NOTHING ON.(Brooklyn Museum's exhibit Exposed: The Victorian Nude)

The Victorians were obsessed with sex. That's our new conventional wisdom about an age of proverbial prudery. It informs a strong, mildly racy historical show, "Exposed: The Victorian Nude," that opened at Tate Britain, in London, last year and is now at the Brooklyn Museum, where it will run until January 5th. The zeal with which Victorians kept up chaste appearances is a giveaway, according to a type of analysis pursued by Michel Foucault, among others. When you presume to constrict, divert, disguise, and otherwise finesse a primal drive, you give it the run of your imagination. One of the show's curators, Martin Myrone, notes in the sumptuous catalogue that the word "pornography" entered the English language during Victoria's reign. The show explores attempts to exploit nudity for maximum appeal but minimum outright eroticism, from the Rubenesque fantasist William Etty, circa 1830, to the harsh realist Walter Sickert, eighty years later. With an air of spilling the beans, Myrone and his fellow-curators, Alison Smith and Robert Upstone, supplement the art with naughty photography, and films, made as early as 1896, which offer such delights as a Victorian lady doing a striptease. (Given her profusion of garments, it might be termed a striptoil.) Not for the first time, we are invited to chuckle at Victorian hypocrisy. But wait.

Condescension begs the question of why we should be interested now-- as I think we are--in Victoriana, which for most of the twentieth century was an emblem of stuffiness. I suspect that it's because our own supposedly liberated age is itself marked by militant conventionality and bossy moralism. Take a lately enshrined oxymoron, "sexual identity." The phrase conveys a giddy confidence that the magma of sex can be managed with bien-pensant cookie cutters. Here we go again. Certainly, there is something eerily akin to a lot of tedious contemporary art in "The Victorian Nude"--a compulsion to attitudinize, and to subordinate aesthetic experience to warranties of morally correct or otherwise laudable intent. Now, as then, socially imposed self-consciousness trivializes pleasures of talent and skill.

Consider the gratuitous gorgeousness of paintings by the Victorian Lawrence Alma-Tadema and of art films by today's Matthew Barney. Erotica doesn't get tonier than in Alma-Tadema's "Tepidarium" (1882), a luminous small painting of an enervated Roman lass wielding a phallic strigil (a skin-scraper) and a strategically positioned feathered fan while recumbent on pillows and fur. (The work's genteel raffishness is so well judged that the Pears Soap company bought it.) Barney's swanky, gamy, unaffecting allegories strike me as Victorian in a similarly glamorous, strenuously coy way. I hasten to add that Barney is one of the most accomplished artists we've got.

When sex is filtered through ideals, individual sex lives are prone to surprises. An ur-Victorian legend concerns the trauma suffered by John Ruskin on his wedding night, when he first caught sight of his bride's pubic hair. For all Ruskin, or anyone else, could have known from looking at nineteenth-century British painting and sculpture--which, in this respect, took classical precedents as unalterable law--the mature female pudendum was baby-bottom smooth. As presented in Victorian art, the nude female is a hermetic vessel. For what? For stories and morals. The viewer's gaze, frustrated in its sexual interest, dilates to take in the expression of the figure as a whole. We are diverted from what we're looking at--a naked woman--to what we're supposed to be looking at. In one painting, it's Venus. In another, Lady Godiva, a Nubian slave, or a fairy. Diana, Circe, Titania, Hypatia, Lilith, Galatea, Pandora, Psyche, Andromeda, and St. Eulalia (her martyred corpse) each takes a turn as the heroine of an edifying tale. Images of men, who are sometimes allowed to have genitals (again with classical endorsement), may shade toward the erotic with an ...