This intimate collection of two millennia of erotic art takes a fresh look at the genre, offering provocative insights into what distinguishes the merely titillating from the masterful.

"In 1906, soon after Matisse acquired his first African sculpture, he began the first of his nudes based on erotic and ethnographic photographs. This reading of Matisse's early sculpture examines the artist's appropriations from two seemingly disparate visions of the body: commercial nude photography and African sculpture. Why would Matisse synthesize mechanically made traces of actual flesh with the hand-carved abstractions of Pende, Senufo, Baga, and Baule figural sculptures? In the twentieth century, halftone technology in France changed economics of photographic reproduction. The inexpensive illustrated revues where Matisse found substitutes for living models were full of plates, making the female body available for mass consumption as never before. One of the main appeals of African sculpture to Matisse and others was that it appeared as a productive antithesis to this; it represented an alternative experience and understanding of human sexuality. In this, Matisse's primitivism was as much a system of beliefs projected onto African sculptures and actual African bodies, as a series of visual and conceptual borrowings from them. To support this idea, the book uses primary materials from turn-of-the-century ethnography and comparative anthropology, popular erotica, and the visual culture of French colonialism. It draws connections between artistic debts and the ideological and historical forces informing them, and plots new study in a now-familiar story of early twentieth-century modernist primitivism. This book challenges an established convention about Matisse--a painter who sculpted merely as a "rest"-- proposing how the sculpture's play with period perceptions of race and gender is key to understanding the artist's fascinations with cultural and sexual origins"--

For centuries, erotic art has brought together the intense passions of both artistic expression and human sexuality. This volatile mixture continues to draw a full spectrum of reactions, from ecstasy to outrage. Above all, it provokes an unquenchable curiosity that lures us into the mysterious realm of forbidden art. Featured here, in beautiful color, are over 500 works of erotic art. Through drawings, paintings, and sculpture, these visions of erotica span diverse countries, cultures, centuries, and lifestyles. Whether it is controversial, humorous, lovely, deviant, mythical, or even instructional, each piece was created within the boundaries of its own social context, and provides a candid, thought-provoking glimpse into another time and place.