Arousing Art : In the Face of House Vote, Museums Are Puzzled by Uproar Over Erotic Works

In a display case in a room off the Inner Peristyle Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, there is a small statue of a satyr, an ancient Greek half-man, half-beast figure that, when closely scrutinized, is obviously aroused.

Nearby, a vase from about 510 B.C.--attributed to Euthymides, a contemporary of the famed Greek vase maker Euphronios--is vividly illustrated with a scene depicting a couple engaged in what is clearly steamy foreplay.

And in the next room, another vase, discreetly titled “Drunken Singing Reveler and His Young Attendant,” shows a pretty-faced teen-age boy holding a pitcher into which his older male companion is urinating.

Across town, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a tall, phallic structure by Robert Graham includes numerous explicit scenes of sexual intercourse. Two or three rooms away, a couple makes love in the back seat of a 1938 Dodge.

In still another room, Jean-Simon Berthelemy’s 1778 painting, “Death of a Gladiator,” shows its subject complete with pubic hair. Philip Conisbee, the museum’s curator of European painting and sculpture, points out that the work probably was completed by Berthelemy while he was in Rome, studying under a French government grant.

Except for the ’38 Dodge scene--by Edward Kienholz, which caused a scandal over its content after it was completed in 1964--none of these anatomically explicit or sexually suggestive artworks has precipitated a single complaint by the millions of people who have viewed them in the last five years or so, the two museums say.

Even with the Kienholz, said Pamela Jenkinson, public information officer at the county museum, “we haven’t heard squat since we opened the building.”

Among curators at the Getty and at LACMA, this is a source of puzzlement. Why, when a single room at the Getty contains a dozen pieces of sexually explicit art, has similar subject matter in contemporary art caused such a fuss? Witness the ruckus surrounding the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose homoerotic and sadomasochistic work--except for its medium--focuses on many of the same things the ancient Greeks did.

Ironically, the single most controversial image in a disputed show of Mapplethorpe’s work is a self-portrait in which he appears nude, with a bullwhip protruding from his buttocks in a fashion reminiscent of the bestial detail of Greek satyrs.

Not surprisingly, then, it is Mapplethorpe--whose work received partial federal financial support--who has become such a large part of the arts funding crisis unfolding in Washington this week.

The dispute, fomented by conservative congressmen, may reach a preliminary climax Wednesday with a budget vote in the House of Representatives that could strip millions of dollars from the National Endowment for the Arts.

After all, said Marion True, curator of antiquities at the Getty, homosexuality, explicit nudity and a variety of sex acts have been legitimately a part of artistic expression since at least Greek times. Tina Oldknow, associate curator of ancient and Islamic art at LACMA, agreed, noting that, while the Getty may have the explicit statue of the satyr on display, LACMA has in its collection a Greek vase that goes even further: It shows two satyrs--masturbating.

Little is known about the personal life styles of Greek artists, said True and Oldknow. At that time, said True, artists lacked the social stature they enjoy today.

Chances are good, however, that Greek artists--working in a society in which homosexuality, for instance, was accepted behavior--were people not unlike Mapplethorpe.

The battle against government support for controversial art has been led by Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.). With assistance from fundamentalist religious groups, the conservative congressmen have challenged the National Endowment for the Arts to devise ways to control subject matter to prevent funding of art that Armey has described as “blatantly offensive to the vast majority of the American people.”

The conservatives contend that the national endowment has no business financing art whose subject matter may be perceived as sacrilegious or pornographic. D’Amato and Armey have said they are not trying to limit artistic freedom of expression--only to ensure that public money doesn’t pay for anything the most conservative members of art’s audience don’t like.

“If we take the representations of life that they (Greek artists) have left for us,” said True, “one has to assume they were familiar with all kinds of things. Group sex was nothing new to the Greeks.

“There are certainly representations of people being spanked with slippers and sandals. There are people with whips in their hands. I’m not suggesting they are equivalent (to Mapplethorpe’s photographic images), but I don’t think there is much that goes on in the contemporary world that would shock a Greek.”

“In Greek art, nudity shouldn’t just be seen as nudity. It denotes something,” said Oldknow. “It means as much about something as a person wearing clothes. It tells us a lot of things about the figure being represented. Ideal youths and their nudity is thought by some people to denote their spiritual excellence and their power in their physical perfection.

“The ideal qualities of a male in the 6th Century B.C. would be that he would be athletically developed, physically powerful, courageous and honorable. So you would have the male figure nude. You don’t have nude female figures because the ideal qualities were that they would wear fashionable clothes and be very demure.”

Two centuries later, said Oldknow, the direction of Greek art shifted enough so that the female nude is frequently seen. In that era, state support of art was virtually unknown, said True and Oldknow. Many vases, in particular, featuring the most explicit subject matter, were private commissions. “You would have dinner parties where men would gather together and drink and discuss things,” said Oldknow. “Women who would accompany the men would be prostitutes, not their wives. It was also acceptable for a man to be married and have a male lover. It really wasn’t an issue.”

The acceptability of such subject matter has gone through permutations over time. In the Victorian age, it became commonplace for a wide variety of nude sculptures, for instance, to be draped or for their genitals to be covered with fig leaves. Michelangelo’s famed fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, completed in 1512, has from time to time aroused controversy because it depicts garland-bearing nude youths.

In the 1920s and ‘30s in the United States, said True, the racy subject matter of Greek vases became such an issue that some museums painted over the genitals of figures depicted on them.

While the function of nudity and explicit sexual conduct in art has changed through history, True contended that the contemporary controversy is characteristic of cyclical clashes between fundamentalist religious beliefs and artistic freedom that have recurred over many centuries.

“I think it’s predictable,” she said. “I think the problem is that, whenever you have a very conservative period politically and socially--which we have right now--and great interest in fundamental religious ideals, people tend to impose them on other people.

“(They seem to say), ‘Not only do I not want this, but I don’t want money going to support anybody else doing this.’ It is one of the problems with art today.”

To True, such a climate demands courage from museum directors and others in the arts community, whose function in such cycles may well be to try to hold out against the running of the political tide.

“I think that any museum that is receiving (government) funding should refuse to be intimidated by the threat that the funding is going to be taken away if government officials who are supporting the national endowment say they don’t approve of the art,” she said.

If this week they don’t approve of Mapplethorpe and photographer Andres Serrano, whose image of a crucifix immersed in urine also played a major role in the current controversy, she added, “next week they won’t approve of Euphronios and Exekias and the Greeks.

“We have explicit representations of couples copulating. Are we supposed to take them off exhibit because someone doesn’t approve of them being on display? Thank you, I won’t do it. When an institution is intimidated by that kind of thing, there’s no way of defining the limits of it. It is not going to stop at modern art.”

At least indirectly, True was criticizing Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, which last month canceled a Mapplethorpe show due to open at the beginning of this month. In announcing the cancellation, the Corcoran said it was attempting to defuse the political controversy, but the decision itself caused such disagreement that the gallery succeeded in potentiating it. Subsequently, the Washington Project for the Arts, another private agency that receives national endowment support, announced that it would host the Mapplethorpe exhibit.

To LACMA’s Conisbee, the current crisis--which observers of the national endowment say is the first in the agency’s nearly 25 years of existence provoked by the visual arts--has been intensified by the fact that photography is a medium unknown in any previous period of history.

“We tend to associate photography with life,” Conisbee said. “A photographer has as much control (over subject matter) as any sculptor or painter, but nevertheless, (photography) has a kind of immediacy or presence. It seems to us not to deal so much with the idea as painting and sculpture.

“I think that, if you can imagine some of the Mapplethorpes done as paintings, it would take some of the immediacy away. You know that, in the photograph, you’re seeing exactly what Mapplethorpe saw in his eyes.

“I find Mapplethorpe in a way not easy to look at. It takes you into a kind of sexual underworld. They are disturbing images.”

But having said that, Conisbee strides through a gallery at LACMA, stopping at Rodin’s “Iris, Messenger of the Gods,” executed in 1890 and 1891. It is a headless--but otherwise anatomically explicit--depiction of a woman, standing, legs spread, with one knee thrust into the air.

“Rodin was deliberately playing the slightly sensational romantic artist’s role,” Conisbee said. “He knew perfectly well he was going to shock people. A lot of his work has a very autoerotic strain. There were drawings by him that were completely explicit. He also acted out the role with his models. He was famous for it.”

To George Goldner, curator of drawings and acting curator of paintings at the Getty, the history of art in terms of subject matter is a meandering stream of sorts. “Each period defines what is sexually explicit a little bit differently,” he said. “There are periods when (sexual content) is rare, if existing at all . . . periods when religious sentiment was preeminent. In the 15th Century, there were very few or no sexually explicit themes.

“I wouldn’t say that there has necessarily always been sexually explicit subject matter, but I think for hundreds of years, there has been. We tend probably today, in the 20th Century, to have more of that than was true in the 16th Century. There are complicated reasons for that that have to do with the social role of an artist.

“In the 16th Century, painting was an essential medium of communication. Today, artists are a bit more functionally out of the center of society, so there’s a tendency for the people who practice it to be a bit more unconventionally, but I think one can easily exaggerate that.

“Going back to the 16th Century, there were artists who were unconventional. There were homosexual artists in the Renaissance. There is no way of telling whether the proportion is greater or less now than it was then.

“Mapplethorpe is more provocative than most artists have been. But we’ve all been numbed by provocation, so you have to go pretty far to provoke.”