Two

Nudes and Nazis; or, Surveying Sex through Violence in Museums

This chapter constitutes a form of discursive display to explore, in experimental fashion, nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums as sites for visualizing perversity through the exhibitionary logic of cultural otherness. To do so, I map an alternative display choreography that matches the “public dramaturgy of power,” as Tony Bennett has described the exhibitionary complex particular to museums, through four “galleries” that textually show and examine specific acts of violence committed against sex objects or subjects exhibited as sex objects.1 I treat these acts of violence as carefully planned performances that used museums as recreational stages for sexual social management and the galvanization of normal sexual spectatorship. I borrow Joseph Roach’s definition of violence as a performance of waste that is meaningful, never senseless or excessive, and always performative as it must have an audience to exist.2 I have selected four instances of performative violence in museums and gathered them under the rubric nudes and Nazis, the itinerary through which I relate in the following pages.

The first gallery, “Venus in Jars,” begins with an examination of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s postmodern freak show Couple in a Cage. It goes on to relate the circumstances under which the African woman Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, billed as the Hottentot Venus, was displayed in London and Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I analyze how sexual display was used as a violent tool for transforming nonwhite peoples into object lessons of evolutionary theory. Displays such as the one that showed Baartman’s Africanness as freakishly other to white, European audiences serve as spectacular examples of imperial biopower that sought to normalize colonial fantasies of otherness by using sexual difference as a confirmation of Western domination. While displays of this kind primarily took place in popular entertainment venues such as circuses, dime museums, and street fairs, the collaboration of freak show proprietors with evolutionary biologists and the burgeoning science industry provided a playful, public face for the biopolitical movement of applied science that would become known as eugenics.

The second gallery, “The Suffragette Slasher,” examines the vandalism/iconoclasm of Diego Velázquez’s Toilet of Venus (La Venus del espejo, or, as I will refer to it, The Rokeby Venus) at the London National Gallery by the suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914. Richardson’s violent act can be seen as a dramatic performance of violating the gendered system of sexual consumption that John Berger has famously called ways of seeing.3 I ruminate on how this act embodied various interpretations of spectatorship that have been debated in feminist media scholarship of the past forty years. Like Laura Mulvey’s interpretation of the gaze, Richardson’s act and what she later said about it suggest that the seeming authority of an object that derives from its display context places rigid limits on female spectatorship.4 Ultimately, Richardson can be viewed as both a rebellious iconoclast and a willful vandal for a multiplicity of reasons dealing with desire, capitalism, and the impulse to destroy what was becoming in museums and in civic life the normative way of framing the female body.

Painted nudes, such as The Rokeby Venus, were fast becoming what Kenneth Clarke would call the ideal art form.5 At the Armory Show in 1913, a year before Richardson’s attack of The Rokeby Venus, students at the Art Institute of Chicago burned Henri Matisse’s painting Blue Nude in effigy and attempted to burn a feminized effigy of Matisse named “Harry Hair Mattress” to protest the display of Blue Nude alongside other modernist works such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. The third gallery, “Blue Nude in Effigy,” examines how the move from realism to abstract representation of the female body factored into this demonstration. I argue that one of the motivations for the burning of Matisse’s painting was to destroy Matisse’s unorthodox representation of the nude, which was seen by his detractors as a locus for generating nontraditional and “degenerate” approaches to depicting the female body. I also entertain interpretations of the painted body of Blue Nude as a representation of the monstrous androgynous or genderqueer body that reads female through the presence of breasts and genitalia but possesses the muscular curvature of a cisgendered male. Blue Nude, whose parenthetical subtitle reads Souvenir of Biskra, also derives from the abstract commemoration of a figurine that Matisse bought during his travels to Algeria; this figurine, though accidentally destroyed as he painted Blue Nude, most likely portrayed the naked, reclining body of a North African and possibly Muslim woman. The feminization of Matisse into “Henry Hair Mattress” sought to strip him of his masculinity and to commit the same violence against him that the Art Institute protesters saw in his alleged primitivization and masculinization of the nude.

The final gallery, “Nazis and the Visual Literacy of Degeneracy,” juxtaposes the first three galleries to what the Nazi regime designated as Entartete Kunst (degenerate art). The Nazis used the word degenerate to describe modern art, which they viewed as Jewish and un-German. The fourth gallery reflects on the layout and textuality of the show Degenerate Art, in which Nazi officials carefully arranged the artworks by theme so as to create what I call a visual literacy of degeneracy with important intersections with the exhibition of race and sexuality. In particular, I concentrate on the exhibition’s room 3, “An Insult to German Womanhood.” I focus on the exhibition of normative sexual ideologies in that room and argue that these displays played an important role in the construction and consolidation of Nazi fascism even as they also revealed the internal conflicts about normal sexuality that riddled Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party). I end the chapter with a more recent performance of violence committed against Andres Serrano’s photographic series A History of Sex in an art gallery in Lund, Sweden. In 2007, a group of alleged neo-Nazi visitors used axes and crowbars against the photographs in a spectacular performance of vandalism and violence.

Overall, these examples demonstrate how museums provide one of many stages and museum visitors some of the many performers in long-standing and violent social and political dramas over sexual spectatorship. I present this selection of museum display events in the form of a genealogical exhibition, a museum of words, if you will,6 to show how display contributed to the invention of sexual perversity in museums and how this perversity depended on the framing of foreign cultural otherness as dangerous and sexually deviant to the practice of museum viewership.

Gallery 1: Venus in Jars

In 1992, the performance artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña presented themselves as the unknown human specimens of the Guatinaui people at mainstream museums all over the world.7 Museum patrons reacted in a wide range of anticipated and unanticipated ways. Some were outraged that museums continued to utilize what they considered to be inhumane and racist exhibition formats for displaying cultural difference. These patrons assumed that the museum, and not Fusco and Gómez-Peña, had authored the exhibition and believed that the exhibit represented some kind of authentic display. Others were angered by what they saw as a slap in the face, a mockery of the museum and the museum visitor. They recognized the exhibit as performance art and were angered at its sneaky tactics and implications. Still other museum visitors gleefully went along with the exhibit by posing for photos with the Guatinaui people, feeding them bananas through their cage, quietly and appreciatively staring as the “natives” watched television, banged away on laptops, danced to rap and hip hop music, sewed vodou dolls, or were led to the bathroom on leashes. In some of the more violent moments, racist skinheads tried to enter the cage. Acid was flung on Gómez-Peña’s legs, and objects were hurled through the bars of the golden cage in which the defenseless artists were vulnerably enclosed.8

Still other visitors were turned on and wanted a closer look at (and feel of) these “foreign” bodies partially concealed under their scanty and outrageous clothing. Several men approached Fusco with romantic interests. As Diana Taylor has argued (not without expressing her own desire): “There was something very alluring about Fusco with her beautiful face painted, [her voluptuous torso], and wearing a grass skirt and a skimpy bra, and the frequent erotic overtures by men suggest that perhaps the erotic pleasure of her performance eclipsed its ethos.”9 At the Whitney Art Museum in New York, the artists provoked an aroused response by inviting visitors to pay $5.00 to get a peek at authentic male Guatinaui genitals. On several occasions in different locations, women reached out to touch Gómez-Peña: “[One woman in Irvine, California,] asked for plastic gloves to be able to touch the male specimen, began to stroke his legs and soon moved towards his crotch. He stepped back and the woman stopped.”10

Perhaps the ethos of the performance was partially eclipsed by the artists’ exclusive focus on the freak show’s relationship to race and ethnicity while leaving the sexual aspects of this display form unchecked. But, in keeping the allure of the sexual exotic intact, the artists remained faithful to the ways in which sexuality was deployed as a crucial facet in the historical exhibition of human aberration and the creation of cultural otherness. A frequent business strategy of freak show managers was to fabricate heterosexual love affairs between the performers. Arranged or claimed marriages were exploited for profits.11 Fusco and Gómez-Peña continued that tradition with the implication that the two Guatinauis were romantically involved. But, while they deconstructed colonialism, they forgot, Sue-Ellen Case has argued, to perform the same treatment of heterosexuality. In effect, they suggested that, even these exotic Guatinaui, somehow cut off from the world until the moment of encounter with this museum display, embodied the “universal” value of heterosexual coupling.12 But what they did manage to accomplish was to show how freak displays depend on hegemonic definitions of racial difference embedded in traditional forms of sexual union to construct a paradoxical kind of sexual exoticism characterized equally by desire as by repulsion.13

2.1 Body cast and skeleton of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus,” in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

I have always been fascinated by Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s Couple in a Cage, or, as they titled it for the museum exhibition, Two UndiscoveredAmerindians. Their performance installation definitively revealed the power of the museum context to render something as true and real at the same time it demonstrated how diverse museum publics arrive on the scene with varying degrees of willingness to question what the museum frames as reality. It also pointed to the ways in which museums have historically contributed to the transformation of fear and disgust of foreign bodies into erotic, and therefore digestible, colonial fantasies. Couple in a Cage, a postmodern restaging of human exhibits from nineteenth-century freak shows, world fairs, and circus arenas, showed how easily alterity could become fetishized and exoticized in display environments. At the same time, the performance showed how readily this exotic erotic othering can be collapsed into recognizable, sexualized, and stereotypical frames that the assumed audience already understands (e.g., the heterosexual couple form of kinship, the stereotype of the hypersexual primitive).

The freak show was a spectacle and a hyperbolic cultural performance that constructed, labeled, and displayed abnormalcy. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has explained: “The freak show consequently created a ‘freak’ or ‘human curiosity’ from an ordinary person who had a visible physical disability or an otherwise atypical body by exaggerating the ostensible difference and the perceived distance between the viewer and the showpiece on the platform.” In the past, freak shows were cultural rituals that framed and choreographed bodily differences that we now call race, ethnicity, and disability. Through display, they enacted the social process of making cultural otherness from the raw materials of human physical variation. When women were exhibited, as they frequently were, freak shows often staged what Garland-Thomson has characterized as “inverted, parodic beauty pageants” that labeled these bodies as grotesque icons of deviant womanhood in juxtaposition to a superior Western ideal.14 This Western ideal depended on the freak’s contained and civilized double: the Anglo-European woman as depicted in paintings of nudes.

In zoos, at circuses, on street corners, and in museums, the freak shows of the nineteenth century invited audiences to see humanity as it ought not be and to develop from their comfortable distance a confidence in their normalcy as the freak on display was marked the aberration. In this way, freak shows were predicated on the offstage showing of what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett called taxonomies of the normal.15Onstage, exhibitions included a motley bunch ranging from cultural freaks (primarily bodies of color from other national contexts but mostly billed as African in origin), natural freaks (depicted as monstrous or extraordinary bodies, as in midgets, giants, or pinheads, but also including what we would consider today to be the physically or mentally disabled), self-made freaks (such as tattooed or body-modified individuals), novelty artists (like snake charmers and fire-eaters), and fake or “gaffed” freaks.16 Simultaneously attracting and repulsing audiences, freak performers, particularly bearded women, tattooed women, skeletal women, “fat” women, and women of color, were dressed in flesh-toned, tight, or flimsy outfits. Occasionally, spectators were invited to touch the freaks on display, a titillating because rare embodied interaction between object and spectator.

Dime museums emerged during this period to cater to the masses and varied in the levels of provocative body display they included. These museums often negotiated the semiclad, sexualized freak show with more respectable displays that appealed to bourgeois Victorian families. The most successful ones, like P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, trod the precarious line between sexual and tasteful family pleasures. “Sex,” Andrea Stulman Dennett writes, “was a powerful component of the performance text of the freak show.”17 And no freak show was ever more sexualized than the display of Sarah Baartman, otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus.

Freak shows, such as the one in Piccadilly Circus where Baartman was displayed, cast women of color as the embodiment of primitive female sexuality and staged cautionary tales of the “natural female appetite unmanaged by social sanctions.”18 In London’s Piccadilly Circus in 1810, Baartman was displayed, according to a contemporary account in the Times, in the following manner:

On a stage about three foot from the floor, with a cage, or enclosed space at the end of it; that the Hottentot was within the cage; that on being ordered by her keeper, she came out, and that her appearance was highly offensive to delicacy. . . . The Hottentot was produced like a wild beast, and ordered to move backwards and forwards, and come out and go into her cage, more like a bear on a chain than a human being. . . . She frequently heaved deep sighs; seemed anxious and uneasy; grew sullen, when she was ordered to play on some rude instrument of music. . . . She is dressed in a colour as nearly resembling her skin as possible. The dress is contrived to exhibit the entire frame of her body, and the spectators even invited to examine the peculiarities of her form.19

Forced to be silent and to represent the fixity of an idea of primitiveness constructed by Europeans, Baartman was made to represent the paradox of what her exhibitors named her: the Hottentot Venus. Venus referenced the white paramour of beauty in the style of Sandro Botticelli’s nude painting The Birth of Venus, and Hottentot was the name that Europeans attributed to the Khoisan people as they made no effort to learn Khoisan or Dutch, two languages that Baartman also spoke in addition to French and English.

With the freak performer unable to express herself in words, her audience focused instead on the lucrative embellishment of her supposedly African features. The stage setup provided a constructed comfort zone for experiencing racial difference close up. As her popularity as a leisure entertainment attraction grew, she also became a medical specimen and was staged as one of many bestial missing links. Her body was poked and prodded by scientists and spectators alike. Though the marketing strategy for the Hottentot Venus conspicuously amplified all her features in illustration, newspaper accounts tell us that the most highly gawked at feature was her buttocks. This feature became a site of fascination and medical study and a visual locus for proving grotesque femininity and cultural inferiority.20 Her buttocks were declared congenital errors (a new category at the time, what we now call birth defects) and were given aname: steatopygia. The gender-bending, low-hanging labia minora she was rumored to possess (sometimes referred to as a curtain of shame orthe Hottentot apron) was also labeled as a malformation of the genitalia,an enlargement that was associated with excessive sexuality and supposedly led to lesbianism.

It was Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist and one of the founding fathers of comparative anatomy, who ultimately subjected Baartman’s body to anatomical investigation. The most important aspect of that research included a close study of her genitals. Siobhan Somerville has argued that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies followed Cuvier’s exact line of inquiry when examining the bodies of African women.21 As medical journals during this period evidence, Cuvier’s study of Baartman’s genitalia became the definitive guide for constructing racial difference by examining the sexual and reproductive anatomy of African female bodies.22 It formed the foundation of what Somerville and others have called scientific racism. Scientific racism is grounded in an understanding of the body as a legible text that demands to be read in order to show its hidden mysteries. The mysteries with which scientific racists were fascinated consistently drew relationships between emerging attitudes on sexuality (the invention of the homosexual as a distinct and deviant sexual species) and the advent of colonial-inspired questions about making visible the differences between civilized and primitive races. Baartman’s genitalia were framed as evidential proof of how a measured difference in the body made manifest racial inferiority and, simultaneously, sexual degeneracy.

In 1815, Baartman left London for Paris with a new owner and was shown in restaurants, private flats, and scientific laboratories. She died in Paris in 1816 of an inflammatory ailment, possibly smallpox or pneumonia complicated by alcohol poisoning. Shortly after her death, Cuvier claimed her body in the interest of science and made a cast of it in wax. Throughout her life she had kept hidden that supposedly gender-bending, low-hanging clitoris that Western scientists had already labeled a congenital error. On her death, she was rendered completely vulnerableto the eyes and hands of scientists. Her body was dissected “to decipher the body, to undress the body,” so that “the hidden secrets of [her] body are fully revealed to the medical gaze.”23 But the lessons of comparative anatomy must be seen by the public to be learned, Cuvier and his colleagues must have reasoned. After their study concluded, Baartman’s genitals and brain were placed in jars and displayed in museums for more than 150 years. Her remains were locked in the storerooms of the Musée de l’Homme until as late as 1982. On the insistence of Nelson Mandela and South African activists, her remains were returned to South Africa and given a ritual burial in her homeland in 2002.

In the case of Baartman and other women of color who were exhibited in life and dissected after death, display served as a “structure of genetic inheritance [that] now provided the matrix for the orderly display of nature’s mistakes . . . and for eliminating such errors in the future—sterilization, anti-miscegenation laws, and selective mating.”24 Baartman’s complete skeleton was exhibited on a stand alongside her pickled and jarred remains. For the first century and a half, she was displayed in the National Museum in Paris, first in the comparative anatomy gallery in the Museum of Ethnography, and then as part of the collection of the Biological Anthropology Laboratory at the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle.25 The cast of her body was briefly exhibited for the last time at the Orsay Museum near the South African embassy in Paris in 1994. In 1974, her remains were moved to the storeroom of the Musée de l’Homme, where the medical scientist Stephen Jay Gould encountered them alongside the dissected genitalia of two other so-called Third World women. Gould was careful to note the organization of the archive as a privileged site of exhibition where bell jars containing the brains of the anatomist Paul Broca and other elite white men were placed above the three jars of the women’s genitalia. He went on to say: “I found no brains of women, and neither Broca’s penis or any male genitalia grace the collection.”26 The way in which the museum’s archivists arranged the body parts in the vault failed to question Cuvier’s beliefs on how to order the human races through juxtaposition and measurement and thus preserved scientific racism in both form and content in the archive.

In both her life and her death, the biopolitics of gender, race, and sexuality were literally mapped onto Baartman’s body and made public and accessible through display. As Sander Gilman noted, black women’s genitalia “were seen as evidence of an anomalous sexuality not only in black women but in all women.”27 In organizing male craniums with female pelvises, the anatomical archive preserved sexual difference as something immutable. The violent inspection of black women’s bodies also became a mode for disciplining white women’s bodies and sexuality. If their pelvises, buttocks, or genitalia were too large, then most likely their sexual behaviors also needed downsizing. In the archive of the Musée de l’Homme, Gould detected a kind of postmortem mastery for Baartman in the juxtaposition of Broca’s decomposing brain “in a leaky jar” with Baartman’s “well-prepared skeleton gaz[ing] up from below.”28 Archival organization, however, has a profound influence on what and how objects are displayed on the museum floor, and the conservation in the archive of sexualized artifacts based on racist theories can often, if left unquestioned, seep into the organizational logic of the museum, as it did in the display of Baartman’s genitals and brain in the Musée de l’Homme until 1974 and her body cast until 1976.

Remembering Baartman and countless other individuals whose display made up the history of freak shows as a colonial form of intercultural performance, Coco Fusco wrote: “While the human exhibition exists in more benign forms today—that is the people in them are not displayed against their will—the desire to look upon predictable forms of Otherness from a safe distance persists.”29 We see these ghosts of modernist perspectivalism and its influence on the consolidation of gender, racial, and sexual norms in most forms of sexual consumption today. While the rules have changed, as Fusco notes, many of the same scripts for who structures the gaze and how it materializes in display spaces as an instrument of both pleasure and power continue.

Gallery 2: The Suffragette Slasher

For the suffragette Mary Richardson, the slashing of Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus at London’s National Gallery on March 10, 1914, was a minor act of rebellion in the long and difficult fight for women’s rights. Richardson, like most English citizens, knew the value of this painting, the only surviving nude by Velázquez. As with L’origine du monde in the previous chapter, so too The Rokeby Venus was shown only in private prior to its acquisition by the National Gallery. It was already a celebrity object before Richardson’s attack. Over a hundred years earlier in 1806, it had been brought to England by the Duke of Wellington, was acquired by a Mr. Morritt of Rokeby Hall at Yorkshire, and then became known by the name of its possessor as The Rokeby Venus. Prior to its sale to the National Gallery at the notoriously high price of £45,000 in 1906, the Times had described it as “perhaps the finest painting of the nude in the world.”30 Thus, the display of the painting became a spectacular event where a once private and taboo Spanish object became available for collective, public consumption in a national English museum. What Spain had regarded as too risqué during the time of the Spanish Inquisition was ultimately exhibited by Spain’s historic rival as a source of great national pride and the representation of white femininity par excellence. The spoils could not be sweeter.31

2.2 The vandalized Toilet of Venus (Rokeby Venus), by Diego Velázquez, (oil on canvas, 1647–51; National Gallery, London), with photo of the meat cleaver used by Mary Richardson.

Richardson, who had been arrested at least ten times leading up to her attack of The Rokeby Venus, carefully planned the event to coincide with other acts of public property destruction by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The goal of this campaign was to shock the public into recognizing the plight of imprisoned suffragettes through militant guerilla tactics. For Richardson, the liberation of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst from imprisonment became her cause (or perhaps her obsession) célèbre. After she attacked the painting, national daily newspapers reported the incident extensively and reprinted a statement that Richardson had sent to the WSPU headquarters. It read:

I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty just as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs. Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for that she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians. If there is an outcry against my deed, let every one remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful living women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy.32

And what an outcry there was. Richardson’s act was viewed as a wanton act of political terrorism that mutilated a national treasure and the paragon of European womanhood. The National Gallery closed its doors for a period of time. The directors and trustees of the Wallace Collection, the Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Guildhall Art Gallery, Hampton Court, and the Windsor Castle Collections followed suit. Outrage ensued as the British public was denied access to its national treasures and an important leisurely pastime.33 Unaccompanied women became particular targets of museum policing.

In this and other instances of violent iconoclasm, rebellious and destructive acts were committed against the formation of hegemonic or transgressive sexual spectatorship in museum contexts that strictly prohibit touch. Touch, erotic or otherwise, was not always considered anathema to the museum. As Constance Classen argues, pre-Enlightenment display spaces such as The Wunderkammern, distant relatives of the modern museum famous for their lack of categorization and chaotic and lush organization, incorporated environments teeming with opportunities to touch.34 It is true, as Classen puts it, that “one of the most difficult subjects for an historian to investigate is that of the corporeal practices of earlier eras.”35 Nonetheless, she finds significant evidence that the first modern public museums allowed visitors to touch the collections. The ceasing of these sensual allowances in the mid-nineteenth century was caused by and generative of dramatic changes in modes of observation, objective science, surveillance techniques, the visual display of capitalism, and an increasing association of the sense of touch with primitive cultures. Touch and permission to touch have everything to do with the organization of knowledge and expertise in the museum as well as who is figured as trustworthy and capable of carefully handling historically or aesthetically valuable artifacts. Museums, then, inspire and reflect organizations of national belonging by drawing boundaries around certain visitors’ sensual perceptions and navigational prerogatives. The spectacular and politicized performance of the vandal/iconoclast is viewed as one of the most heinous and feared breaches of museum regulations as it threatens to destroy the national treasures that symbolically belong to everyone, though just beyond their tactile reach.

What motivates a spectator to break this most holy of museum rules has been a much-debated topic. Consider, for example, this excerpt from Tina Howe’s play Museum, a parodic comedy of errors about bad museum manners and the portrayal of an exhausting day in the lives of the American museum guards (all 227 of them) who are charged with enforcing the museum’s regulations:

Liz’s voice. (Offstage.) Did you hear what happened to Botticelli’s Venus this morning?

Carol’s voice. (Offstage.) No, what?

Liz’s voice. (Offstage.) Some maniac shot it with a gun.

Liz, Carol, and Blakey (Enter, enthusiastic college girls who are taking an art course together.)

Carol. Someone shot it? People don’t shoot paintings. They slash them!

Liz. I heard it on the radio this morning. A hooded man pumped eighteen bullets into the Venus figure at the Uffizi.

Carol. I’ve never heard of anyone . . . shooting a painting.

Blakey. You’re right! They usually attack them with knives or axes.

Carol. There’s something so . . . alienated . . . about shooting a painting.

Howe’s museum visitors steal, touch the art, laugh too loudly, lift and suck on statues, stand too close, cross the line, mouth off, and take photographs (with the flash on!). In the play, the act of violence discussed in the excerpt offered here occurs elsewhere in a European museum “where [a]ny maniac can get away with anything,” according to the “Second Guard” persona. The site of the massacre: the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The perpetrator: a “heavily built” and hooded male assailant armed with a handgun. The victim: Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The crime: lodging “more than 18 bullets into the nude Venus figure, literally shooting her in the face of the canvas” and destroying the painting beyond restoration. In other words, the “Voice” at the start of the play concludes, “the most violent attack ever made against a Renaissance painting.”36

Most often a spectator who dares to touch in order to destroy is dismissed as a political terrorist or as mentally disturbed. Others prefer not to discuss it, believing that doing so will put ideas into people’s heads, a notion that extends J. L. Austin’s argument that certain speech acts possess performative power and that brackets certain utterances as unhealthy stimuli.37 Like sexual arousal, the dramatic act of destroying a material object on display in a museum has been consistently ignored for this reason but also because analyzing the behavior and emotions of those who touch or become aroused is tricky and often unsavory business. “With the analysis of response,” David Freedberg argues, “we take into full account the dialectic between material image and the beholder, and the history of images reclaims its rightful place at the crossroads of history, anthropology, and psychology.”38 Freedberg reminds us that the act of an individual assailant toward a material object on display in a museum is not only inspired by the resentments of the spectator toward the object in question but also intricately interwoven with the social and political circumstances of the time and place. In a sense, as Freedberg argues, the spectator seeks to wound or even murder the object that is viewed as alive.

Like the act of violence committed against The Birth of Venus in Howe’s play, most attacks against art objects in museums have been committed by men, and in many instances the object attacked was a female nude. Examining the language used to describe such acts committed by men against representations of the nude female form, Gridley McKim-Smith asserts: “The rhetoric of vandalism is really a rhetoric of rape.” McKim-Smith believes that “these acts register an implicit belief that the painting is more than an inert combination of pigment and support, and language also describes damaged paintings as if they were living victims of personal assault.”39 Indeed, she argues, the language that describes these violent acts feminizes the object attacked, likening it to the victim of sexual abuse. But, if, as Freedberg contends, art objects displayed in museums and in particular paintings are viewed as alive by the iconoclast and, as McKim-Smith adds, vandals view paintings as living women with whom they possess a vengeful sexual dynamic, then how do we account for an attack against the painting of a female nude when the assailant is a woman, as in the case of Mary Richardson?

The typical resentments that motivated the iconoclasts in Freedberg’s study were directed at the object itself. For Richardson, her resentment was directed at the authority that was attached to the object, those who created its value as a priceless treasure and deemed it worthy of display to the public. In a sense, she symbolically wounded and sought to murder the material object as an accessible and vital organ of the authority of the state over women’s civic and social bodies. While Emmeline Pankhurst languished in prison, Richardson chose to sacrifice The Rokeby Venus, despite her professed love of art, to draw attention to the private suffering of Pankhurst through the highly public display of a painting in a national museum.

While the political objectives of Richardson motivated her response, her romantic desire for Pankhurst may also have played a role in her decision to slash The Rokeby Venus. There has been much debate about the sexual relationships between suffragettes during this time period.40 Scholars who focus on the diaries of female suffragettes have claimed that sexual or at least sensual relationships between them were commonplace and that Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter, Christabel, could be included in a lesbian history of Britain. One scholar on the subject, Martin Pugh, wrote: “The extreme pressures generated by suffragette militancy—the experience of public hostility, clashes with police, ill-treatment in prison and the general sense of being part of a persecuted minority—inevitably led some women into more intimate relationships than was usual; their situation was not unlike that endured by men in wartime conditions.”41 In contemporary accounts, Richardson’s motive for attacking The Rokeby Venus was described in language that gendered her as male and claimed that she mimicked the explicit sexual violence that some men, such as Jack the Ripper, committed against women. McKim-Smith’s analysis of the event also entertains the possibility of what she described as Richardson’s “sadomasochistic fantasy in which she simultaneously identified with both male and female roles” in her spectatorship and attack.42 Ever since Laura Mulvey’s work, media scholars generally accept the fact that the gender of the spectator does not restrict the agent with whom that spectator identifies, and, considering that love between women in the trenches of the suffragette movement was common, I want to propose that Richardson’s attack can also be viewed as an expression of sexual desire for or even love of Emmeline Pankhurst. While these assertions remain unprovable, I mention this possibility to suggest that, while the violence Richardson committed against The Rokeby Venus could have been inspired by hatred of government authority, it could equally have been inspired by love, filial, romantic, or otherwise, for another woman.

What seems clear is that Richardson’s hatred of certain government forms for regulating the female citizenry inspired her premeditated attack. Lynda Nead has argued: “Richardson’s attack amounted to a re-authoring of the work that ruptured the aesthetic and cultural codes of the painting and of the female nude [as a genre] more generally.”43 In a 1952 interview with BBC Radio, Richardson explained: “I thought I must do something to try and rouse the public. I thought, well, what will I do. Well, I better attack a woman who is worth something financially . . . so I thought, well, the Venus is worth a lot of money.”44 Through her dramatic tactics, Richardson strove to show how relations between commodities and images had supplanted relations between people. She was, in effect, using spectacle as a violent ephemeral performance to illuminate what Guy Debord described as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”45 Richardson’s aim, like Debord’s situationist one, was to arouse the spectator who had been mesmerized by the ongoing spectacle of media images and, through radical action in the form of revolutionary situation construction (e.g., Richardson’s act of vandalism), reorder everyday life, politics, and art.46 Richardson’s act took place on a “free day” when anyone could enter the museum without charge. This is part of the reason the attack met with such scathing and wide-scale vitriol. Not only did she destroy a national treasure and a paragon of beauty; she also interrupted what had become a sphere of social space that was nominally free from the obligations of labor. She employed the violent act of the iconoclast/vandal not just to destroy the exhibited object, though this too must be sacrificed, but also to strip the display of the object of its symbolic, cultural, and economic capital through a public performance of destruction.

Richardson’s act might then be viewed as the first in a genealogy of militant feminist performance tactics that I noted in the previous chapter and that Rebecca Schneider has gathered under the name binary terror. Like the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist group of working artists who emblazoned the urban streets of the world with agit-prop art signage that read, for example, “DO WOMEN HAVE TO BE NAKED TO GET INTO MUSEUMS?” Richardson made explicit the social constructions that marked women as less evolved than men.47 She, like the Guerrilla Girls, seized on the museum as a platform in that struggle. The political import of her act, however, was complicated by what she would later in her life become: a fascist who worked as a women’s organizer for the British Union of Fascists. While it might be tempting to characterize her violent act as an unequivocally laudable feminist performance, she also chose to destroy a work of art that, as we will soon see, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party would also deem inappropriate for public (but not private) consumption. Ultimately, we must view her violent act within the larger narrative of her life, a life in which she consistently tried to wed her socialist and suffragette values with political tactics and ideologies widely considered to be hostile to feminism.48

Furthermore, Richardson operated within the discursive framework of the suffragettes, which focused on rights for white women. While Velázquez’s Venus endured seven slashes to her back and buttocks, the specter of another Venus—the Hottentot Venus—persisted in the cultural imaginary of museum display as primitive and uncivilized. With the dawn of the modernist art movement, as the next gallery will explore, the naked bodies of women of color were incorporated into the lexicon of the idealized nude that dared to use paintings as contact zones for the clash of the primitive and the modern. The display of the multimedia works of the surrealists and the expressionists and the paintings of Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse forged an ultimately canonical but initially controversial category of sexual spectatorship in museums that, in the case of Matisse’s Blue Nude, infuriated students at the Art Institute in Chicago and led to the violent protests at the Armory Show in 1914.

Gallery 3: Blue Nude in Effigy

Charles Francis Browne had derided the impressionists ever since his days as a student in Paris. Now a nationally renowned landscape painter and an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago, he was a vehement opponent of the exhibition that arrogantly claimed, he must have thought, to introduce the benighted American art world to the chaotic and confounded European avant-garde. His primary target: Henri Matisse and his abominable female nudes.

On April 16, 1913, his students burned copies of three of Matisse’s most offensive “monster paintings” in a jubilant revelry. One of the paintings selected for the flames was Matisse’s Blue Nude, which Leo and Gertrude Stein had lent to the traveling exhibition. Before burning the reproduction, they painted it red, as though covering it in blood. The gory image that remained burned slowly while students danced around the bonfire casting off the diabolical spirit that possessed the picture that Matisse dared to title nude.

2.3 Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), by Henri Matisse (oil on canvas, 1907). Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art.

A mock trial followed the burning ceremony on the south portico of the Art Institute. Dressed in motley garb, the students descended the front steps with great ceremony with their prisoner, named “Henry Hair Mattress,” in toe. Manacled and white with terror, the actor playing this feminized Matisse surrogate was pushed forward with a rusty bayonet while the prosecutor scowled and read the indictment: “You are charged with artistic murder, pictorial arson, artistic rapine, total degeneracy of color, criminal misuse of line, general esthetic aberration, and contumacious abuse of title.” Overwhelmed by the severity of the prisoner’s offenses, the jury collectively fainted. On recovering, they unanimously declared him guilty on all counts in the first degree. The executioner stepped forward to slay the defendant, but the “shivering futurist, overcome by his own conscience, fell dead.” The police stepped in before the students could end their ceremony with the burning of an effigy of Matisse.49

Part performance artists, part angry mob, the students at the Art Institute found in Matisse and in particular in his Blue Nude the ideal target of symbolic violence. Burning in effigy, Joseph Roach reminds us, is a “violent performance of waste, the elimination of a monstrous double, but one fashioned by artifice as a stand-in, an ‘unproductive expenditure’ that both sustains community with the comforting fiction that real borders exist and troubles it with the spectacle of their immolation.” Effigies serve as props in ritualized atmospheres within which participants can communicate with dead things toward their renewal. Here I use Roach’s concept of effigy to show how the female figure “fill[ed] by means of surrogation a vacancy created by the absence of an original.”50 For the Art Institute students, realistic nudes, like The Rokeby Venus, were the dead or dying subjects that they sought to renew. They blamed Matisse and his coterie of European art elites for killing those subjects off through the use of objectionable art techniques. Furthermore, these new techniques fundamentally changed the relationship between the masculinized gaze of patriarchal perspectivalism and the quintessential artistic genre of idealized femininity, the nude. For the Art Institute students and their instructor, among other vociferous critics, what Matisse killed was the way of seeing this highly valued and politically necessary representation of woman. And what he tried to birth, or so they thought, was a new locus of sensual spectator pleasures that were actively sexual, primitive, and peculiarly androgynous. The effect for them was monstrous, freakish, and degenerate.

By the time the Exhibition of International Art, better known today as the Armory Show, arrived at the Art Institute on March 24, 1913, the public already anticipated being titillated and disgusted by what would be on display. The traveling show, organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, was hailed by New York journalists as a “miracle,” a “bomb shell,” and “an event not on any account to be missed.”51 The exhibition strove to introduce European modern art to American audiences, but in Chicago this goal was sidetracked by the general antipathy of Art Institute audiences to modernism and especially to modern art. The scathing response of Chicago critics focused on the perceived immorality of the assault on the representation of the female form that some of the included artists, especially Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse, were accused of committing.

Few works aroused such vehement criticism, especially at the Chicago show, as Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude. More so than any other artist, Matisse was accused of misusing the medium of the nude to degrade the female form by rendering it dangerously masculine, potentially nonwhite, and actively sexual (more naked than nude).52 In his study of the American reception of Matisse, John O’Brian has argued: “Matisse is an emblematic figure in twentieth-century art, perhaps the emblem of an artist whose work is predicated on the sensual pleasures to be had from the aesthetic sensation of looking.”53 For O’Brian, Matisse’s painterly style spurred the eruption of controversy even as it was already forming in the transitional period from one set of sexual norms to another; this transition would eventually take hold, albeit unevenly, across different sexual populations in the postwar period. The banality of the display of Blue Nude and other offending paintings of the female form at the Armory Show, as well as Blue Nude’s violent reception, is a paradigmatic moment for studying the fits and starts through which sex took on new meanings during this period.

For some of the audience members who thronged the Art Institute between April 16 and May 24, what was on display was a political affront to emerging sensibilities of the global American outlook. An elite group of degenerate Europeans whose work embodied a “Bolshevik philosophy applied to art” displayed this work, it was thought, to circulate insurgent political ideas. As John O’Brian has pointed out, the anxieties about communism voiced in response to the Armory Show and subsequent exhibitions of what was becoming known as modern art would be heard again during the early years of the Cold War.54 American artists who embraced the Armory Show and other shows of modern art did so precisely because they saw in these exhibitions, J. M. Mancini argued, “modernism’s break from nineteenth-century aesthetic traditions” and furthermore “believed that aesthetic revolution would bring about democratic social change.” While the potential revolutionary fervor of modernist art was a necessary part of the equation, the “much less democratic struggle of an emerging art-work elite” began “to limit and police access to artistic knowledge and the art world itself.”55

The painter and writer Kenyon Cox became the critical voice for the American everyman who felt that the emerging aesthetic contours of modern art imposed an impossible and inaccessible language of elitism on the fundamentally democratic exercise of appreciating understandable art during one’s leisure time.56 Prominent political figures also weighed in. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, published a frequently quoted critique of what he saw as the “lunatic fringe” of elite European artists who displayed work at the show. That critique exposed an anxiety about Bolshevist political propaganda posing as art as well as a concern about the illegibility of modern art. One of his favorite targets was what he saw as the “mammalian” but “not especially human” depiction of the female body:

It is true, as the champions of these extremists say, that there can be no life without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development. Probably we err in treating most of the pictures seriously. It is likely that many of them represent in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly lucrative which the late P. T. Barnum showed with his fake mermaid. There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint.57

Here, Roosevelt accused the artists and organizers of the show of dealing in the seedy, dishonest, and exaggerated spectacles of circuses, dime museums, and freak shows. For him, the art on display was faked, much like Barnum’s mermaid gimmick. The collectors who purchased a cubist painting were fooled by an optical illusion into buying a “misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint.” We can deduce from this that a real painting of a woman was something that was unthreatening and pleasing to look on, much like the passive paragon of beauty of The Rokeby Venus. Of course, as we have seen, Mary Richardson would not agree with Roosevelt’s taste in nudes. The kind he preferred caused her great agitation. What is clear from this passage and the slashing of The Rokeby Venus is that not all nudes are created equal.58

The students at the Art Institute in 1913 were not alone in attacking the “esthetic aberration” of Matisse’s approach to the female form. In one of the few writings to seriously consider the sexual seduction of Matisse’s Blue Nude and other feminine representations, John Elderfield ruminated on the aftermath of the effigy burning at the Armory Show: “In effect, Matisse was viewed as having violated the female body because of the way he deployed his aesthetic medium. This sounds like a feminist argument. But did these students, the majority of whom were male, object to Matisse’s work because it reinforced a conventional view of women as passive and powerless? I don’t think so. Violating a conventionally pleasurable image of the female body could be interpreted as doing precisely the opposite, and was.” He goes on to recount the critique of a Matisse nude shown in 1908 in New York that was described as “malevolent . . . hideously at odds with nature . . . loathsome and abnormal . . . [revealing] the female animal in all her shame and horror.”59 These words seem straight out of the newspaper articles written about the display of the Hottentot Venus in 1811, except this time the nude, that sanctified and hallowed art form of the managed female sexual appetite, becomes the object of disgust. Matisse had successfully painted a nude that no longer provided the foil to primitive sexual deviance. He had dared to mix the elements of the two, and the resulting spectatorial experience sparked massive masculine outrage.

The context in which Matisse painted Blue Nude was instrumental to what Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield have called the radical invention of his early years. Matisse painted Blue Nude in 1907 shortly after his first trip to Morocco (in 1906). He described this trip and his fascination with Persian miniatures as an important factor in his artistic “transition.”60 Some have suggested that Blue Nude is not a representation of white femininity but rather the image of an Algerian woman.61 While the race of the Blue Nude persona is an unresolved question, the ways in which critics lambasted the image of the woman as subhuman seemed to tap into and resurrect the racist rhetoric of preabolition England when describing the sexuality of Sarah Baartman. John Berger famously distinguished European art and its obsession with portraying supine and vulnerably positioned women from Indian, Persian, African, and Pre-Columbian art, all of which depict active women performing sex, love, and mutual voyeurism.62 By applying the inspiration derived from non-Western objects and places to the canvas of Blue Nude, Matisse portrayed some of the spirit of this forgotten sensuality of the woman of color, an absence, Jennifer DeVere Brody reminds us, that is rarely, if ever, seen as desired in high art.63 It is this spirit in the Armory Show that Art Institute students wished to cast off in 1913.

The other factor that contributed to the violent burning in effigy of the painting and the attempt to burn an effigy of Matisse was a classic case of “gender trouble.” The subversion of the male gaze demanded the interrogation of not only whiteness but also the constitutive performance of viewership based on sexual object choice. Matisse denied the pleasure that comes with viewing the feminine by endowing his nudes with a teeming sculptural musculature that grew out of his artistic process as well as out of the way in which he viewed his own body’s relationship to the canvas. Blue Nude emerged by accident, a hasty initiation to remember a sculpture that had slipped off the turntable in his studio. Most Matisse scholars seize on this serendipitous disaster as a turning point in the mutually influential relationship of his sculptures and his paintings.64 This moment is best viewed alongside his 1908 “Notes of a Painter” where he describes his process of reworking an image so as to create a representation of the female body that is “more fully human” and at the same time “a self-representation” that identifies himself with his model. His painterly process transported him to a state of mind that he described as “alien to [his] normal life as a man.”65

Some critics have described Matisse’s nudes as phallic, and others have described them as androgynous. His contemporary Louis Vauxcelles characterized Blue Nude as a “mannish nymph.”66 The Artnet writer Charlie Finch described his own reaction to encountering Blue Nude at the Matisse: Radical Invention exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010: “I confess, having seen the painting in person more than once, to being repelled by it and finally got around to asking why. When I discovered the surprising answer, I immediately fell in love with the painting. You see, Matisse has painted a voluptuous nude of a woman which includes physical elements of a man. Blue Nude is a drag-queen picture disguised as the erotic memory of a woman.”67 In comparing the racialized influences that marked this moment in Matisse’s career and that clearly affected the words chosen by his critics to describe the animalistic sexuality of Blue Nude with the disgust that arose in past and present male viewers of the androgynous persona of the image, we can see how race, gender, and sex crisscross the body depicted on the canvas to disorient the canonical viewership of the nude. Art Institute students remained vague about the exact nonformalistic nature of the “esthetic aberration” and “contumacious abuse of title” that Henry Hair Mattress was charged with. They were right to seize on this moment as one of global change in sexual mores, but, on the local level, they also helped transform the Armory Show into a cultural crisis brought on by what they saw as a radical Bolshevik break with tradition. Blue Nude, like any good sex object, destroyed the absorptive museum experience characterized by docile and unemotional spectatorship on the part of an unadulterated white, male perspective.68 As in the Armory show, so too in the Nazi Degenerate Art show: what was considered degenerate was not ultimately the displayed objects but the way in which the objects were displayed to prevent the mastering gazes of patriarchal perspectivalism from landing.

Gallery 4: Nazis and the Visual Literacy of Degeneracy

A November 2001 statement prepared by the Smithsonian Council outlined the exhibitionary thematics that have proved most volatile in the history of display. At one point in the report, an anonymous “chief curator at a well-known East Coast art museum” argued: “Frankly next to sex, Nazi is the hottest button you can push. ‘Sex’ and ‘Nazi’ are the two words that no museum director, board chair, or curator wants to hear. The amount of emotional freight that surrounds the Nazi-era makes it difficult for nonprofit institutions to deal with it rationally.”69 That Nazis and sex have become two of the most taboo topics to display in museums is an ironic historical development. Nazi displays were rife with a particular variety of regime-approved sexuality and represented the ways in which the Nazi Party on the whole was highly conflicted about sexual mores.

2.4 View of one section of the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition, ca. 1937, Munich, Germany. University of California, San Diego.

Most scholarship on this period in Germany’s history overwhelmingly assumes that the Third Reich was hostile to sex and that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party was an antithetical reaction to the “voluptuous panic” of Weimar Berlin.70 Yet according to Dagmar Herzog “the grotesquely brutal but wildly popular dictatorship” of Hitler “was obsessed with issues of both reproduction and pleasure.”71 Indeed, the Third Reich was responsible for the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) and the violent persecution of homosexuals under the harsh punishments of Paragraph 175. But repression occupied one of many storylines in the history of Nazi sexuality; other tales impart how sex was deployed to consolidate the power of the Third Reich. The Nazis became experts at using display as a violent public dramaturgy of power.

Specifically, race and racism unified the party and dictated what strategies were used in the reorganization of sexual life. Sexual display was central to Nazi theories of biopolitics, control, and the destruction of human life because its focus on the naked body allowed racial differences to be highlighted, ordered, and shown to the masses.72 The Nazis were masterful at using sex to make claims to the restoration of law and order partially through celebrating a return to heterosexuality, marriage, and family life for populations that met certain racial and class delineations. For those ideologically approved by the regime, the appeal to a popular nostalgia for romantic ideals of heterosexual desire partially explains how the Nazi Party became politically attractive to such a large number of German citizens.

This chapter’s final gallery examines the 1937 Munich Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) as an example of how display was used by Nazi curators, led by the National Socialist president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts Adolf Ziegler, to develop a visual literacy of degeneracy. This visual landscape bolstered a popular appeal to Nazi sexuality via the leisure activity of museumgoing. The display of the female body became central to the Nazis’ use of the museum as a theater of biopolitics. The Nazis claimed that modernist artists desecrated the female form, a particular affront to the purity of German women, and that their work must therefore be destroyed. In the violent fight over the racial and gendered makeup of sexual normalcy, the female body again took center stage in this political spectacle of Nazi propaganda.

The primary targets of the exhibition were art critics, dealers, and museum directors who had been instrumental in displaying, buying, and circulating modern art before the Third Reich’s ascendancy. The exhibition was attended by over two million visitors (about twenty thousand per day) during its four-month run in Munich before it traveled throughout Germany and Austria to be seen by approximately one million more visitors. Attendance at the exhibition was free, and five times as many people attended the show as visited the Nazi-approved art museum the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) that had opened just a day before the Degenerate Art show.73 The objective in concurrently organizing these two exhibitions was to encourage visitors to juxtapose the House of German Art’s Nazi-approved collection, which largely consisted of naked Aryan bodies idealized through painting and sculpture, to what was exhibited as degenerate art by depraved and unhealthy artists at the Degenerate Art show.

But, while the German public and in particular the German art elites constituted the audience for these shows, the intellectual dimensions of modern art were not the only elements attacked at Degenerate Art. For the Nazis, art that appealed to class struggle, that exhorted military sabotage, and that violated religious feelings was also obscene. As its title belies, however, Degenerate Art aimed to teach a visual rhetoric for identifying certain racial, moral, and sexual types that were degenerate not only in their modes of artistic expression but also in their biology. Entartete was a term invented by nineteenth-century psychologists to describe clinical mental illness; writers of medical, biological, and anthropological literature later broadened it to refer to any biological deviance. “Whether anti-Semitism was deeply felt or simply strategically utilized,” argued Herzog, “there is no question that it provided one of the premier sense-making systems in use in the Third Reich.”74 While only 6 percent of the artists represented at the show were Jewish, the textual labels presented the look of certain paintings, sculptures, and drawings as quintessentially un-German, Jewish, and therefore degenerate in form. As Kate Green has argued, Nazi curators approached the show as “a spectacular example of propaganda . . . and also an utterly ordinary curatorial endeavor.”75 The selection of certain works, their juxtaposition to each other through labeling, layout, installation design, contextualizing elements, and the imposition of a certain itinerary for movement through rooms and galleries, was typical of any and all museum exhibitions. What differed from other museum experiences were the ways in which Nazi curators extrapolated biological Jewish degeneracy from works of art neither created by Jewish artists nor thematically connected to Jewishness.

Degenerate Art taught museum visitors how to see Jewishness in every nontraditional art form and made a claim that works of modern art were degenerate by displaying them in crooked, cramped, and unflattering ways. Galleries were poorly lit, paintings were hung upside down without frames, and anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, and anti-intellectual slogans swirled in crudely painted script on the walls. The intended effect was to make viewers feel overwhelmed, disoriented, and even nauseated by the sheer number of complex artworks and the rapid juxtapositions between them. Labels were key to the display techniques employed at Degenerate Art. Museum signage attempted to instruct museum visitors that any feelings of discomfort were inspired by the content of the work and not the mode of showing it. Gallery room titles such as “Images of Cultural Bolshevism,” “Chambers of Horror of Art,” and “Art That Did Not Issue from Our Soul” made political claims to modern art as the un-German work of Jews, Bolsheviks, intellectual elites, homosexuals, and the mentally disturbed, while smaller wall texts connected these groups to the emergence of important sociopolitical issues such as unemployment, inflation, and Germany’s defeat in World War I.

The Degenerate Art show was one part of a holistic plan to seize the apparatuses of public culture to make visual biopolitical connections among art, eugenics, and the emerging popularity of sexual science. In 1936, a year before the exhibition, Hitler and Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels virtually gained total control over German cultural affairs. While Degenerate Art carefully staged the confiscated images to inscribe Jewish people and people of color as biologically diseased and morally and culturally degenerate, the nearby House of German Art included sculptures and paintings that framed fit, healthy, and Olympian bodies as the sexual and sexualized ideal. While other Nazi-supported exhibitions such as the International Hygiene Exhibition that opened in Dresden in 1930 more explicitly promoted eugenics through panels, posters, and data about birth and marriage rates and hereditary transmission, the exhibition of works at the House of German Art exhibition aestheticized and eroticized fit and healthy bodies that, when juxtaposed with works at the Degenerate Art show, promoted eugenic goals. According to Fae Brauer: “By framing illness, disease, disability and deformity alongside racial and Semitic difference as the binary opposite, the ‘degenerate’ body became inscribed as abject, contagious and dangerous. . . . Through nudity and provocative posing, the aspirational imagery made it seem normal and natural to desire to have sexual contact with the delectable body for ‘rational procreation.’ Conversely, the abject image was designed to evoke repulsion: aversion to emulation of and sexual contact with the degenerate body compounded by its alignment with syphilis and other forms of sexual contagion.”76 Brauer suggests that, in Nazi Germany and other locations such as Victorian Britain, as we saw in the exhibition of Sarah Baartman, art, biopower, and eugenics created a visual vernacular for understanding a corpus of sexological and psychoanalytic discourses that Foucault called scientia sexualis. For Foucault, scientia sexualis pivots on the performance of confession, a mode of uncovering the truth of sex that, for hegemonic and political ends, actually served to conceal it. He juxtaposed scientia sexualis to ars erotica, a playful and creative sexual culture that valued “bodies and pleasures.”

Nazi seizure of display as a political tool for consolidating power suggests that the distinction between societies based in ars erotica and those based in scientia sexualis is not always clear. Degenerate Art and its normativized foil, the House of German Art, revealed how Nazis used art exhibitions to establish biopolitical messages about sex that originated in the study of anatomy and race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nazi curators seized on museums as stages for presenting the medicine of perversions of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and, ironically in the context of Nazi Germany, psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud.77 Instead of presenting this literature in a scientific manner with graphs and statistical data, they employed art as evidence of perversion. That is, they used sexual display as a strategic tool for employing the pleasure of leisurely pursuits, such as museumgoing, in the service of establishing a regime-approved scientia sexualis.

Nazism’s relationship to the nude is a case in point. Degenerate Art included a category dedicated to displaying depraved art that “mocked,” “vilified,” and “insulted” German womanhood. This room was populated by avant-garde nudes such as Kleinschmidt’s Melancholi (1929), Ernst’s Eva (1929), and Matisse’s Reclining Nude (a reproduction of the sculpture on which he based Blue Nude). Hitler and his cronies incorporated all these female representations into a category of “women who can arouse only revulsion.”78 Across the park at the House of German Art, neoclassical nudes were exhibited in abundance and hailed as the Aryan ideal. Many of the nudes at the Great House of German Art depicted naked men as “lithe and supple, muscular and harmonious bodies” that expressed, as George Mosse argued, “strength and harmony, order and dynamism, in other words, the ideal qualities of both burgher and nation.” If Degenerate Art attempted “to demonstrate the consequences of the rejection of social and sexual norms,” the “idealized seminude male,” as in the work of Hitler’s favorite sculptor Arno Breker, came to symbolize the pureblooded male citizen of the Third Reich. Mosse added: “The nakedness of the male stereotype displayed on so many Nazi buildings and monuments, however, never lost its unsettling and latently threatening effect.”79 When and whether the rampant display of naked men as symbolic of the health and virility of the regime spilled over into the degenerate perversion of homosexuality became the obsession of Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS. In November 1937, he delivered a speech that attempted to create a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” male nudity and homosociality that the opening of Degenerate Art and the House of German Art also visually manifested. In this and other instances, display worked in tandem with speeches, posters, pamphlets, films, and other sites of Nazi propaganda and political spectacle to create a visual literacy of degeneracy that was, nonetheless, contradictory and incongruous.

While the display of male nudes caused great anxiety among factions of the Nazi Party, the incongruity of the National Socialist view on sex was even more apparent in the Nazis’ display dilemmas when depicting the naked female body. In room 3 of the Degenerate Art show, Nazi curators selected sculptures and paintings of naked women crafted in the modern art aesthetic. The display of nudity and sexual posturing became a means for separating men from women, and representations of androgyny and lesbianism were suppressed as they “menaced the division between the sexes and thus struck at the very roots of society.”80 In effect, the Nazis created two distinct categories of nudes: one in the style of Matisse’s Blue Nude with all its genderqueer and race complexities and another kind of female nude that was shown through the motifs of athleticism and sport and that “emanates delight in the healthy human body.”81

Yet even the display of women who fit within the Nazi cult of health and Aryan beauty met with much internal debate. On the one hand, Goebbels demanded that women and girls be strong, fit, and easy to look at but that the display of musculature on the arms and legs should be prohibited so as to maintain a sharp distinction between male and female in the visual vernacular.82 Nudism was banned, but Nazi display culture supported the showing of naked women in motion or engaged in sport, but only if their “feminine contours” were deemphasized so as to approximate the male athlete’s body. It seemed that women who were either too masculine or too feminine were equally dangerous to public display. Otherwise, women were exhibited as the embodiment of bourgeois Aryan respectability and defenders and protectors of the people through their roles as mothers and custodians of tradition.83 In this latter category, hips became a locus of contradictory critique. Broad hips were necessary for visually depicting women as childbearers and Aryan breeders, but narrow hips were prized as sexually desirable to the male gaze. When Hitler previewed the House of German Art in 1937, for example, he vociferously criticized the curatorial choice to include so many paintings depicting peasant women with broad hips.84

In her discussion of the conflicting female ideals under German National Socialism, Lorettann Gascard gathers images depicting women in service to or sacrificing for the state as the Nazi’s “eugenic ideal.” She juxtaposes these representations with what she calls the pleasure ideal, avisual category that satisfied the personal preferences of Hitler and his coterie and provided a visual landscape for the promotion of sexual fantasies. She argues: “The eugenic ideal and the pleasure ideal glaringly reflect contradictions embedded in the [Nazi] ideology approach to its female population.”85 Drawing on Gascard’s interest in studying the visual negotiations performed by Nazi-approved artists to navigate these ideals, I argue that divisions between public and private display were used to distinguish between the eugenic and the pleasure ideals. Nazi-approved art depicting naked women as muscular athletes or clothed women as mothers and breeders was displayed in public, but in private nudes depicting women as passive and sexually expectant graced the homes of many Nazi officials, including Hitler. Hitler’s favorite painter of nudes and the architect behind Degenerate Art, Adolf Ziegler, produced static, neoclassical images of Aryan figures in styles not unlike but less skillful than The Rokeby Venus. Ziegler saw the painting of his nudes and their display in private domestic settings as a service to the state. For him, paintings of beautiful nude German women encouraged the libido of German men, giving them the incentive to have more German children who would in turn embody the Aryan cult of health and beauty.86 If public display was aimed at integrating the masses into the visual literacy of the Third Reich, private display was intended to promote pleasurable sexual intercourse between state-approved couples charged with rearing the next generation of Aryan elites.

The ways in which Nazis created contradictory categories of nude men and women and based public or private display decisions on these categories reveal the contradictions in the sexual mores of the Nazi Party generally. To draw from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and the debate about the naked and the nude, the Nazi nudes that promoted women’s bodies in motion seem to fly against the tradition of sexualized nudes as passive and immobile. As in the ubiquity of the neoclassical naked male body as symbolic of the Third Reich, attempts to create divisions between normal and abnormal sexualities collapsed on themselves and could rightly appear to promote active female sexuality, homosexuality, and other forms of perverse degeneracy that the Nazis so diligently strove to visualize in the juxtaposition of Degenerate Art and the House of German Art.

The Nazis would ultimately destroy, sell, or lose most of the artworks that populated the Degenerate Art show. Violence against the objects they displayed accompanied the destruction of humans they considered degenerate, as various books on the Nazi pillaging of European art that include rape in the title suggest.87 The ultimate fate of Europe’s artistic treasures culminated in a purifying bonfire, a thrilling finale in the drama of spectacularized politics that led up to the Second World War. While I have focused on the ways in which the Nazis used display to publicize their biopolitical aspirations of national makeup and sexual pleasure, Degenerate Art and its foil, the House of German Art, should not be seen as Nazi propaganda alone. As George Mosse pointed out, the exhibition “played upon basic moral attitudes that inform all societies.” “The concept of respectability,” he continued, “has lasted; after all, even today art is condemned if it transgresses the normative reality in too shocking a fashion. That Entartete Kunst exists in a continuum is demonstrated by the controversy in 1989 over Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs, which were thought to offend public decency.”88

While Mosse has noted the potentially fascist approach to sexual display at the end of the twentieth century, other scholars such as Fae Brauer have focused on how interrelationships between art, visual cultures, medicine, science, anatomy, psychology, anthropology, criminology, and eugenics were consistently forged in a multiplicity of events that occurred throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the French Third Republic, Victorian and interwar Britain, the Soviet Union, North America, and Australia and New Zealand. In this chapter, I have created an exhibitionary genealogy that looks to the history of sexual display as a method for examining how museums contributed to the exhibition and circulation of sexual biopower and the creation of categories of sexual normalcy and sexual perversity. I prefer to juxtapose these events in four galleries rather than collapse them into an artificial sameness so as to cultivate a holistic and contextual approach to the study of museum display and the politics of sexual spectatorship. In each gallery, museum display serves as an integral component in the development of sexual ideologies forged through the regulation and disciplining of museumgoing as a recreational practice.

While Mosse and I would agree that the logic of Degenerate Art persists, as does the exhibitionary rationale of the freak show, the feminist/fascist iconoclast, and the male-dominated anxiety of sexual and gender hybridity, the display structures that represent the meaningful violence of biopolitical aspirations in the present tense must take into account the shifting political and economic contours of late capitalism, which is the focus of the next chapter. Most museum violence in these late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scenarios is subtly and discursively enacted. External political and cultural debate as well as in-house museum signage become signposts for deciphering the impact of sexual display on defining sexual normalcy from an ever shifting sexual abject. But still, in a few instances, overt violence takes place in museums that connect the past to the present of sexual exhibition.

A History of Sex and Violence

I end with a twenty-first-century example of this kind of overt sexual iconoclasm/vandalism.

At 3:30 PM on a quiet afternoon in Lund, Sweden, four masked men ran through the Kulturen Gallery smashing the sexually explicit photographs of Andres Serrano’s series A History of Sex with crowbars and axes. In all they destroyed seven fifty- by sixty-inch photographs (a combined value of approximately $200,000) while shouting expletives and “We don’t support this shit!” in Swedish. The exhibition was divided into two galleries, one of which was a darkened “back room” dedicated to what the curator Viveca Ohlsson considered to be the more risqué works and where the men started their hacking. The vandals whom local authorities believed to be members of the Nationalist Socialist Front, the largest neo-Nazi organization in Sweden, left behind leaflets reading: “Against decadence and for a healthier culture.” Later, a video with heavy metal music as background was posted on Youtube. The video, which has since been removed, included text that said that the men would strike again against those who “perversify” the public and blamed parents who “willingly expose” their children to art such as Serranos’s.89

2.5 Axed Roberts and Luca from Andres Serrano’s A History of Sex (1995). Photo by Viveca Ohlsson, Kulturen Gallery, Lund, Sweden, 2007.

The huge full-color prints in Serrano’s A History of Sex depict some of the most marginalized and policed sex acts in the history of sexuality. His choice to use the fine art genre of portraiture to depict static and unemotional images of fisting, intergenerational and interracial lovers, zoophilia, and dominant women who penetrate pushed the very limits of what kinds of sex can be licitly viewed in public. One photograph, Leo’s Fantasy, in which a woman urinates into a man’s mouth, his head thrown back to welcomingly receive the stream, inspired a backlash composed of actual and symbolic performances of violence in Groningen, Netherlands. From February to May 1997, the Groninger Museum displayed A History of Sex and decided to use Leo’s Fantasy as the image for the publicity poster, which was customized for advertising the exhibition on the local tram. Church groups were the first to protest. The controversy became a legal battle when citizens brought suit in a Dutch court to stop the distribution of the poster. The court first ruled that the poster was not obscene but later changed its decision. Meanwhile, the people of Groningen threw paint bombs at the Groninger, leaving visible residues on the facade of the museum, and marking the space as one of many sites in the genealogy of social and political dramas regarding issues of sexual display.90

These were not the only performances of violence committed against Serrano’s art. In 1989, conservative politicians and religious groups attacked the National Endowment for the Arts for helping finance Serrano’s work, including a photograph of a crucifix allegedly immersed in urine. In 1997, a print of the photograph, called Piss Christ, was attacked and destroyed while on display at the National Gallery of Art. Beyond the infamous Piss Christ, Serrano’s artistic oeuvre includes other taboo themes such as guns, naked dead bodies in the morgue, and portraits of the homeless. That Serrano took on sex was no big surprise, but the way in which he did so—color prints that allude to mainstream advertising in their colossal size and format—shocked not only his opponents but also the art world, which struggled to find words to defend the polymorphous perversity of his photographic series. Always the bad boy artist, Serrano chose format and size to mock the charges of recruitment that had been leveled against many queer artists who displayed their work during and after the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. As Paul H-O posted: “What’s more, Serrano has also ended up on top of the pile, for this month at least, that is the art-world debate over representation and art and what it can do and how it can do it. Some of the pictures aren’t so much about sex acts as about display, and of course display is a sex act.”91 In Sweden in 2007, the Christian Democrats and the Liberal People’s Party joined the outraged response of the right-wing nationalist Sweden Democrats party in attacking not only the art and its display but also the government’s cultural policy. “Taxes are being spent on exhibitions that the public is not interested in, for example non-figurative art,” Erik Almqvist, a spokesman for theSwedish Democrats, told the Art Newspaper. “Instead we should focus on values that create a feeling of togetherness.”92 The arguments waged against the artwork—that it is obscene, pornographic, abstract, elitist, and not reflective of the cultural history that the nationalists viewed as truly Swedish—sound similar to the strategies employed by the Nazis to argue both for and against certain kinds of art to promote national ideals.93 While the relationship between nationalism and sex certainly remain relevant to contexts of sexual display during late capitalism, they become eclipsed by the popular adoption of the rhetoric on the Right that first and foremost these exhibitions represent a waste of government and taxpayer resources. This consumer approach to citizenship (as opposed to critical citizenship) regarding the museum management of sexual culture becomes the mode and manner for attacking the sex act of display and the rise of queer political voices as we turn our attention to the violence of the ongoing culture wars of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first.

3.1 Warning sign for second iteration of the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, December 2011, Brooklyn Museum. Photo by author.

3.2 Warning sign for Lost and Found: The Lesbian and Gay Presence in the Archives of American Art, December 2010, National Portrait Gallery. Photo by author.

3.3 Warning sign for Because We Are, an art exhibition on LGBT civil rights, September 2010, Station Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo by author.