FAMOUS ARTISTS DO EROTICA

Through the ages great artists as well as lesser ones have drawn and painted erections and sex acts of various kinds. But in the Judeo-Christian West these works were considered to be pornography. Many are privately owned, and most of the rest are held by museums in special collections. In recent years, with the relaxing of censorship, these works have also become widely available in anthologies of erotic art. Some of the artists whose work can be found in these anthologies include Leonardo da Vinci (a cross-section of a couple fucking); Parmigianino (I've seen an engraving of a Witches' Sabbath, where celebrants sit on a huge erect cock with the rump of a goat); Thomas Rowlandson (a series of bawdy etchings done around 1810, including one scene in Kensington Gardens of a bunch of phalluses with legs); Giulio Romano, who in Mantua decorated a room in the palazzo of Duke Federico II with a ceilingful of erotic frescoes; Aubrey Beardsley, George Grosz, Egon Schiele, Hans Bellmer, Andre Masson, Felicien Rops, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cocteau, Dali and Picasso. More often than not in this erotic work the penis is seen as either comical (the disembodied phalluses) or a cause of embarrassment and shame. (George Grosz and Egon Schiele both did self-portraits while masturbating. Schiele looks hollow-eyed and haunted; Grosz is shamefaced in the shadows, ejaculating while two women perform for him. The phalluses, the active elements in both portraits, are huge, throbbing and red.) Picasso often drew penises, erect and flaccid, and his work often dealt with sexual relationships. Because he was Picasso, and anything he made was assumed to be high art, his erotic works were shown in museums and sold in galleries. In 1997, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York had a large Schiele show, full of penises and vulvas, a lot of writers got to speculate in print about genitals as fit subjects for artists.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley