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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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...
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