How do artists incorporate sexuality and reproduction in art?

1. Reproduction and Sexuality
Chapter 7

2. First Couple
• Primoridial couples: (first couple)
representation of the “mother” and “father”
of humankind
– Creation myths
– Marriage rituals

3. Adam and Eve
Various depictions over the centuries.
Focus on the “temptation” and
“expulsion”.
Knowledge or awareness of sex or
self?
Masaccio, The Expulsion from
Paradise, Italy, 1427, Fresco.

4. Temptation (detail),
Hugo van der Goes
c.1470 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

5. Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve,
1510
Michelangelo. Fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome

6. Marriage
• Human couples in art-
exhibit range of
marriage traditions and
culture
• Symbolism

7. The Arnolfini Marriage
Jan van Eyck
Netherlands, 1434
32 x 23”, Oil paint on oak

8. Iconography
• Visual METAPHOR-image or element that is
descriptive of something else.
• SYMBOL-image or element that stands for or
represents some other entity or concept.
• ICONOGRAPHY-system of symbols that allows
artists to refer to complex ideas.

9. Stations of the Cross
• Christian and spiritual as well as legal and
factual
• Painting is legal document

10. Signature
• Jan van Eyck was here in 1434
• Witness to the marriage

11. Single Candle
• Represents all seeing eye of God
• Placed next to the beds of newlyweds to
encourage fertility

12. Loyalty
• Faithfulness
• Earthly love

13. Expensive Fruit
• Imported food, wealth
• Fertility
• Forbidden fruit
• Sin sanctified by marriage

14. Linked Hands
• Signifies union of two as one in Christian
marriage

15. • The pose
– Emphasizes stomach
– Focus of beauty
– Fertility
– Future pregnancy
• The dress
– Fashionable
– Color of fertility
• The bed
– Enter the world
– Leave the world
– Red for passion

16. Wife’s shoes near the bed

17. Husband’s shoes near the outside world
• Belief that touching ground with bare feet
ensures fertility

18. The Act of Sex in Art

20. Roman imperial oil lamp with erotic scene

21. A sexual wall painting in Pompeii

22. Sunga Empire sculpture (India), 1st century BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

23. Relief carving from the Kandarya Mahadeva Temple, Khajuraho, India, c. 1000
“The Hindu religion openly celebrates sexual love, as erotic
coupling…
a virtue and a path that leads to redemption.”- Exploring Art

24. Fertility
• Sculpture made for the purpose of enhancing
fertility, procreation
• Fertility Goddesses and Gods
• Ritualistic use

25. • Venus of Willendorf,
Austria
• C. 25,000-20,000 BCE
• Stone, 4 inches high
• Exaggerated body parts

26. ARTIST Jacopo da Pontormo
PAINTING The Visitation
Oil on Canvas
79 ½ x 61 3/8 in.
1528
Italy

27. Bill Viola
The Greeting,
1995
video sound installation, production still

29. Red Nude, Pregnant, 1910
The bodily distortions, explicit eroticism
and anguish which made Egon
Schiele’s artworks unpopular during his
lifetime are the same features which
make them so mesmerizing today.
Schiele (1890 – 1918) was an
exceptionally prolific Austrian
Expressionist .© Art.com

30. Alice Neel
The Pregnant Woman
1971
oil on canvas
40 x 60 in.
"I thought the whole picture of woman
without pregnancy was . . . trivial," Neel
said. "It's treating woman as sex object.
But you know, sex results in something."

31. Birth

32. Mother and Child

33. Egon Schiele "The Family"
1918, oil on canvas, Osterreichische
Galerie, Vienna

34. THE FEMALE FIGURE
&
THE MALE GAZE
Sexuality in art

35. Alessandro Botticelli (Florentine, 1444/5-1510)
THE BIRTH OF VENUS

37. Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538, Oil on canvas

38. The Rokeby Venus (also known as The Toilet of Venus, Venus at her Mirror,
Venus and Cupid, or La Venus del espejo) by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660)

39. La Maja Desnuda by Francisco de Goya
(1797- 1800)
In 1815 the Spanish Inquisition stripped Goya of his title
of court painter because this was considered obscene.
Stamps picturing this were approved in 1930 by the
Spanish Postal Authority. The same year the United
States government banned and returned any mail bearing
the stamp. In 1959 the U.S. Post Office banned its
mailing as a reproduction that was being used for
publicity of a movie of Goya's life.

40. La maja vestida, ca. 1803

41. Grande Odalisque
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, France, 1814, oil on
canvas.

42. Edward Manet, Olympia, France, 1863.

43. Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (The Young
Ladies of Avignon)
PABLO PICASSO
1907

44. Edward Weston, Nude, 1925.

45. MALE NUDITY IN ART
Because we should…
Robert Mapplethorpe. Tulip, 1984.

46. The Boxers, 5th century BCE, this pottery image from Ancient Greece

49. Triumph of Samson
By Guido Reni

50. Jacques Louis David (1748-1825)

51. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
Thomas E. McKellar, 1918

52. Alice Neel, "John Perreault," 1972. Collection: Whitney Museum of
American Art.

53. The Turkish Bath by Sylvia Sleigh

54. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
Ajitto, 1981

56. Yasumasu Morimura, Portrait (Twins), 1988, color photograph, 6ft x 9ft.

57. Annie Leibovitz
Lance Armstrong, New York City
Iris print, 1999

58. Critical Thinking
• Compare/contrast the female nude art versus
the art with male nudity.
• What major differences, if any do you find?

61. FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
Sexuality in Art

62. guerrilla - a member of an irregular armed force that fights a stronger force by sabotage
and harassment

68. Guerrilla Girls. Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?
1986. Street poster, USA.
P. 83 & 92, Deriving Meaning, Feminist Criticism in Exploring Art