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October 8, 2006 – February 18, 2007

An involvement with all forms and facets of eros – love, passion and lust, desire and sexual union – was and still is one of the most crucial impulses behind the creation of art. The Fondation Beyeler is devoting a comprehensive two-part exhibition to eros, a theme that has held a prominent place in the history of art. We concentrate especially on works by artists who relied on eros as the essential motive force behind their creative activity. After the first exhibition focused on the two pioneers of modernism Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso, the second, “Eros in Modern Art,” will be a larger overview comprising over 200 works. Various approaches to and developments in erotic art from the early modern period, through the twentieth century, and down to our own day will be presented.

The eroticism in these works ranges from the straightforward and drastic to evocations whose meaning becomes clear only upon a deeper involvement with the artist’s oeuvre. Deserving of special attention in this regard are the expansive, post-Surrealist installations of Rebecca Horn. Nearly every medium employed in modern and contemporary art is represented in the show: painting and sculpture, video and film, as well as graphic art, drawing and photography.

The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the BA-CA Kunstforum, Vienna, where it will be on view from 1 March to 22 July 2007.

Room Guide 

OEUVRE

 
Paul Cézanne, La Tentation de saint Antoine, around 1875-77, Oil on canvas, 47 x 56 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Paul Cézanne

Cézanne tells the story of the Temptation of St. Anthony in a highly idiosyncratic way, both in terms of form and content. A nude woman, confident of triumph, reclines in front of a blue and white cloth (the canvas), as if to say, Here I am, St. Cézanne, paint me! St. Anthony falls to his knees, averting his eyes, resisting the woman (a naked Madonna in her gloriole?) and her infant angels. The radiant light emitted by the nude, unseen by the saint, falls on a bare skull – apparently to the chagrin of the red, horned devil. Like St. Anthony, Cézanne refused to succumb to female beauty – he would never paint a “beautiful,” pleasing nude in his life – but held fast to the beauty and truth of the painted image.

 
Edgar Degas, Le Petit déjeuner après le bain (Le Bain), around 1895–98, Pastel on paper on cardboard, 82,5 x 79 cm, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

Edgar Degas

Degas never left his female figures up in the air, as would a snapshot that freezes a figure balanced on one leg. His compositions lead beyond the moment. It is his artistic skills – precise composition, distribution of emphases and intervals, excerpting, flow of line, and spectacular coloration – that make this woman appear veritably to climb out of her tub. The appeal of this superb pastel lies not so much in the lovely figure depicted as in the simple and yet complex course our eye traces through every element in the picture – from a bath in the tub to breakfast. Prior to Degas, no artist saw or rendered the female body quite like this. Here a scene is not developed out of the subject; the scene itself becomes the subject of a painting.

 
Pierre Bonnard, L’Homme et la femme, 1900. Oil on canvas. 115 x 72,5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © 2006 ProLitteris, Zürich

Pierre Bonnard

Bonnard was not only a superb colorist but a master in the evocation of psychological nuances. The situation depicted here is basically unspectacular: a man and a woman, she naked and crouching on a bed, staring in front of herself; he standing next to her, almost entirely undressed and apparently just slipping out of his shirt. His facial expression is neutral, but perhaps more concerned than happy. Although the two are separated from each other by a kind of screen, they obviously represent a couple. Was the picture meant to be a bordello scene? Although the answer is uncertain, the impression of estrangement between man and woman is definitely there. Might Bonnard have succeeded in evoking the sudden sense of shame that can arise in face of the other’s nakedness when two people become intimate for the first time?

 
Salvador Dalí, Le grand masturbateur, 1929. Oil on canvas, 110 x 150 cm, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. © 2006 ProLitteris, Zürich

Salvador Dalí

Created under the impression of Dalí’s first encounter with his future wife, Gala, this painting may be seen as a mirror of the artist’s sexual longings and complexes. The figure of the masturbator consists of a huge face, nose to the ground and single eye shut. At the height of the missing mouth appears a giant locust whose phallic body is being attacked by a swarm of ants. Out of the face emerges the bust of a woman whose mouth approaches the genitals of a male torso. The “great masturbator” has a hybrid form, a sphinx-like figure that unites elements of the male and female sexes. Like a dream image arisen from the unconscious mind, the composite figure embodies an ideal of Surrealism par excellence.

 
Rebecca Horn, The Lover’s Bed, 1990 (Iron bed frame, butterflies and engine), 116 x 121 x 191 cm, Private Collection. Foto: Gunther Lepkowski

Rebecca Horn

We are confronted by an empty metal bed with beautiful blue butterflies hovering over it. Suddenly they begin to move their wings, evoking the dreamlike presence of delight even in the void. The butterflies relate to the figure of old Serafina in Horn’s 1998 film Buster’s Bedroom (see the film sequence on the wall). In an insane asylum, Serafina was visited by butterflies that reminded her of her dead lovers. In the installation itself, this film sequence, associated with certain actors (Valentina Cortese and Donald Sutherland), is shifted onto a different time plane where everything accidental and transitory has vanished. The old woman is gone, and the machinery, in a ballet of memory, celebrates only the souls of the deceased lovers, fluttering around the empty bed in the guise of butterflies.

Catalogue «EROS in Modern Art»

Eros was the Greek god of Love. But Eros is also what fuels our desire for knowledge and our creativity. Passion and lust likewise come under the heading of Eros. And in Freudian psychoanalysis, Eros is the libido, one of our two vital instincts. The representation and exploration of Eros is a classic and recurring motif in art. The catalogue documents the 2007 exhibition devoted specifically to "Eros in modern art".

"Eros in der Kunst der Moderne" contains an essay by Konrad Liessmann on the relationship between art and eroticism, plus a glossary of related terms.

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