The Divinity of Sex by Charles Pickstone

Author:Charles Pickstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250086402
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

6

Painted Flesh

Sex and the Fine Art Tradition

Art and sex have always been bedfellows. From the earliest fertility goddesses through to the most luxuriant Victorian oil painting, from Exekias to Etty, from Michelangelo to Picasso, one can sense the charge of human sexuality informing, electrifying the artist’s vision and stirring the interest of the viewer – whether it is directly expressed through pictures of the human body, clothed or unclothed, or indirectly through rolling landscapes or still lifes of fruit bursting with vegetable fecundity.

It cannot be denied that one enjoys the majority of painting and sculpture primarily through the eyes, through the embodied sensation of looking, rather than through the brain and intellectual processes. The initial appreciation of a work of art – one’s immediate ‘gut feeling’ about it – is always somatic, something that is ultimately always even if indirectly related to touch, taste and feel. A baby learns about the world of objects by putting them in his or her mouth, and the instinct of sucking objects to get the feel of them never leaves us, even if only in the abstract. In a sense, looking at works of art is a sort of abstract touching (or even sucking). And if the body is important in relating to art, sexuality, that extreme form of being embodied, is never truly absent.

This applies not only to lush and sensual oil painting. Even the driest painting imaginable may have some sort of erotic charge. Take, for example, Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), the Dutch painter whose most famous works are rigid black grids of irregularly parallel horizontal and vertical straight lines, with some of the resulting squares filled in with primary colours. They are synonymous with all that is most restrained, unemotional and intellectual in art. On the surface, there is not a shred of emotion or sexuality in his work. Yet the historian Peter Gay in his book Art and Act, shows how Mondrian’s grids were the result of powerful sexual repression. He sees Mondrian as dominated by a strict and moral father, and sublimating through his art a sexuality that would otherwise have been intolerable. His grids are an iron mask; behind them hides the great painter’s damaged sexuality.

Had he been anyone else, he would have been just another fussy bachelor, starting affairs he could not consummate, driven back into himself by his awe of female superiority, staring at the provocative nudes that cater to such tastes … but fortunately for himself and for art he was Mondrian, an artist who could transform his neurosis into painting.1

Thus, like the celibate priest who has renounced sex and yet remains a highly sexual figure, Mondrian’s works are powerfully charged compositions, sexually.

Even abstract oil paintings without any obvious subject-matter are often clearly sensuous if not actually sensual. As Willem de Kooning (another well-known Dutch painter who, like Mondrian, emigrated to New York) famously commented, oil paint was invented precisely to portray human flesh. His own paintings, even the most abstract, are highly charged and sensual.

I began this chapter by implying a dichotomy between mind and body.

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