What’s new
Any time is the right time …
21st September 2023
Today we have pleasure in bringing you the earliest erotic portfolio yet to be added to the website, the sweet hand-coloured 1733 L’Année Galante. This month-by-month account of lovemaking reminds us that any season is the right time for hands-on intimacy – see all twelve images by clicking here.
Bodies
11th September 2023
The concept of ‘the erotic’ in art is sometimes hard to delineate; Richard Wallace’s paintings are almost never explicitly sexual, but what is nearly hidden can often be more sensually stimulating that that which is in full view. See his work now by clicking here.
French frolics
8th September 2023
With grateful thanks to one of our American contributors, we bring you all twenty of Claude Bornet’s very explicit 1803 engravings for Andrea Nerciat’s Devil in the Flesh – click here to see them. Yes, there was a great deal of sexual experimentation two centuries ago!
Hidden gay worlds
7th September 2023
It was lonely being a poor, self-taught gay artist in America in the 1970s and 80s, but Patrick Angus succeeded in portraying the real world of demimonde New York in the era of AIDS. See his sympathetic, often touchingly witty, work now by clicking here.
Van Mäele encore!
6th September 2023
As promised, more of the great Martin van Mäele for you, a suite of twelve original erotic watercolours from the mid-1920s. More than a century old, but so fresh and imaginative! See them all now by clicking here.
Sadie and her lustful friends
5th September 2023
‘Of all the books I have read about people on a desert isle, The Cautious Amorist is by far the most scandalous’ – a review of Australian Norman Lindsay’s 1932 novel, replete with his own lively illustrations. See what Sadie and her friends get up to by clicking here!
Holiday romances
4th September 2023
With the help of one of our lovely contributors we have been able to source a full set of Jean-Adrien Mercier’s 1929 plates for Un été à la campagne (A Summer in the Countryside), the letters of two teenage French girls discovering sex for the first time. See them all now by clicking here.
Bawdy or what?
3rd September 2023
More new Martin van Mäele today, his 1920 plates for Béranger’s Gaietés, the bawdy poems for which Béranger was well known in risqué Parisian circles. See them all now by clicking here. And even more wonderful van Mäele works coming very soon …
Honesterotica at EAL 2023
2nd September 2023
For any of you that can make it to London next weekend, 7–10th September, you really shouldn’t miss the annual Erotic Arts London event. Honesterotica will be offering two fascinating illustrated presentations on the history of erotic art, details attached, and there are thirteen rooms full of new art along with life drawing, music, stalls and much more. See you there! For more information and ticket sales click here.
If you can’t save the attached image file, here are the presentation details:
Erotic art – a rich and provocative history
Though the main focus of EAL is contemporary work, erotic art and illustration has of course been around since people started drawing and painting. To celebrate the vast amount of erotic art and illustration produced in the last two hundred years, EAL is offering two fascinating illustrated presentations by the founder and curator of the world’s largest and best-known resource for erotic art, John from honesterotica.
Honesterotica was created to celebrate the many artists and illustrators who over the years have produced a rich abundance of wonderful erotic material. With over 500 artists and nearly 50,000 images, 12,000 Twitter followers and a thousand visits a day from all over the world, the 100% non-commercial Honesterotica has grown to be a treasure trove for academics, collectors, and all lovers of beautiful and thought-provoking erotic art.
On Saturday at 2pm John will be exploring the significance and importance of transgressive art, from sado-masochism and the relationship of pain and sex, all the way to the contentious issue of children and sex. With examples from the illustrators of de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, to artists today who are exploring the boundaries of what is ‘acceptable’, this presentation explores why art is such an important medium for the examination of the dark side of the world of eroticism. After all, if imagination isn’t allowed free rein in art it will tend to find more dangerous channels of expression.
And on Sunday at 2pm the focus is on what is meant by ‘honest erotica’. The Honesterotica project was created partly to counter the torrent of substandard pornography which offers a very limited idea of what eroticism can portray, instead concentrating on aspects which mirror more closely the way real people experience a fulfilling erotic life – meaningful relationships, warmth and closeness, pleasure and reward, rich variety and not just a quick and boring sequence of thrusting, groaning and quick coming. And while porn tends to take itself very seriously – you’ll rarely even see anyone smiling – honest erotica reminds us that sex is such a weird and wonderful phenomenon that sometimes we just have to laugh out loud.
A dirty old man
2nd September 2023
Back to the early days of erotic illustration today, with the caricaturist Traviès de Villers’ 1830 hand-coloured prints of the erotic encounters of his unsavoury hunchbacked Parisian Monsieur Mayeux. See them all now by clicking here.