Leo Putz’s erotic drawings occupy a different register from his oil paintings – smaller, more intimate works on paper that trade the canvases’ painterly colour fields and surface build-up for direct line, immediacy, and the opportunity to imagine a much more explicit range of sexual subjects. Where his oils celebrate light, atmosphere and pictorial harmony, many of the known erotic works, executed in pencil, coloured pencil, chalk and pastel, rely on the sensual suggestion of contour and touch: the sweep of a back, the weight of a thigh, all rendered in a few confident strokes.

His drawings allowed Putz to explore the figure with a quicker, more intimate hand. Pastel and coloured pencil permit immediate modulation of skin tone on paper without the drying time and layering oil requires. This makes the drawings feel more private and improvisational – studies or vignettes meant for close viewing, collecting in portfolios, or reproduction in prints rather than the public display function that large oils fulfilled.

Putz’s surviving drawings also show that he was intimately interested in the more explicitly sexual and physical aspects of the human body, not just its artistic potential. Several portfolios include studies of couples and threesomes enjoying rampant sex, and women displaying their genitals and pissing. Most of these small explicit works which have survived are in private collections, and we are very grateful to Hans-Jürgen Döpp for these images; Hans-Jürgen, the compiler of many books on erotic art, curates the Venusberg online gallery and bookshop which you can find here.