a drawing or painting tends to make this work erotic or sex-arousing because, in the same sense as Manet's picture, it draws the attention

of the viewer to the "realities" of the situation.

The "peep-show" aspect of semi-nudity is erotic because it expresses the dynamism of undress ing rather than the state of nudity.

Between the objective sex-depicting and the subjective sex-arousing work of art there is often a fine line; and this line changes drastically from community to community and from time to time. Thus, the notorious copulating nudes that were fairly common on public buildings in ancient Greece and India are apt to be sexually-arousing to a much greater extent for us than for their nudity-accustomed and more objective creators. And even for us, if we continue to see many of them and to be accustomed to their nudity, they soon lose most of their erotic or sex-arousing quality. In general, however, there is a considerable body of art that is sex-depicting in an objective way and a body that is sex-arousing in a personal or subjective way. The former will normally be less likely to be banned or bowdlerized than the latter.

3. Sex-arousing or erotic and pornographic art. Sex-arousing art may be created by an artist who has little idea of the potential arousability of his work or who wishes to stimulate his viewers esthetically or emotionally and who employs deliberately sex-arousing themes to effect this end. In this case, we refer to his work as being "erotic realism." On the other hand, sex-arousing art may be created by an artist who is fully conscious of what he is doing and who wishes dynamically, concretely, and against some of the mores (or assumed mores) of his day to stimulate the naked sexuality of his viewers. Thus, if Rodin's male in The Kiss had his hand on the female's buttocks or gen: itals his statue would be violently erotic but not necessarily pornographic; while if the female had been having active intercourse with the male or had been another inale the statue would be pornographic. Again, the statues of coital figures on Indian temples are erotic, but not pornographic; but the depiction of the same

terms of contemporary photography would (in 99 per cent of imaginable cases) be pornographic and not erotic.

It is necessary, again, to distinguish between

the motives of the creator and those of the viewer. In the case of the Indian temple statues, for most of the tourists who see them the figures are unquestionably pornographic, but from the standpoint of their creators it would not be logical (except with careful qualification) to call them pornographic art.

If these three categories of sex-depicting, sexarousing, and pornographic art are valid, it would appear that pornography can normally only exist where sexual mores are to a degree prohibitive and where pornographic productions can therefore be mores-destroying The laughter at sex acts and depictions-as shown in the tendencies of many primitive peoples to enjoy lascivious stories and in those of the Chinese and Japanese to enjoy their "pillow book" art-is not necessarily pornographic; but where the mores are quite antisexual, it almost necessarily is. In a perfectly mature and permissive society pornography probably cannot exist.

Clear-cut instances of sex-depicting and sexarousing art are known from ancient times. Primitive peoples have created much sculpture and pottery that portrays sexual and erotic themes. Cicero and Pliny mention libidines— highly erotic pictures and bas reliefs used to adom Roman villas of Pompeii; and many of these have been unearthed in modern excavations of ancient cities (Northcote, 1916). Erotic as well as pornographic playing cards were fairly prevalent in fifteenth-century England and were quite in vogue in the nineteenth century (Bloch, 1934). As noted previously in this article, an entire school of enormously talented erotic (and sometimes pornographic) artists arose in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Edward Fuch's monumental three-volume work on the erotic clement in caricature (1909-1912) shows that some of the most renowned artists have deliberately drawn and painted sexually arousing pictures. Bloch (1908) lists, among the great names in art who have created paintings that have frequently been called "obscene," Rem brandt, Watteau, Fragonard, Pascin, and Beardsley.

Can there be great erotic art? There almost certainly can, even though most sex-arousing representations are so focused on some of the

more limited aspects of their content that they tend to ignore some of the main elements of composition, organization, and style that are necessary for the existence of truly fine art. But some of the deliberately sex-arousing Jap. anese drawings-which we would undoubtedly label as being pornographic, though the Japanese themselves would often take a different position-are works of rare beauty and craftsmanship; and when viewed by a cultured person they are likely to appeal to him primarily as works of art and only secondarily as erotica. Many nonerotic works, ironically enough, have been endowed with a highly stimulating character because of attempts to censor them. Thus, as Havelock Ellis (1936), Forel (1922), and other authorities have pointed out, putting fig leaves on paintings or statues often excites the viewers, by drawing attention to what they conceal, far more than a display of simple nudity would.

Nonetheless, censorship of art representations has been rife from at least the days of early Christianity. Christian opposition to nudity in any form made it à sin, well into the Middle Ages, to use even a naked boy as a model (Stanley, 1955). During the Renais sance, Savonarola. preached mightily against nudity in art and burned many pictures portraying delights of the flesh. During the Counter-Reformation, after the Medici popes had passed on, fig leaves were supplied for nude statues in the Vatican, and Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" was made respectable by the addition of painted drawers (Markun, 1930). In eighteenth-century America, a plaster cast of Venus de Medici could not be publicly shown in Philadelphia; and Vanderlyn's "Ariadne" was looked upon with disfavor. In nineteenth-century America, when Horatio Greenough painted a group of "Chanting Cherubs" for J. Fenimore Cooper, the naked babies aroused great moral indignation. A half-draped statue of George Washington also was looked upon unfavorably. In the 1870's and 1880's, Markun (1930, p. 560) tells us, “it was rather a daring person, even in New York high society, who ventured to hang a nude in his drawing room."

In Victorian England, Watts was called upon to explain in public why he could not have

clothed his Psyche and the young girl of his famous Mammon work. William Etty and others continued to paint nudes; but Etty's scheme of decoration for a garden house in Buckingham Palace was rejected because of its "immodesty."

Censorship of so-called obscene paintings and sculptural representations continued into the early part of the twentieth century; and, of course, it still persists, except that there has been considerable liberalization in the "socalling." In the early 1900's John S. Sumner of the Society for the Suppression of Vice prosecuted the art dealer who displayed the nude painting, "September Morn"; and the French playwright, Paul Bourget, was shocked to discover, when he was visiting America, that the people of Boston refused to permit the forms of two naked children carved by the American sculptor August Saint-Gaudens to appear on the façade of their public library. Trousers were also put on antique statues in Baltimore and Philadelphia (Dingwall, 1957).

It has only been during the last half of the twentieth century that the realistic portrayal of nudity in art has truly begun to come into its own and to remain essentially unfettered by censorship. "September Morn" is now found to be entirely innocuous by the viewing public; and many of our widely circularized periodicals have become exceptionally unsqueamish about publishing full-length, completely bare-bosomed pictures of appetizing young females (Ellis, 1960a). For the moment, at least, censorship of pictures that combine art and sexual themes is well on the decline. To use the distinctions made at the beginning of this section, we may say that both sex-depicting and sexarousing paintings and sculpture are both widely accepted in Western society today; but the banning of outright pornography is still very much with us.

Art and Sex Education

Sex education is normally carried on in a rather hesitant fashion in Western society; and when it is given it usually consists of written words or spoken lectures. Art, when it is employed at all in this kind of sex teaching, is used for the photographlike illustrations of the

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