Philip Hensher: The fine line between high art and erotica

This must be one of the more disconcerting experiences to be had in an art gallery. Tate Liverpool's exhibition of the art of Gustav Klimt and his contemporaries in turn-of-the-century Vienna ends with a dimly-lit room of his drawings. The drawings are often quite thinly executed and I was just peering at one of them, trying to make out its subject, when a voice from behind hailed me. It was Mr Tom Sutcliffe, of this parish and, at that exact moment, I realised that what I had been examining with such closeness was a drawing of a naked lady doing something indescribable to herself. But what is the correct, polite way of looking at such a thing in public?

I knew in general terms that Klimt produced a large volume of erotic drawings, though I don't remember ever having seen them before. Viennese art of the period was as interested in frank and hidden expressions of sexuality as any other part of Viennese intellectual life. There is an old chestnut about Klimt that, when painting a female portrait, he occasionally painted the sitter nude before adding the drapery on top. I don't believe it for a second, but there is something powerfully erotic about his public depictions of women, and it comes out without any constraint in the private drawings.

What is unnerving about these drawings is Klimt's obvious enjoyment of the scene, and the inferral that he must have commissioned models, individually and in pairs, to perform some exceptionally private acts in front of him. These are not drawings from imagination but obviously done very quickly, from life. When we look at the erotic paintings of Klimt's younger contemporary, Egon Schiele, they are, in some measure, easier for us to come to terms with. First, even though they, too, are very frank, they are much more stylised. If you liked, you could hang on to the belief that Schiele painted them from his imagination. Secondly, Schiele's sexualised nudes are openly full of anguish and suffering. Looking at his erotic art, you can't really believe that anyone would ever do any of that for pleasure, so it seems all right to look at it with enjoyment.

Literature has great difficulty dealing with the erotic in any detail, often only managing to deal with it successfully at those minor corners where the act becomes verbal – Constance Chatterley's exchanges with Mellors, or the long telephone call which constitutes Nicholson Baker's Vox. There, the line between high-minded endeavour and pornography is relatively clear.

But in the case of art, the distinction cannot be drawn nearly so neatly. There is no doubt in my mind that Klimt was not detached from the scene; he was sexually excited, and meant to induce the same feeling in his ideal observer. There is plenty of great art which does exactly that. Courbet's deeply shocking L'Origine du Monde, Felicien Rops, some Eric Gill and many of the greatest Japanese woodcuts and Indian miniatures could never be reproduced in a mass-circulation newspaper, even now.

There is a magnificent Fragonard in Munich of a barely pubescent girl masturbating with the aid of her pet dog. It is on open display, but I wonder for how much longer, given the radical shift in our sensitivities in this area.

After a deep breath, anyone will see how stunning these Klimt drawings are – they show a master, working at full tilt and never losing technical control, however the scene affected him. They are works of the passions at white heat and they retain their power to shock and, as I found out, to embarrass, a hundred years after they were produced. That has to be worth something.

Long road? It's more of a tall tale

A forthcoming BBC4 drama, The Long Road to Finchley, stars Andrea Riseborough as the young Margaret Thatcher. It contains the utterly startling notion that Mrs Thatcher in her youth attempted to seduce Edward Heath, and that their long-standing hostility in later years sprang from this failure.

A complete load of old rubbish, of course, and it really displays the poverty of imagination of the scriptwriters. Romantic love is all very well as a subject, but only in the minds of the slightly thick does it act as an explanation for everything.

If there was ever a personal division riven by pure ideological commitment, it was the split between Heathite and Thatcherite after 1975. The true story is as gripping as any thriller.

* What is the English national dish? I don't mean what do we eat most of – I think we ought to keep quiet about cook 'n' chill chicken tikka masala – or even what we seem to like best. But rather, what a national dish ought to do, which is impress and seduce foreigners, who, even now, are rather too ready to write off English cooking without ever even having bothered to sample any.

I think I have the answer, in the form of fish pie. A properly made fish pie, with a mixture of sustainable white fish, something smoked, some prawns and, if you're feeling flush, a handful of scallops, in my experience never fails. Even Americans, who, associating the word "pie" exclusively with fruit dishes, greet the idea with initial faint disgust, invariably clean their plates in the end. But when was the last time you had it in a restaurant, hitting the exact pitch between refined construction and heartiness? I don't think I ever have; it's something to make yourself on a rainy Sunday afternoon. And there are going to be plenty of those this summer.

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