if to expose her skin, all contribute to the eroticism of the artwork. Look at the sculpture and read the above excerpt again and tell me she wasn’t actually just talking about cumming.
Or perhaps every time we reach orgasm, we are simply experiencing God’s love. Who knows!
2. Tako to Ama (蛸と海女) (The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife) by Katsushika Hokusai. 1814. Japan.
Hokusai is easily the best-known Japanese woodblock print (ukiyo-e) artist in history. He was prolific, producing over 30,000 pieces in his lifetime, and prints such as The Great Wave off Kanagawa are among the most replicated artworks of all time.
Like most ukiyo-e artists, Hokusai also made shunga; erotic (and often incredibly explicit) woodblock prints, usually published in 12-page books called enpon. Shunga was lucrative, and in high demand. It was consumed by all social classes, and by men and women alike. While the government made repeated attempts to censor such explicit images, their efforts rarely made a dent in shunga production and sales..
This particular shunga work, from the three-volume series Kinoe no Komatsu, depicts a large octopus performing cunnilingus (oral sex) on a nude woman, evidently an ama (shell-diver), while a smaller octopus kisses her and fondles her nipple. The text surrounding the scene quotes the woman and her tentacled lovers expressing their mutual pleasure. Chitinous beak aside, the octopus evidently knows how to treat his girl right.
Hokusai wasn’t the first to depict sexual relations between human women and octopodes, with such scenes being depicted in netsuke carvings dating as far back as the 1600s. This subject matter continues to be explored today, namely in hentai, pornographic anime, or manga. Next time you’re in the mood for tentacle porn, give thanks to the long history of cephalopod erotica behind it.
3. The Great Masturbator by Salvador Dalí. 1929. France.
Salvador Dalí’s relationship with sex and sexuality was complex to say the least, making him well-suited to the Freudian preoccupations of the Surrealists. As a pre-teen, Dalí’s father showed him images of bodies mutilated by advanced STIs, instilling in him a great fear of sexual contact. He was insecure about the size of his penis, and apparently was deathly afraid of female genitalia. It wasn’t until his marriage to Gala, a Russian socialite ten years his senior with an insatiable appetite for sex, in the same year he completed The Great Masturbator, that he finally managed to do the deed. While his interest in intercourse was minimal, he was a big fan of jacking off and advocated for masturbation as an STI-safe alternative to good old fashioned fucking.
At first glance, there’s little about The Great Masturbator that would suggest anything erotic, the only real sexual signifier being the woman’s head and shoulders facing a man’s crotch and legs toward the upper right-hand side. Dalí paints his own face as a pale-yellow amorphous mass, apparently based on a rock formation he saw on the Spanish coast. His elongated nose rests on the ground, supporting the rest of his head, which is topped by a precarious stack of rocks and seashells. A grasshopper with an abdomen teeming with ants covers his mouth. The mass of the head is at once so organic and fleshy in its curves, yet so artificial in colour and retaining the solidity of the rock that inspired it. It’s an agonising image, full of incoherent and abstractly sexual images that synergise to form a deeply uncomfortable whole. It’s sexually charged but also totally repressed, totally anxious. I think that’s why I like it so much. It’s erotic and yet it has little to do with desire.
4. Georgia O’Keeffe, Torso No. 11 by Alfred Stieglitz. 1931. USA.
Stieglitz will forever be one of my favourite photographers, primarily because of the way he turns three-dimensional scenes and objects into abstracted geometric compositions with just a camera. In the same way he compartmentalises the view of the Flatiron building in Manhattan, here he turns the nether regions of his muse and wife, painter Georgia O’Keeffe, into a collection of shapes, lines, and surfaces. Her amply-pubed labia form a dark, gem-like diamond shape in the centre of the image, breaking up the consistent surface of her smooth legs. Every line is on a diagonal, and there are few right angles. The cropping of the image minimises the presence of curved lines, creating something totally geometric and delicious.
Some would label the image as objectifying, but I challenge them to come up with a way to achieve the same artistic goal in a way that humanises the subject. Breaking images down to the most essential of their parts was kind of the whole point. However, feminist art critics are justified in commenting on the way that Stieglitz’s images of O’Keeffe totally shaped the public’s reception of her own paintings, even to this day. Her paintings of expansive, rolling desert landscapes and close-up views of the anatomy of flowers are persistently read as sexual in nature. Anything pink, anything folded, anything with symmetry in her work, is read as a yonic symbol. Biographical knowledge of an artist can be a useful tool for looking at artworks, but it can also be restrictive and reductive.
5. Untitled (Lisa Taylor in bathtub with tray of perfume bottles) by Chris Von Wangenheim. 1974. USA.
This photograph appeared in Vogue in 1974, which I think is brilliant because she is not wearing any clothes. A hill I am willing to die on is that good fashion photography is about so much more than just selling clothes. I do not know this woman, and seldom do I find myself oiled up in a bathtub holding a mirrored tray covered in luxury perfumes, and yet this image conjures up such a distinct atmosphere for me. It’s frivolous and totally unrealistic; why is she wet when the bath is empty? Why is she putting on perfume if she is in the bath and will simply wash away the fragrance? Why are the bottles balanced so precariously around the rim of the tray? These unanswerable questions teach us that an image does not have to follow the rules of our world to effectively build a world of its own.
The sensuality, the wetness of her skin, the utter nonchalance are distinctly pre-AIDS pandemic, and pre-Reagan-era return to moral purism. It doesn’t matter if we can’t distinguish the exact brands of the perfumes, because the image was created not to sell individual consumable items, but the fantasy, the lifestyle, the mood as a whole, something rarely seen in commercial publications like Vogue in recent years. And while these elements place this photo firmly in the 1970s, aesthetically speaking, it is ahead of its time, with the saturated colour and intense flash being fairly typical of 1980s and 1990s fashion photography.
Everything about this photograph gives me a little thrill. The deep lustre of the black bathtub; the sense of freshness and fertility evoked by the pale green orchids; the way the tray sits between the model’s parted legs; how the pink perfume bottle only just conceals her nipple; and the way the mirrored tray conjures up images of debauched New York City parties, with lines upon lines of cocaine. It’s a sensory affair—we can’t help but imagine the steamy slickness of her skin, the way the perfumes smell, the warmth of the only-maybe-present bathwater.
Sometimes, I want to lick this photograph.