Lágrimas De Eros (Tears of Eros) at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, is an exhibition of the erotic in art spanning five centuries. The title comes from George Bataille’s eponymous book Les Larmes d’Éros, 1961, where Bataille argues for the petit mort of the orgasm, the foretaste of the erotic in death.

The exhibition moves you through stages of eroticism sequentially, as a narrative: “innocence to temptation, temptation to the torment of passion, ending in atonement and death.”

This sequence moves room by room through depictions of the birth of Venus; Eve; sirens, femme fatales and nymphets; the temptation of Saint Anthony; the agony of Saint Sebastian; Andromeda; the Kiss, then closes with three videos by Bill Viola which are a heavy handed attempt at “cleansing.” They portray naked couples either underwater or entering and exiting a cascade of water; think John and Yoko under a waterfall.

Room after room of naked women gaze at you – oils, sketches, pastels and prints of lips, teeth, breasts and thighs. The exhibition suggests that the gaze is the cohesion of the erotic and death. Many of the pieces are attempts at capturing just that gaze, which may be no more than an objectified male fantasy mythologized through Eros and reflected back to him.

Not for Picasso in this case at least. His sketch Painter in a Shawl Drawing his Model at the Maison Tellier (1970) shows a woman with legs parted, exposing her vagina for the many-headed man ogling her. It is full of eyes and cocks, phallic-knobbed walking sticks, bulging codpieces and straining groins.

Throughout are many revisitations to classic myths and paintings. Most successful among them is Tom Hunter’s Reservoir #1. Recalling JW Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs, Hunter’s four bare-chested women stand in algae-covered water up to their hips. Behind is a low-slung red-bricked bridge, where you could imagine a canal barge puttering beneath through post-industrial England. One of them wears a nose ring; she has a decorated dreadlock. The women gaze at the man on the bank, whose back faces the camera. He is touching the hand of one of them, reaching out to her, or is she reaching out to him? Behind a clump of grass and wildflowers, a young cupid stares straight into the camera, at you.

The final painting of the exhibition is well placed. It is Margitte’s Les Amants. A couple, their heads side by side, are covered by individual white cloths. They are eyeless – starving you of the erotic gaze, of any gaze within which to locate yourself, yet beneath the cloth you know she is looking straight at you. Why are they cut off from us? Are they doomed to live out, alone, an existence that is ineffable? Or, united by concealment from us, perhaps it is the case as stated by the Gaughin woodcut in an earlier room, Be in Love and You’ll be Happy. -Keith Payne

Watch a virtual tour of the exhibitions.