Volume 44, Number 19 · December 4, 1997
Can Genitals Be Beautiful?
By John Updike
Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna
exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, October 12, 1997-January 4, 1998., Catalog of the exhibition by Magdalena Dabrowski, by Rudolf Leopold
DuMont Buchverlag/Museum of Modern Art, 363 pp., $32.50 (paper)
In Civilization and its Discontents Freud found the civilized love of beauty something of a puzzle: 'All that seems certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim. 'Beauty' and 'attraction' [the German Reiz means 'stimulus' as well as 'attraction'] are originally attributes of the sexual object.' And yet, he goes on, 'It is worth remarking that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are nevertheless hardly ever judged to be beautiful; the quality of beauty seems, instead, to attach to certain secondary sexual characters.'[1]
Review, 2654 words
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