Author: Joyce Kozloff, introduction by Linda Nochlin

Publisher/Date: Hudson Hills Press, 1990

Format: Red cloth bound hardcover book with dust jacket, 88 pages

Description: This is an artist’s exploration of the erotic thorough an extraordinary suite of watercolor paintings that incorporate both sexual and ornamental motifs from the great art of the world, East and West.

From the dustjacket: Patterns of Desire is an artist’s exploration of the erotic through an extraordinary suite of watercolor paintings that incorporate both sexual and ornamental motifs from the great art of the world, East and West. Joyce Kozloff; a leading artist who explores ornament in all her work, including large-scale architectural and environmental projects, here provides surprising and amusing juxtapositions in a series of fantasies that romp through art history. Here are scenes ranging from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to a Charles Rennie Mackintosh tearoom, from The Book of Kells to Japanese science-fiction movies, from visionary French architectural drawings to Greek pottery, from a pre-Columbian Codex to an Italian Renaissance villa. All are treated with an equal inventiveness and irreverence.
Thirty-two paintings are reproduced as full-page colorplates facing color enlargements of particularly delectable details. Kozloff also provides brief commentaries for each painting, explaining both her scenarios and their sources.
Patterns of Desire is introduced by noted art historian Linda Nochlin (Distinguished Professor of Art History, The Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York) in an essay of remarkable wit and erudition. She writes: “The Patterns of Desire series is, on some level, always about pleasure, that most desirable and elusive of experiences. In these images, three kinds of pleasure are at issue, perpetually figuring and refiguring themselves in a variety of ways: the pleasure of the artist, the viewer, and the figures represented in the images. ...The pleasure of the artist has to do with both the sexual and the decorative aspects of the production. ‘I wanted to swing back and forth between architecture, the decorative arts, popular culture, and landscape, between flat and deep space,’ Kozloff declares. ‘I chose only sources that I love. After all, the series was to be about pleasure.’ ”
Nochlin concludes: “Sex, in many of its manifestations, is bizarre or seems so when looked at from outside; at times it is outright funny. It is especially funny when it takes place in the wrong settings-and almost all of Kozloff’s settings are ‘wrong’ from the point of view of spatial, temporal, and visual logic. It is, in a way, just this wrongness that makes them so right, ...a liberation of the erotic fantasy from the bonds of time and place, a free flight into a crazy, untrammeled garden of earthly delights.