Art does not exist in a vacuum; art stripped of its social and political context is stripped of much, if not all, of its meaning. Pressing this thesis, together with arguing the case for the “transformative powers” of transgressive, erotic art, are the principle tasks Alyce Mahon set herself in writing Eroticism & Art. And Mahon, University Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge, does both with a passion and flair that in no way detract from her exemplary scholarship.

Ultimately, this book is testimony to the futility, the foolishness or the deceit of any attempt to divorce art and its “formal con-
cerns” from the sociopolitical con-
text of its time, as the modern Western discipline of art criticism has “tended” to do. It is, as the author states categorically, “an impossible divide” – and we have modernist “representations of the erotic body” to thank for making this clear.

Mahon locates the work at hand – that is, modern Western art since the mid-nineteenth century

– in wider historical and cultural contexts, and she cogently maps a developing willingness to en-
gage with erotic themes and ever more transgressive subject mat-
ter. For example: “As the twent-
ieth century began, sexual trans-
gression in art became an in-
creasingly common motif. Artists turned to the erotic body as a means of addressing a whole gamut of personal and political questions… A burgeoning avant-
garde defied bourgeois conserv-
atism in Europe between the two World Wars by using sexual obs-
cenity as a metaphor for political obscenity.” Immediately after World War Two, the Surrealists “continued to call for sexual and political revolution through the erotic”, and in the 1960s “the explicit body was used as a sym-
bol for and an agent of political dissent”.

Presenting her narrative chronol-
ogically – so as not to lose “the sense of the historical and polit-
ical trajectory and agency of the erotic in art” – Mahon then effort-
lessly carries her study through postmodernism and into the early twenty-first century. The result is

a flowing treatise entirely congru-
ous with her argument that “erot-
icism has not been marginal but central to the history of art as a whole”, and that the erotic body in particular is “a disputed terrain that allows artists to ask some of the most difficult questions at critical moments in our history”. This also enables us to see that “erotic art reveals the tensions between the individual’s artistic and sexual freedom on the one hand, and the ambitions and anxieties of society on the other”.

In treating these themes, Mahon places great significance on the “battle” between Eros, the life drive, as represented by the erot-
ic, and its opposite, Thanatos, the death drive, as represented by the dark side of desire. This is an important element in her theoret-
ical structure – and she is by no means venturing onto a limb, as art critic and historian Michèle Cone sums up a consensus: “scholars...seem to concur that with modernity, death becomes inseparable from eroticism”.1

Such subject matter could easily prove intolerably dense in the