Reprinted from THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, edited by Albert Ellis, Ph. D., and Albert Abarbanel, Ph. D. Published by Hawthorn Books, 70 Fifth Avenue, New York. Copyright © 1961 by Hawthorn Books, Inc.

Art and Sex

ALBERT ELLIS

HE word art may be used broadly or narrowly; and in the present article it will be used largely in its narrower sense: pictorial art. What are some of the most important connections between human sexuality and artistic rep resentation as depicted in drawing, painting, and sculpture? What may be said about sex and the artist? These are the main questions this article will attempt to answer.

Sex and Art History

The use of sexual motifs in drawing, painting, and sculpture goes back to the earliest days of human history. Primitive art was, and in many sections of the world still is, replete with sexual and reproductive motifs. Primitive peoples, in their pictures and statues, often tended to exaggerate the loins, rumps, breasts, and sex parts of their figures-probably because, as Dell (1930) points out, these parts of the body were of pronounced and often magical importance to them. Much can be said about the place of sex in primitive art; but since this topic is covered by another article in this Encyclopedia, it is merely mentioned here.

In civilized times, the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese produced many notable artistic works; but the full flowering of sexual representations in art is usually acknowledged to have started in Ancient Greece. The earliest Greek art known to us was not highly sexualized; but after 500 BC. Greek artists began to portray the human body for the sake of giving pleasure in its own right rather than for other and less sensual motives; and pictorial and sculptural art became art in the fullest sense when this esthetic revolution occurred

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(Wall, 1932). The Greeks became obsessed with the dream of ideal beauty, and, as Garland (1957) points out, "with the development of Greek art the sculptor creates a type of beauty which has never been excelled: for centuries the measurements and features of the antique Kore and classic Venus are accepted as perfection and ensuing civilizations have created nothing more exquisite than these lovely goddesses, unselfconscious in their nakedness." This is not a universally accepted dictum, but would appear to contain some truth.

The Greeks were also noted for their direct erotic representations in art, and graphic reproductions of the sexual act were numerous and met with little opposition or censorship. Every coital activity the ancients could imagine was portrayed and modeled on their walls, ceilings, vases, and other objets d'art (Bloch, 1934; Guyon, 1934; Northcote, 1916). It must not be thought, however, that the famous orgiastic representations (such as those found in the Pompeii excavations) were ubiquitous in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. There is reason to believe that they were often done on special assignment of certain members of the nobility and that they were no more typical of ancient art as a whole than modern pornography is typical of today's art. The idealization of physical beauty (in terms of shapes, lines, and volumes) rather than the depiction of naked sensuality was the pronounced theme of Greek and, to a much lesser degree, of Roman art.

During the Middle Ages, largely owing to the. suppressive influence of the Catholic Church, sensuous and erotic art suffered a severe setback; and from the Byzantine world to England

and the North countries fully clothed and highly asexualized representations became the rule. Then, although still kept under wraps to some degree by ecclesiastical restrictions and conventions, the nudes of the Renaissance began to take the center of the pictorial stage; and masters such as Correggio, Botticelli, Titian, and Tintoretto began to display their highly sensuous paintings, with nudes and semidraped figures. Rembrandt, Rubens, and many other artists continued this tradition into the seventeenth century; and even during the period of the Restoration nudity in art was perfectly acceptable to courtiers, although their own clothing showed a stricter sense of modesty (Markun, 1930).

At the same time that the sensual movement in art was in progress, a coexterminous "earthy" rather than erotic core of pictorial and sculptural art was coming into existence. Artists such as Brueghel and Bosch, though not specializing in nudes, frankly depicted the sex proclivities of some of their subjects; and what has been called "erotic realism" as distinguished from "hard core pornography" (Kronhausen and Kronhausen, 1959) had some of its lustiest beginnings. It may also be noted that some medieval works of art included a grotesque element that was at least quasi-erotic. Thus, the grotesque and "satanic" figures of some of the gothic church sculpture contained an element of "fascination of the evil" which may be considered an interesting subheading under the general classification of "sexual" art.

During the eighteenth century, the erotic content of Western art became even more pronounced in many respects. Masters such as Watteau and Boucher continued to portray sensuous nudes; and in England arose a school of artists who specialized in the erotic, and often in the pornographic. Leading the list of artists who often painted erotic subject matter was the great painter and engraver, William Hogarth; and following him were such minor masters as James Gillray (who specialized in works on flagellation), Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank (illustrator of a famous edition of the pornographic novel, Fanny Hill). The movement toward the erotization of art continued in the nineteenth century. Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Goya were

among the outstanding Continental artists whose portrayals of the female form were both reverent and exciting; Gainsborough and Reynolds in England also did some interesting nudes; and a mystic-satanic sexy 'lement was added to painting by Felician Fps and by the pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Mystic voluptuousness, together with overtones and undertones of sexual perversity, were also depicted by Aubrey Beardsley, one of the most famous sexual illustrators of all time.

Late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Impressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and other movements in modern art, culminating in the considerable vogue for abstract, nonrepresentational, and nonobjective art, which has many followers today, to some extent reduced the direct depiction of eroticism that had been reborn in Renaissance art. But

not entirely. Shapes, colors, and textures, to the eye of the sophisticated viewer of contemporary art, can be unusually erotically stimulating. Wilfred Scawen Blunt attended the 1910 PostImpressionist exhibition in Paris and saw in the paintings there only "that gross puerility which scrawls indecencies on the wall of a privy" (Markun, 1930, p. 337). And Pitirim Sorokin, one of the guardians of sexual traditionalism of our day, insists that surrealistic pictures and sculptures of today are overloaded with voluptuous scenes and figures and with depictions of procreation and fertility. If sexuality is not rendered visually in modern art, he contends, it is often explicit in the name given by the artist to his design or contraption. "The general trend in our pictures, photographs, sculpture, and other visual arts," he concludes "has been toward a more naked, more sensuous representation of the human body" (Sorokin, 1956, pp. 26-27).

Contemporary art, moreover, is far from being completely nonrepresentational. Artists are still producing male and female representations of the human body that are at times sensual, sexual, or even intensely romantic. And one of the outstanding twentieth-century painters, Jules Pascin, went even further than the nineteenth-century master of nude portraiture, Renoir, in his rendering of pulsating flesh and gave a most realistic, earthy view of female

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