Erotic

Art that expresses or arouses sexual desire, and the long history of hiding, licensing and exposing it.

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About

Erotic art is made to express or arouse desire, and nearly every culture has produced it, often alongside rules to hide or control it. At Khajuraho in central India, temples built around 950–1050 set embracing couples among gods and dancers. In Japan, shunga, or ‘spring pictures’, were a normal part of the woodblock trade, and Katsushika Hokusai's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814) is among the best known.

In Europe desire usually needed a mythological alibi. Engravings of Giulio Romano's designs for I Modi (1524) were suppressed by the papacy, and François Boucher's reclining nudes for the French court were more candid. Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World (1866) dropped the pretext entirely. In the 20th century Tom of Finland's drawings of muscular men circulated in physique magazines and shaped gay visual culture, and Dorothy Iannone painted her love affair with Dieter Roth in bright, explicit detail.