do male homosexual. frequently bec›me 'esthetically inclined. Fart of this participation by homosexuals in artistic interests may be compensatory; part may be imitative and derivative; part may stem from withdrawal from "masculine" interests, and part may be other wise correlated to homosexual neurosis. Art interest, however, should not be confused with artistic creativity; and there is some reason to suspect that fixed homosexuality takes away from rather than adds to artistic solidity and that those relatively few great artists who have been exclusively homosexual have fought their way to the top of their profession in spite of rather than because of their emotional aberration.

Up until and including the present day, sex differences in artistic creativity have been quite pronounced. Although numerous females attend art school and show considerable talent, and although some of them become outstanding illustrators, relatively few achieve high rank among the truly great artists of their day. Havelock Ellis, after an exhaustive study of sex differences, reported that "there can be no doubt whatever that if we leave out of consideration the interpretive arts, the artistic impulse is vastly more spontaneous, more 'pronounced, and more widely spread among men than among women" (1929, p. 374). Ludovici 1932, p. 44 concurred: "We find chiefly the names of men in all the records of human greatness." And even Simone de Beauvoir (1953), after pointing out that women have had a unique role in the cultural and intellectual life of Western civilization, was forced to conclude that "however important this collective role of the intellectual woman may have been, the individual contributions have been in general of le value."

Why women have turned out to be less impressive in the field of creative art has often been a matter for debate. Havelock Ellis 1929 believed that although the sexual sphere is more massive in women it is less energet in its manifestations; and that consequently the female's creativity suffers. Virginia Woolf 1930 held that biok gy has little to do with the artistic inadequacy of women, rather, she contended, the need for true independence and a room of her own constitute the female's.

worst handicaps in empeting artistically with the male. Simone de Beauvoir (1953 insisted that art and thought have their living springs in action and that because woman has not been engaged in action to any considerable degree, she does not make the most of her artistic potentialities. Other authors feel that the female's main creative outlet is childbearing and childrearing; and that because she is biosocially focused on this kind of creativity, her contribu tions to art tend to be relatively secondary, imitative, and usually second-rate.

The mystery of why women are, on the whole, considerably less artistically creative than men is enhanced by two noteworthy exceptions to the general rule. In the first place, in certain esthetic fields, such as the writing of fiction, women are often outstanding creators— e.g., Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, etc. In the second place, women are frequently unusually gifted as performing or interpretive artists, in such fields as dancing, singing, acting, and the playing of musical instruments. Why, then, do they fail, in almost all instances, as outstanding painters, sculptors, and composers?

In addition to the reasons posited two paragraphs back, it may be hypothesized that women, for biological and social reasons, are far more interested in concrete human relations than they are in abstract artistic processes; and that the graphic arts and music, in particular, require for their highest forms of composition a vital absorption in abstract ideas rather than more concrete feelings. None of the foregoing theories of why artistic creativity is lower in the female than in the male, however, have any conclusive data in their support; and the issue remains still scientifically unresolved.

The Diagnosis of Sexual Disturbances from Artistic Productions

During the last two decades art and sex have become associated in a manner that hardly existed before World War II: namely, the psy chological diagnosis of individuals with sex T nonsexual disturbances through the interpretation of their paintings, drawings, or sculpture. Several psychologists and psychotherapists, in-

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cluding Buck (1949), Hammer (1958), Machover (1948), and Naumberg (1950), have published treatises purporting to show that emotionally disturbed, and particularly sexually disturbed, individuals will project their personality problems into their artistic productions and that if these productions are carefully analyzed these individuals may be accurately diagnosed. Thus, drawings and paintings have been employed in revealing the problems of homosexuals, sadomasochists, fetishists, exhibitionists, and other kinds of potential or actual sex offenders.

Evidence presented by the above named authors, as well as many studies by others, would tend to indicate that although artistic productions may be of some use in the clinical diagnosis of sexual and nonsexual disturbances, no foolproof method of diagnosis or prognosis yet exists in this connection and predictive results are spotty, inconsistent, and inconclusive. By far the best method of evaluating an individual's general or sexual disturbances would still seem to be a face to face clinical Interview; and projective methods of person ality assessment, including the use of artistic productions, are of comparative minor value and low validity (A. Ellis, 1953).

Pornography and Art

cpted because the word sex has multiple meanings when used in relation to art. Following the suggestions of Brian Heald (personal com munication), we shall attempt to break down the term sex so that it becomes denotatively clearer when used in the phrase “sex and art." We may thus distinguish among three reasonably clear-cut meanings:

1. Sex-depicting but nonerotic art. A considerable number of works of painting and sculpture depict or involve sexual content but do so in a nondynamic or nonarousing way. The majority of the better known examples of Greek nudes, for example, are sexual, in that they depict the feminine form, but they are not erotic, in that they do not arouse the sex impulses of the average viewer. Some Greek nudes, however, such as the Venus Callipyge, åre erotic or desire-arousing to members of our society because they emphasize sexual features (in this case, the buttocks which our mores do not (yet) accept or approve. The Callipygian Venus, therefore, tends to become associated in the mind of today's Western viewer not with nudity but with undressing-which to him is ordinarily tabooed and sex-arousing.

By the same token, Rodin's famous piece of Sculpture, The Kiss, is sex-depicting (because it deals with sex-love processes but not particularly, to most viewers, erotic or sex-arousing (because it is relatively objectively descriptive or self-contained rather than dynamically excitative). The Kiss may also be deemed to be on the borderline of the two categories of sex depiction and sex arousal because (a) a sizeable minority of viewers may become sexually aroused by it and (b) an even larger number of viewers may become amatively or emotionally (rather than sexually) aroused by its glorification of young love.

Pornography is a term that was originally used to describe prostitutes and their trade but has in recent years been employed to describe literature or art that has been created with the deliberate intention of arousing sexual desire. It is often confused with erotic realism. Thus, some of the descriptions in James Joyce's Ulysses or some of the vitally alive nudes of Renoir or Pascin may arouse the most lascivious thoughts in certain readers or viewers; but this does not seem to have been the conscious intent of the creators of these descriptions or portray als. As Forel (1922 points out, Greek art was enormously concerned with the nude female figure; but most of this art was far from being pornographic or "obscene," since the intention of the artist was to idealize the female former's phantasies tend to move cut from the time rather than to arouse sexual thoughts and and place of the painting and to use it as a fancies. jumping-off point for his personal sex imagin ings. Similarly, the depiction of pubic hair in

The field of art and sex is unusually compli-

2. Sex-arousing or cratic but nonpornugraphic art. A great many works of art not only depict sexual content but do so in a dynamic (or arousing manner. Thus, Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe shows a nude in the company of several young Frenchmen and depicts the girl and her companions so that the average

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