Blog
This is the honesterotica blog, where every month or so we will post a thought-provoking article on a subject related to the content of the site.
Here are a few of the subjects that we are planning to cover; do feel free to suggest ideas of your own!
- Why is it that French writers, thinkers and illustrators dominate the genre? Is there really ‘une exception française’ – a uniquely 'French exceptionalism’?
- How should artists and illustrators handle the delicate subject of children and sexuality?
- The recent history of censorship and illustration.
- Where have all the good erotic illustrators gone?
- The role of illustration in good sex and relationships education.
- What does feminist erotic illustration look like?
- Does the visual imagination of extreme eroticism foster exploitation or mitigate it?
Gamiani – a detective story
Anyone familiar with erotic literature will know that the story of Gamiani, first published in 1833, is one of the classics of the genre, explicit, imaginative and amusing.
Birthday Blog Part 3
On to the third and final instalment of your contributions from our request to our followers to let us know what sort of erotic art works best for them. Thank you again for everyone who responded to the call for input.
Birthday Blog Part 2
Here is the second instalment of contributions to our request to our followers to let us know what sort of erotic art works best for them. Another thoughtful and illuminating set of responses, including two contributors who, as artists themselves, recognise that much inspiration can be gained from seeing other artists’ work.
Thank you again for everyone who responded to the call for input – as we say on the website feedback page, honesterotica is very much a collaborative effort, regularly informed and improved by input from our visitors!
Birthday Blog Part 1
Happy birthday to us! Happy birthday to us! Happy birthday dear honesterotica, happy birthday to us!
To celebrate our first five years we asked you, our wonderful followers and visitors, to tell us something about what sort of erotic art and illustrations works best for you, and why it is important to have a resource like honesterotica to display and explore the vast amount of wonderful art which has been created over the centuries, yet much of it unknown and unseen as ‘difficult’ material, often censored or confused with exploitative pornography.
A Paris gallery with a novel approach to ‘difficult art’
As anyone who knows Paris well will be aware, it probably has more art galleries per square kilometre than any other city in the world. So it is a brave individual who chooses to establish something new and different in ‘the city of light’. This, however, is exactly what art lover and communications expert Rachel Hardouin chose to do early in 2018, having honed her credentials working with some of Europe’s best-known and most innovative advertising agencies.
What makes art erotic – for you?
Honesterotica will shortly be coming up for our fifth birthday, and we’ve come a long way in that time.
We started with just 80 artists; now we have over 340. We started with zero Twitter followers; now we’re well on the way to 10,000. At the beginning we were lucky to have twenty visitors to the site each day; now we regularly have more than 800.
Lynn Paula Russell – Retrospective and Sale of Works, 1985–2020
Lynn Paula Russell is the most-visited artist on the honesterotica website; if you like Paula’s work, and especially if you are interested in buying one of her original works, here is your chance!
Conversations with Hans-Jürgen, Part 3
Here is the third and last part of our interview with Hans-Jürgen Döpp, in which he shares his thoughts about erotica today, the influence of the internet, how he defines erotica – and which are his favourite erotic images of all time.
Conversations with Hans-Jürgen, Part 2
Nobody knows more about erotic art than Hans-Jürgen Döpp. His many books include 1000 Erotic Works of Genius, Objects of Desire, The Kiss, Temple of Venus and Paris Eros.
Hans-Jürgen is based in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany, and for many years taught sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University. As well as collecting, teaching and writing he has curated many exhibitions and helped develop and collect for several erotic art museums.
Conversations with Hans-Jürgen, Part 1
The name of Hans-Jürgen Döpp will be familiar to anyone interested in the history and dissemination of erotic art, and we are delighted that he has agreed to answer many of the questions we so often ask of ourselves!