Seduced by Erotic Art

Museum founder Naomi Wilzig with "Leda and the Swan"; below, detail of a watercolor of Josephine Baker, part of the museum collection. (Photos By Robert G. Harbour -- World Erotic Art Museum)

Columbia University emeritus professor of philosophy and art critic Arthur Danto agrees. He believes today's cultural censorship in the United States is due largely to ultra-conservative politics.

"New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art owns an erotic Picasso painting that they've never publicly displayed," he says. The painting, he says, depicts Picasso performing an act that Americans freely engage in, and yet they had to leave their country if they wanted to see the painting, which was lent out to the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal a few years ago as part of the "Picasso Erotique" exhibition. This show of the 20th-century master's most erotic works also made stops in Barcelona and Paris.

Wilzig says that in addition to being beautiful, erotic art offers something more. "It makes you think about things like relationships, politics and mortality, but at the same time it challenges the mind to search for the very nucleus or erotic spark that makes the work come alive."

At the age of 55 she embarked on an odyssey that took her into foreign lands where communication was often reduced to crude and sometimes hilarious hand gestures. Eventually she resorted to wearing a cardboard sign around her neck proclaiming in French and in English "Buying Erotica" as she strolled through antique fairs and flea markets.

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As the elevator door to the museum slides open, I'm greeted by Wilzig, but the eye contact is fleeting as I catch sight of provocative portrayals of a copulating couple and larger-than-life male appendages over her shoulder. And suddenly I feel like a timid adolescent. We stop to look at one of her prized possessions: the iconic phallic sculpture "The Rocking Machine" from Stanley Kubrick's cult classic film "A Clockwork Orange," which she acquired at auction in 1999.

The museum, with its simple, cream-colored walls and low ambient lighting, has a quiet, comfortable feel. There are rooms and hallways featuring groupings of cultures, historical periods and themes including Greek and Roman mythology. Each object is catalogued with date and place of origin as well as the artist's name.

Some of the artists are household names. There's a watercolor by Picasso and lithographs by Salvador Dali and Gustav Klimt. There is also the work of those known for their erotic art, including Bruno Zach, Hans Bellmer, Robert Mapplethorpe and others. But much of the art is anonymous or pseudonymous because its creators feared being ostracized or persecuted.

The museum also houses a research library of more than 250 volumes on erotic art. Wilzig herself has written five books on erotica.

In the Asian section, an ornately carved Kama Sutra bed dominates a tiny room. Every inch of the bed pulsates with 161 explicitly detailed carvings of erotic scenes. In another room, lighted cabinets house 1,000-year-old jade sex toys from Bali and African fertility masks.

Some of the oldest pieces in the museum include Egyptian fertility amulets and Greco-Roman clay oil lamps adorned with raised erotic scenes (200 B.C. to A.D. 300), evoking a time when sexuality played an important role in everyday life and religious rituals.

In the European section, a French bronze figurine (1900) of a cancan dancer doing the splits in a long flowing skirt would sit nicely on the mantel of a proper English manor, but turn her around and she's not wearing any knickers.

One of the highlights of this section is a one-of-a-kind reproduction of a resplendent red throne that belonged to Catherine the Great.

The hand-carved rendering is based on a photograph from World War I that is displayed alongside the throne. It is believed the original chair was lost or destroyed. The throne's golden frame is carved to portray erotic acts, the top center crowned with an image of the 18th-century Russian empress, who is said to have possessed an insatiable Dionysian streak.

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"Erotic art can remind us of the richness and romance of what life is all about, of what we are missing and what potentials are there for us," says Laura Henkel, an art appraiser and associate professor in the budding field of erotology, or study of erotic art, at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.

Henkel says Wilzig's collection is "world class." And it is also attracting international acclaim. Francesc Granell -- a former European Union official who teaches economics at the University of Barcelona and who has toured Europe's erotic art museums in Europe -- says none of them can match the artistic caliber of Wilzig's.

Wilzig says her vast and varied collection has taught her tolerance of the vast and varied libidinous theatrics of consenting adults. "It has taught me not to judge people's choices in life."

And what does she say of those who deride her collection? "Our society generally acknowledges that adolescents should attain a certain level of emotional and intellectual maturity before they engage in sexual activity. I think the same principle applies to erotic art."