Kelly Devine Thomas

The interpretation of sexual symbols in art is everywhere. But what we view as erotic often tells us less about the artists than it does about our own sensibilities. 

More than 30 years ago, critic Leo Steinberg wrote in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art about an unidentified major American art historian who had asserted: “Michelangelo’s sex life is, quite frankly, none of our business. We can’t treat him, try him or confess him. His physical pleasures, whatever they may have been, have no importance for his art.” What was astonishing about the historian’s words, observed Steinberg, was a “modern scholar’s assurance that a great artist’s sexual life could be so divorced from his personality as to remain irrelevant to his art and therefore to us.”

How things have changed. Today, says John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “one could argue the climate has moved way to the other side.” Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, agrees: “There has been a sea change in terms of there being a willingness to read iconography, which in the heyday of formalism you had to ignore.”

Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Robert Rauschenberg’s stuffed goat encircled by a tire. Jeff Koons’s appliances. In today’s hypersexual art world, one hardly needs graphic images to stimulate sexual interpretations.

With this critical shift has come the freedom—for both artist and viewer—to conflate the iconographical with the autobiographical. Sometimes artists add erotic elements, but just as often viewers do. As Richard Shiff, a professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin, notes: “Some artists play with sexuality. They can’t resist sticking something in. They know most people won’t recognize it. And they can laugh about it with their friends later.” But other times a viewer can perceive eroticism an artist never intended. “That which obsesses you, you will see everywhere,” says Michael Findlay, a director of Acquavella Galleries in New York. “If it’s there to take out, maybe you put it in.”

Read more of my ARTnews article here.