Where Art was Love...

Where Love was Sex...

and Sex was Art

by

Donald Webster Cory

When primitive man first picked up an inanimate object and found that, by applying pressure against a surface, he could make a picture that would remain on that surface for him to behold, he had discovered art. On cave walls he depicted animals and gods, trees and fire, and then, with instruments to aid him, he reshaped the wood and even the stone around him. Mankind found that art was a medium — perhaps the only one, if within the scope of that term we include the linguistic arts by which the human being expressed his view of the world. In short, art was a metaphor to state how the homo sapiens saw the "out there." To use the current jargon of sociology, it was metaphor to communicate how man structures reality.

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Man looked at the world without (which was frequently his world within) and there he saw and depicted gods, and trees, and uninhibited by moral strictures other than the terrible taboos under which he suffered he depicted sex. Sex in its glory, its magical power, its fascination, its mystery, its humor: sex combined with love or separated from it, sex as man thought it was, or feared it was not, or thought that it ought to be.

During the centuries and millennia as civilization was developed, erotic art flourished in many societies, until it was driven underground by those who mistakenly felt that whatever was hidden behind fig leaves became invisible and hence nonexistent. The publication today of three magnificent collections of classic erotic art vividly expresses the vigor and naturalism with which classic civilizations structured their view of sexual reality, and, by contrast, the weakness, the veritable lifelessness, of the Puritan ethic which so completely enshrouded the Western world. And yet, if the erotic art of India, Greece and Rome indicates the freedom and

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