The Shape of Desire, Eroticism in Art - PART I of II
- Diamond Zhou
- May 10
- 12 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
May 10th, 2025
The Shape of Desire - Eroticism in Art, Part I of II
Eroticism is more than a theme or subject in art, it is a way of being, a form of inner aliveness. It speaks to imagination as much as flesh, to vulnerability, to pleasure, and to a kind of charged attentiveness to the world. As the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897–1962) once wrote, eroticism is "assenting to life up to the point of death," a surrender to the intensity of experience. It is not merely sexual, but profoundly existential. In its richest sense, eroticism draws from the tension between inhibition and release, imagination and sensation. It thrives in anticipation, in subtlety, in the possibility of transgression, and it often lives most fully in suggestion rather than disclosure.
When eroticism enters visual art as a mirror, it reflects not only how we represent the body, but how we desire, how we look, and how we navigate the edge between private longing and public expression. To look at erotic art is to be drawn into an emotional and intellectual encounter, not just with another's body, but with one’s own imagination. Erotic art, at its most compelling, refuses simplicity. It is not simply about nudity or sex, as it is about the charged presence of the body, the relationship between the gaze and gesture, the suggestion of intimacy, and the space between viewer and subject. Artists have shaped desire through form, gesture, and myth, and how viewers have responded, with awe, delight, scandal, or introspection. Each era constructs eroticism differently, but all ask the same question: what does it mean to see, and be seen, as a body capable of love, longing, and pleasure?
CONTENT WARNING: Explicit nudity and sexual imagery.
Viewer discretion advised.
The tradition of erotic art in the West begins, famously, with Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos (c. 360 BCE), the first known life-size female nude in Greek sculpture. Before this, male athletes and gods had been depicted nude, but female figures were almost always clothed. Praxiteles’ Aphrodite changed that: shown disrobing for a bath, her hand modestly covering her groin, she became both an object of devotion and intense desire. Roman copies proliferated, and the statue was said to inspire longing so powerful that some men lost their minds in front of her. Pliny the Elder recorded tales of infatuated visitors driven to madness. But this was no simple act of voyeurism. In classical Athens, where women were rarely seen in public life, the act of rendering a female figure naked in stone was an audacious disruption of societal norms. It made the viewer complicit in a moment of transgression and of wonder. The Aphrodite of Knidos established a visual language that would ripple through centuries: the modest pose, the exposed vulnerability, the divine eroticism cloaked in marble.
From Knidos onward, Western artists would copy and adapt Praxiteles’s Venus Pudica pose endlessly. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Giorgione’s and Titian’s Sleeping Venus, and countless others all borrow the modest gesture and sinuous contrapposto of that original. In short, the classical nude, at first a breath-taking novelty, inaugurated a lineage of erotic imagery in Western art. This lineage alternated between idealization (goddesses and mythic heroines) and defiance (bold mortals on the brink of shame), but always carried the charge of forbidden beauty.
After centuries of medieval modesty, the Renaissance brought the nude body back into the center of artistic expression. But it did so under the veil of mythology. Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) depicts the goddess arriving on a scallop shell, windswept and idealized. Her hands modestly cover her nudity, and her gaze turns away. This is not overt sensuality, it is a poetic vision of beauty. Yet, the painting is undeniably erotic. It invites longing, even as it disguises it under classical allegory.
Elsewhere, the male nude returned in full force. Michelangelo’s David (1504) stood tall in Florence as a symbol of civic pride, but also of human beauty in its most idealized form. The Church, wary of its anatomical frankness, later ordered a bronze fig leaf to cover his genitals, a telling reminder of the discomfort that erotic beauty can provoke even when wrapped in moral or heroic narrative.
In Venice, artists pushed the envelope further. Palma il Vecchio’s A Blonde Woman (c. 1520) is not a mythological goddess, but a real, sensual woman, one breast exposed, smiling knowingly. Her gaze meets the viewer’s, suggesting her awareness and agency. This was a different kind of eroticism: human, embodied, and psychological.
Titian advanced this sensibility in works such as Venus of Urbino (1538), where a reclining nude looks directly at us, one hand resting suggestively below her navel. Here, eroticism is intimate. It is not mythological, it is rather domestic. She lies in a private bedroom, not on Mount Olympus. Her nudity is not accidental, it is an invitation. The rose in her hand, the dog at her feet, the presence of servants in the background all evoke sensuality, fertility, and marital intimacy. This is eroticism at ease, unapologetic and deeply human. Titian’s bold Venus was part of a shift: the sleeping, ideal nymph gave way to a living woman in flesh-and-blood reality.
The Baroque era expanded this theatricality. Artists like Peter Paul Rubens in Catholic Europe filled canvases with voluminous, fleshy nudes, painters’ models stretched across Mediterranean clouds or golden beds. Rubens’s mythological scenes such as Leda and the Swan or the Venus and Adonis series pulsed with carnal energy, emphasizing curves and rubenesque vitality. At the same time, Caravaggio and his followers introduced a stark realism: even religious and mythic subjects were lit with dramatic chiaroscuro, often capturing tense private moments. Works such as Artemisia Gentileschi’s Danaë could shock more by their raw physicality than by nudity alone.
The Baroque period turned eroticism into spectacle. Rubens painted voluptuous goddesses and mythic lovers tangled in movement and flesh. Bernini, in marble, captured moments of intense spiritual and physical rapture. His Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52), sculpted for a Roman chapel, depicts the saint swooning under the angel’s arrow, her face etched with a kind of bliss that has prompted generations of viewers to read erotic pleasure into a scene of divine ecstasy. For Bataille, this work exemplified how eroticism can blur the line between the sacred and the sensual.
The Rococo era, by contrast, embraced eroticism as flirtation and fantasy. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767) epitomizes this spirit. A young woman, pushed by an oblivious older man, swings high into the air as her lover hides below, gazing up her skirts. Her shoe flies off mid-air, a symbol of abandon. Cupid statues look on approvingly. Here, eroticism is playful, light, and knowing. The painting delights in suggestion. Its pastel palette and lush garden setting make the scene feel like a dream, but its symbolism is hardly subtle. It is a moment of sexual agency cloaked in aristocratic whimsy.
The nineteenth century saw the breakdown of old taboos and the rise of direct confrontation. In Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), a nude woman picnics with two fully clothed men. Her gaze is cool, confident. This is not a goddess or allegory. She is recognisably modern, and more than her nudity was the scandal. The painting stripped eroticism of its mythic disguise and placed it, starkly in the real world. Art historians have noted that Manet was deliberately amplifying eighteenth-century provocations. He borrowed compositional cues from earlier works (Renaissance prints or Watteau’s dévôt Foursome) but “amplified them to scandalous proportions.” The woman’s gaze is direct and unapologetic, she meets our eyes as calmly as the men do, erasing any pretence of modesty. The clothed men, speculated to be friends or even prostitutes, appear relaxed and even empowered by their roles. Manet seems to be saying that sexual desire exists plainly in the daylight, not just in fantasy.
Manet’s Olympia (1863) was even more provocative. A reclining nude meets the viewer’s gaze with frankness, her hand firmly placed over her pelvis. She is not submissive. She is not a fantasy. She is a Parisian courtesan, real, alert, and aware. Critics were outraged not by her nudity, but by her unflinching presence. She would not play the role of passive muse.
Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) pushed the boundary further still. A close-up of a woman’s genitals and torso, the painting remains controversial. There is no head, no setting, only the physical reality of the female body. For Courbet, this was not pornography but realism. He declared it a tribute to life’s origin, and in doing so, demanded that eroticism be acknowledged as part of existence, not hidden away or aestheticized beyond recognition.
By the late 1800s, most artists would claim that imagery alone could not contain erotic experience. Symbolists preferred suggestion and metaphor: Odilon Redon drew opium-induced dream worlds of erotic myth; Gustave Moreau painted androgynous Salomees with ghostly veils; the photographers and printmakers of the time probed the erotic through light, shadow, and the hint of touch. In cinema, pioneers like Georges Méliès staged erotic fantasies with sensuous movement and playful effects.
John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1883–84) caused a sensation at the 1884 Paris Salon. In the portrait, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau stands out against a deep, shadowy background, her pale shoulders exposed above a sleek black gown. Sargent captured her with a cool, confident poise that challenged the era’s expectations of female modesty. At first the right strap of her dress slipped off her shoulder—a small but provocative detail that many viewers read as suggestive and morally daring. The press denounced the painting, Gautreau’s social standing took a hit, and Sargent, unnerved by the uproar, repainted the strap to sit securely before the work left the Salon. The very qualities that shocked nineteenth‑century audiences now define the picture’s modern appeal, marking it as a pivotal moment in the history of portraiture.
Throughout the century, theorists like John Ruskin and Walter Pater argued that art’s erotic charge lay in its appeal to the senses and feelings of the cultivated mind. In The Renaissance Pater famously wrote that art should be appreciated as experience and not judged for moral content. The idea was that eroticism in art could exist purely as the aesthetic enjoyment of beauty itself, free of vulgarity.
As the 20th century dawned, established norms fell away. The Symbolists (like Franz von Stuck or Gustav Klimt) had already spliced eroticism with fantasy. Klimt’s lush, patterned canvases, such as The Kiss, Danaë, Water Serpents are visible celebrations of erotic love, often with pregnant allusions. His nudes glow with color and goddess‑like power, reducing shame to ornament. Klimt’s student Egon Schiele took this even further: his bodies are twisted, exposed, even grotesque by turn. Schiele’s approach forced viewers to confront sexuality as something raw and anguished. His drawings of friends, lovers, and himself in contorted naked poses were deemed obscene by polite Viennese society; the artist was even arrested and tried for “lewdness” in 1912. As one modern writer notes, Schiele’s time regarded female sexuality itself as a “pathology,” and so art that depicted it was often accused of pornographic intent. Schiele ignored that stigma.
Parallel to Expressionism were the Surrealists, who sought erotic truth in dreams and the unconscious. Influenced by Freud, artists like Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst fixated on fetishes and dream-objects. Dalí conjured images of soft watches draped over naked torsos. Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo painted uncanny erotic scenes as metaphor. The Surrealists believed erotic art could access primal drives: fetishism was explicitly discussed by Freud in 1913, and it surfaced in many Surrealist works. As Susan Sontag would later observe, Bataille’s Story of the Eye and Surrealism at large “enacts…a vertiginous blurring of boundaries” between pleasure and pain, eroticism and the repulsive. In other words, modernism turned erotic art into a site of experimentation: collage, photography, dance, and literature all interrogated desire. Picasso, too, veered in this direction, his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) smashed classical representation with jagged planes, but it is loaded with brothel imagery. In the 1920s and ’30s, Picasso continued drawing and painting erotic scenes of his lovers, raw, multiple-profile views that broke form itself. Even Cubism and abstraction could not fully purge the erotic impulse from art.
Elsewhere in the mid-century, artists like Paul Cadmus (in the U.S.) painted muscular bathers as an unabashed celebration of homoerotic desire. Abstract Expressionists sometimes likened color fields to the body’s interior. The “boom” in pin-up photography and the Playboy aesthetic in the 1950s shows how mass culture commercialised erotic imagery, but many painters and photographers continued to use the camera in poetic, rather than explicit, ways. By mid-century the debate was no longer just what to show of the erotic, but how to engage it. Critics began invoking Laura Mulvey’s film theory: the idea that the cinematic “male gaze” conditions how we look at women (and men) in images. Art critics asked: who gazes at the nude? Who is allowed to look, and with what right? Even Berger’s famous line “Men act and women appear” had its art-analogue in how painters arranged their models. Although Mulvey wrote about cinema, her insight carries over to painting: when a woman in a painting “performs to be looked at,” the painting encodes a certain erotic power dynamic. Conceptual artists took up this game as well: in the 1960s feminist artists like Carolee Schneemann and Judy Chicago explicitly staged the body and its gaze, forcing the viewer to confront their own position. In all these developments, however, we see one refrain: eroticism increasingly became a dialogue, not a monologue. The viewer’s desire (and anxiety) became part of the artwork’s effect.
While Western art was evolving, non-Western cultures had their own traditions of erotic depiction, often intertwined with religion or literature. In Japan, for instance, Edo-period shunga were an accepted genre of popular art. Shunga (春画, “spring pictures”) were woodblock prints and paintings showing lovers in explicit, often playful erotic scenarios. Unlike in much of Europe, these images were not considered illicit contraband; Shinto and secular culture treated them as part of everyday visual life. Men and women of various classes owned shunga, which often circulated clandestinely but generally without the moral panic seen in Victorian Europe. These prints did not shy from penetration and multiple positions; they could be comical or tender, reflecting a cultural view of sex as a normal human pleasure. Importantly, shunga artists often stylized the male and female forms with exaggeration, a reminder that in this tradition eroticism can be cartoonish or cartoonishly magnified, always symbolic.
In India, the Kama Sutra (4th–5th century CE) and the sculptures of Khajuraho temples (10th–12th centuries) portrayed sexual union as spiritual practice. In these contexts, eroticism was sacred. Sex was not a sin but a path to transcendence, and its depiction in art was both joyful and reverent.
In Persian and Mughal miniature painting, erotic scenes were woven into poetry and private manuscripts. Erotic love was part of courtly culture, literature, and mystical expression. These works, often highly stylized, carried their own codes of meaning and intimacy.
Eroticism in art is an expression of life’s vitality. It thrives on energy, attention, and risk. As many thinkers have echoed, eroticism arises from the mix of excitation and inhibition, imagination and sensation. To be alive, to some degree, is to be open to being moved, and erotic art may remind us that to see another figure, nude, bathed in sunlight is to feel ourselves bathed in possibility. The body in erotic art is both an object and subject: it can be controlled and disciplined, but it can also surprise us with urges outside control, where we can momentarily relinquish our dry rationality and embrace wonder.
In contemporary art, as much as ever, artists continue to reclaim eroticism as a vital force. Photographers paint with light to evoke intimate closeness, performance artists use their own bodies to chart political desire, and digital creators play with layers of identity and pleasure. But they all continue in the tradition that erotic art invites participation. It compels us to ask what it means to feel alive in our skins, to admit our vulnerability, and to cherish the spark of desire.
We want to share that our colleague Judy Chen has concluded her two‑and‑a‑half‑year chapter with Paul Kyle Gallery. During that time Judy’s gentle smile, generous spirit, and quietly wicked sense of humour made every day brighter. Her punctuality and reliability meant we could always count on her, and her courage inspired us more than she knows. Although we will miss her presence, we celebrate her decision to take on a role in the non‑profit sector, a setting perfectly aligned with her values, and we send her off with heartfelt gratitude, confidence in her success, and excitement for her adventures ahead.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Barbara Astman: Concealed/Revealed
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Tony Robins: Flowers of Resistance
Opening Saturday, June 21st, 2025
