Seduced by Erotic Art
Grandmother Has a Thing -- and a Museum -- for Taboo Genre

By Risha Gotlieb
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, July 2, 2006

It didn't take years of psychoanalysis or a religious epiphany for Naomi Wilzig to cast off a life of constraints. No, it was erotic art and its special allure that propelled her into a $10 million global quest.

At 71, after a 16-year buying spree, Wilzig is one of the world's preeminent private collectors of fine erotic art. Her cache of approximately 4,000 pieces includes paintings, sculptures and tapestries from all over the world, some dating from 300 B.C.

But for years, pressured by the stigma attached to erotic art, Wilzig kept her vast collection in her 3,500-square-foot Tampa Bay winter home. Grandma's house was starting to look like a Danish sex shop. But, she says, "these works served no great value sitting at home."

Wilzig cast around for five years looking for a place to display her art. New York, Las Vegas, St. Petersburg and Tampa were chilly to her proposal, she says. She finally chanced on South Beach, the hot quarter of Miami Beach that is a mixture of tycoons, celebrities, bikini-clad models, Eurotrash and Art Deco architecture.

It was a fit, and last October Wilzig opened the World Erotic Art Museum, the only gallery of its kind in North America.

Housed on the second floor of a simple white building on Washington Avenue, the museum is as nondescript as its curator. You could never guess by looking at this 5-foot-3, unassuming, rosy-cheeked grandmother of three the sultry images she collects.

* * *

Wilzig was raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish household. "I was brought up in an environment where there was absolutely no discussion of sex," she says. "It didn't exist." She went on to become a banker's wife in Clifton, N.J. Her late husband, Siggi Wilzig, was president and CEO of the Trust Co. of New Jersey and one of the founders of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Wilzig says her husband never shared her passion for erotic art and she pursued her hobby under the pseudonym "Miss Naomi."

Although Wilzig had been an avid antique collector, it was only after her eldest son, Ivan, asked her to buy "an erotic conversation piece" for his bachelor apartment that she began to think about acquiring erotic art. "I didn't even know that it existed," she says.

Three months later she found her first erotic art piece in a St. Petersburg, Fla., antique shop. The proprietor climbed a ladder and pulled out a book hidden behind a tall wooden cabinet. It was a shunga, a hand-painted, leather-bound Japanese pillow book from about 1850 featuring a series of 25 prints. The shunga, a sort of how-to manual, was typically given to young couples on their wedding night, she explains.

Wilzig was instantly seduced by the taboo factor of the art and the challenge of simply finding it.

Although erotic art can be traced to Cro-Magnon times, much of it has been hidden or lost when it was excluded by politics, religion and class strictures, says June Reinisch, director emeritus and senior research fellow of the Kinsey Institute, who has lectured around the world on many aspects of sexuality including erotic art. She adds that most American museums still keep their erotic art collections hidden from the general public.

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

"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."