Erotic art

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

By today's standards Fragonard's The Swing is rather tame, but in the 18th century this painting of a courtier's mistress being in a position where a man can look up her skirts was considered highly erotic. Note 18th century women did not wear knickers or other similar undergarment.

Erotic art covers any artistic work including paintings, sculptures, photographs, music and writings that is intended to evoke erotic arousal or that depicts scenes of love-making.

[edit] Definition

Defining erotic art is difficult since perceptions of what is erotic fluctuate. For example, a voluptuous nude painting by Peter Paul Rubens could have been considered erotic or pornographic when it was created for a private patron in the 17th century. In a different context, a sculpture of a phallus in Africa may be considered a traditional symbol of potency though not overtly erotic.

[edit] Difference with pornography

A distinction is sometimes made between erotic art and pornography (which also depicts scenes of love-making and is intended to evoke erotic arousal, but is not considered art by some). However, no such objective distinction exists and the difference is often in the eye of the beholder.

[edit] Historical

Hermit monk performing auparashtika on a princely visitor. Temple of Chhapri, Central India, 12th century. Khajuraho

Among the oldest surviving examples of erotic depictions are Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings, but many cultures have created erotic art. The ancient Greeks painted sexual scenes on their ceramics, many of them famous for being some of the earliest depictions of same-sex relations and pederasty. There are numerous sexually explicit paintings on the walls of ruined Roman buildings in Pompeii. The Moche of Peru are another ancient people that sculpted explicit scenes of sex into their pottery. ^[1]Additionally, there has been a long tradition of erotic painting in the east. In Japan, shunga appeared in the 13th century and continued to grow in popularity until the 19th century when photography was invented.^[2] Similarly, the erotic art of China reached its peak during the latter part of the Ming Dynasty.^[3] In India, the Kama Sutra is a famous sex manual still popularly read around the world.

[edit] Modern

Gustave Courbet's L’Origine du monde (1866), Musée d'Orsay.

In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text I Modi was an woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601 Caravaggio painted the "Love Triumphant," for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The latter is reputed to have kept it hidden behind a curtain to show only to his friends, as it was seen as a blatant celebration of sodomy. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls, and so on.

Today erotic artists thrive though the genre is still not as accepted as the more standard genres of art such as portraiture and landscape. We can thank the "Sexual Revolution" for reducing the limitations imposed on artists through censorship. Plus during the last few centuries society has broadened its view of what can be considered as art; several new styles developed during the 1800s such as Impressionism and Realism. This has given artists a wider spectrum to work with. We still have the traditionalist such as the erotic surrealist Anthony Christian and his students who use the same techniques that have been tried and tested by artists since the Renaissance, but we also have more contemporary artists such Marci McDonald's abstract work, and the bizarre drawings of Julian Murphy that clearly show the influences modern culture has had on Erotic Art.

[edit] Legal standards

Whether or not an instance of erotic art is obscene depends on the standards of the community in which it is displayed.

In the United States, the 1973 ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in Miller v. California established a three-tiered test to determine what was obscene - and thus not protected, versus what was merely erotic and thus protected by the First Amendment.

Delivering the opinion of the court, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, "The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."^{[citation needed]}

[edit] See also

• Fetish art
• History of erotic photography
• History of erotic depictions
• Lesbianism in erotica
• Nudity in art
• Sex in advertising
• Sex in film

[edit] References

1. ^ Marilyn Chambers, John Leslie, Seymore Butts. (2005). Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization [DVD]. Koch Vision.
2. ^ Shunga. Japanese art net and architecture users system (2001). Retrieved on 2006-08-23.
3. ^ Bertholet, L.C.P. (October, 1997). Dreams of Spring: Erotic Art in China : From the Bertholet Collection. Pepin Press. ISBN 9054960396.

[edit] External links

• Erotica in Art in the "History of Art"
• Erotic Photos,wallpapers,videos