Erotic art in the Modern Era – The Revolution of the Body

The text below is the excerpt of the book 1000 Erotic Works of Genius (ISBN: 9781783109371), written by Hans-Jürgen Döpp, Joe A. Thomas and Victoria Charles, published by Parkstone International.

The 1960s saw major changes in the history of sexuality in modern society. Primary among these was the introduction of the contraceptive pill, which for the first time allowed women to enjoy sexuality without the fear of pregnancy. Released in the United States in 1960, “the pill” quickly spread across the developed world. The advent of easy and safe oral contraception created feelings of sexual liberation that contributed to the famed sexual revolution of the sixties.

Primarily, the sexual revolution implied a change in attitudes. The internationally distributed results of Alfred Kinsey’s famous sexual behaviour surveys of the 1940s and 1950s had already exposed the dissonance between the rich variety of private sexual experience and the conservative, Judeo-Christian ideals espoused in public. What was “revolutionary” about the sexual revolution was the average person’s new willingness to discuss sexuality openly and frequently. This change was encouraged not only by social and scientific developments such as oral contraception, but also by cultural components such as the increasing popularity of Playboy magazine and the use of female sexuality as an enticement in advertising. Fashion also focused on sexuality with Mary Quant’s mini-skirts and Rudi Gernreich’s topless bathing suit for women.

Writers such as Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse celebrated sexuality as a means of individual spiritual fulfilment and socio-political change. None of these developments were lost on the artists of the sixties. The Pop artists of Europe and America, who commonly mined popular culture for subjects, were among the first to exploit the sexual content that they found there. Martial Raysse in France and Tom Wesselmann in the United States commented on the commercialisation of sex by painting female nudes based on mass media sources. Meanwhile, an older generation of artists such as Picasso continued to use sexual and erotic subjects for more personal and emotional motives. In the more sexually liberal climate of the sixties Hans Bellmer was able to illustrate suppressed works of erotic literature such as the Little Treatise on Morals.

In many ways the 1970s were the fruition of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The decade’s unrest culminated in the international turmoil of the 1968 protests. In its wake, a newly liberated society could freely enjoy a myriad of new possibilities. Particularly important was the rise of feminism, or as it was then known, Women’s Liberation. Among the most important of the original tenets of Women’s Liberation was a new sexual freedom made possible by the contraceptive pill. Women could now be active agents of their own sexuality rather than passive objects of male, heterosexual desire. Alongside this development was the wave of gay liberation.

For the first time since the tentative efforts of Magnus Hirschfeld in Weimar-era Germany, homosexuals began to publicly assert themselves and their sexual identity as part of the broad shift in attitudes after the sexual revolution. In visual art, pluralism reigned supreme. While much of the art world turned to a variety of cool, conceptual work, some artists continued to explore erotic themes, particularly the assertion of feminine sexual agency by the growing ranks of influential women artists such as Louise Bourgeois.

Subsequently, eroticism and sexuality have continued to thrive in a wide variety of expressive media. Despite recurrent resistance – largely from worldwide organised religions – the achievements of the sexual revolution have profoundly changed society. From popular music and film to painting and sculpture, eroticism and sexuality are an integral part of contemporary international culture.

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