Who Would Want to Eat Cézanne’s Apples?

 
Just as I was planning this post, a similarly themed post appeared in Jonathon Jones' art blog for The Guardian.  Jones reviews The Hoerengracht, an installation that depicts prostitutes in Amsterdam's red light district, and he asks why the installation fits so well at Britain's National Gallery in close proximity to Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard and Bronzino's Venus and Cupid.  He concludes that "it's simply wrong to think that high European painting - the tradition this museum displays so well – is always spiritual and lofty.  A great painting can be shockingly carnal.  It can be pornographic.  Oil painting is the greatest come-on ever devised, and that makes The Hoerengracht a telling, intriguing visitor in these hallowed halls."


I agree with this sentiment but not wholeheartedly.  I believe that there is a distinction to be made between the pornographic and the carnal or erotic.  My original plans for this post involved discussing a picture that I do not like much, one that makes me uncomfortable.  I could think of nothing quite so squirm-inducing as art that threatens to be taken as pornography so I chose Caravaggio's Boy with a Basket of Fruit and found myself looking squarely at what first seemed to be my own prudishness but later revealed itself to be closer to empathy and a deepening understanding.


Almost every time I look at Boy with a Basket of Fruit, I see something different.  My sympathy for the picture shifts with my sympathy for the human race.  I see it through the eyes of my many selves, wanting at times to take it as adoring, at others as exploitative.  There is no denying that the painting is baldly erotic.  It seems clear at first viewing that it is an enticement, a come-on, so I began by challenging myself to articulate the essential (rather than the obvious) difference between that picture and this one. 


In his "The Way of Art," Joseph Campbell distinguishes true art from the didactic, a work made to induce the viewer to loathe the subject, and the pornographic, a work made to induce the viewer to desire the subject.  To illustrate this distinction, he explains that no one would want to eat Cézanne's apples.  One could, therefore, make the argument that the photograph we are considering is pornographic because there is no question that the model is presented as an object of desire.  If one detects a vulnerability in his pose, it is because it is difficult to seduce without betraying some vulnerability.  (Without the possibility of rejection, it would not be seduction but rape).  The observation of the model's vulnerability, then, is of more anthropological than aesthetic interest.  There is nothing ambiguous about the offer the photo is making.  The audience stands as proxy to the photographer and there is no mystery about what the photographer chose to see. 


What are we to make, then, of Caravaggio's painting? Has it been designated as art simply because generations of viewers have chosen to pretend that the picture's gesture is not a seductive one? It seems to me that Campbell's guidelines must mislead when desire itself is the true subject of the painting. Even someone who finds nothing sexually attractive in Carravagio's model must acknowledge that we are being invited to look as if through lustful eyes.  We are being invited to empathize with both the seducer and the seduced, invited to look and to look at ourselves looking. We are presented with an opportunity to step inside our own human tendency to objectify. 


The way that I am looking at it today, there seems to be much that is ambiguous about the come-on in Boy with a Basket of Fruit.  The way the boy clutches the basket to himself suggests an understandable ambivalence about his own ripeness (he was, after all, even in more heartless centuries, still acknowledged to be only a boy) and there is something about the tension of the muscles in his neck, as if it is not clear whether he was consciously displaying his features to advantage or had simply found himself frozen mid-beckon, asking himself if he really wanted to go through with it.  This ambiguity is not what essentially distinguishes the Caravaggio from the photo, however.  A reluctance to seduce does not negate the act of seduction.  It merely reveals that seduction can be a messy affair (and some people like their affairs a little messy).  No, to be regarded as erotic rather than pornographic, it is not necessary that the work's gesture should be unambiguous but it is necessary that it should never be unironic.  Its surface no deeper than the surface of our everyday lives, we must look within it for the truth.  
 
Here, for example, there may be something moldering and sad about the stance Titian's Venus of Urbino has taken, something distasteful in her indifference to the rest of the world, but her purpose of the moment seems completely straightforward.  Here, in The Maja Clothed, the subject revels in a sexual appeal that garments cannot conceal and here Antiope (or Venus) seems merely unashamed in her untroubled sleep, neither inviting nor turning away the appraising look. What we learn from these paintings is that, whether it is reluctant or enthusiastic, desire is always complicated. 


To allow us to look upon the erotic and truly see it, to invite us to see desire itself for all that it is, a picture must present us with desire in more than one of its aspects. (Klimt's The Kiss, for instance, is too tender to be erotic. It shows us love uncomplicated by the truly carnal).  Erotic art must not shy away from desire's natural complications.  In pornography, the deeper complications get in the way, empathy is a hindrance, but empathy is the raison d'être of the erotic in art.  Of course, as Lewis points out in An Experiment in Criticism, one may use any work as pornography but only an evocation of desire that invites us, not to use, but to appreciate may properly be considered as art. 


Our modern sensibilities tell us that a healthy depiction of sex is one that presents the sexual as an unqualified good.  This is because we are learning to fear our restraint more than our animality but the animal—even if, in itself and in its natural balance, it is always at least ugly-beautiful-- is not always pretty.  One does not have to be a prude to acknowledge that there is possessiveness in desire, that there is, in seducing and being seduced, a need to appropriate.  We look upon the desired with exclusively animal eyes but, when we look upon the beloved, we see with eyes that are animal, human and sometimes divine.  The shift in consciousness that erotic art asks us to make, even when its subject is depicted in a moment of debasement, is from seeing the desired, to seeing the beloved.  

When we see something with the fullest empathy, we see it as it is in itself and we cannot help but love it.  When we see ourselves seeing, and see all of the complicated emotions this arouses, we are encouraged to apply this empathy to ourselves.  This moment—when the unifying aesthetic heals the fractures that divide the carnal, the psychological and the spiritual—has more power than all of the frankly clinical discussions in the world to bring us to love both the animal and the human in all of us.