Three Chicago Shows Ask Whether Erotic Art Is Back

By Marcus Bennett

Three Chicago exhibitions this spring and summer foregrounded erotic art: Alice Tippit at the DePaul Art Museum, SHADOW at tête-à-tête-à-tête, and Willem de Kooning Drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago. Their shared charge is clear. Their institutional reach is not. Together they test three conditions: a catalogue-led show, a bodily installation and a blockbuster.

The question behind the round-up is personal. I see many Chicago exhibitions, and lately more than a few have felt almost ridiculously erotic. Eros has never left art, but I had noticed it neither in the shows I viewed nor at the school where I teach. Did sex return, or was I simply more attuned to it? Both remain possible.

I turned 50 in the past year, and popular culture seemed to confirm the joke: Sharon Horgan’s Youth and Olivia Colman’s Wicker are recent screen-based explorations of lusty midlife ladyhood. Their premise supplied personal context for noticing erotic material at precisely the age when these shows made it unusually visible.

That personal context did not become evidence of a broad revival. My deliberately crude gauge puts female middle-age libido at “either zero or 1,000, on a scale of one to 100,” with the qualification that it rests on an admittedly minuscule survey. The joke points to the problem: neither that statistic nor an exhibition round-up can measure desire.

This is therefore not an account of my own or my acquaintances’ sex lives; that accounting can wait until, in the dark joke, after everyone is dead. What follows instead groups exhibitions by a red thread and asks why their accompanying didactics rarely name it directly.

Where does the erotic charge register?

Last spring, Alice Tippit’s sly, meticulous paintings at the DePaul Art Museum prompted a more complicated response than the catalogue could contain. The catalogue was delightful, but it did not articulate the disturbance produced by the paintings, even prompting the thought that a therapist might be needed again. The show’s silence in its didactics became part of its effect.

During the summer, Shannon Stratton’s curatorial project SHADOW at tête-à-tête-à-tête turned toward bodies. Holly Murkerson contributed sensuous photographs of a stone passageway worth entering. Two dark leather-and-wood stools, credited to David Sprecher and Neiva Mulhearn, required visitors to straddle and peer into them. Material and posture did the explaining, turning furniture into an erotic encounter rather than a seat.

The summer blockbuster Willem de Kooning Drawing produced the opposite result for me at the Art Institute of Chicago. Its glowing reviews and polite museum text did not prepare me for “miserable naked women” filling the walls. I like a good nude, but the exhibition made desire feel less like pleasure than distress.

By the third room, and certainly by the giant rowboat charcoals from the mid-1960s, de Kooning’s subjects looked like victims of crime. The drawings’ scale and the exhibition’s accumulation of bodies made seduction increasingly difficult to sustain. Here, charcoal did not soften the encounter; it gave the work physical force.

A Jonathan Mathias installation view, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, records the show’s crowded wall presentation. Unlike Tippit’s indirect paintings and Stratton’s tactile installation, Willem de Kooning Drawing overwhelmed interpretation with scale, repetition and a crowded wall.

Two Lee Miller photographs, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, widen the frame: Woman with Hand on Head, also known as Coiffure, from 1931, and Charlie Chaplin with chandelier from 1932.

The historical span from those photographs to de Kooning’s mid-1960s drawings makes the return-of-eroticism question less a claim of novelty than an old institutional problem. Eros has always been present in art; describing it plainly remains the harder task.

What does this change for Chicago art viewers?

Judged as proof of a citywide comeback, the evidence remains anecdotal: three exhibitions, one writer’s selective eye and a survey too small to support any conclusion. The defensible change is visibility. Erotic art has not newly arrived; it has become harder for institutions to approach through euphemism.

For a visitor, the difference is concrete. At DePaul, the catalogue left much of the bodily response unspoken. At tête-à-tête-à-tête, looking, straddling and peering became part of the work. At the Art Institute, wall text and glowing reviews failed to describe an exhibition built around de Kooning’s women. The viewer must still judge whether the work offers seduction, discomfort or threat.

None offers a prescription for what erotic art should look like. Together they expose a curatorial problem: viewers can detect seduction, discomfort and even violence in the same image, while institutional prose often supplies only a narrow choice between beauty and danger.

The historical span from Miller’s 1931 and 1932 photographs to de Kooning’s mid-1960s drawings also corrects the novelty narrative. These are not unprecedented problems.

If this spring-and-summer cluster develops into a broader institutional shift, its test will be whether Chicago’s museums can name erotic charge directly while leaving viewers room to resist, reinterpret or reject it; otherwise the images will continue to outrun the didactics.