Rubens, Peter Paul The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus c. 1618 Oil on canvas 88 x 82 7/8 in (224 x 210.5 cm) Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Nowadays, erotic art is more of a niche player and the art market (the closest thing to a royal court that we have) prefers its sexy in air quotes. Marilyn Minter uses hard core porn photographs and transforms them into glittering, wet-and-wild bauble-fests. They are not so erotic when she’s done with them but way “sexy,” hip and commercially viable.

Marilyn Minter, Split, 2003, C-print

When I emailed a bunch of Philadelphia artists recently to ask what was the most erotic art they’d seen and why, mostly I got no responses. One artist, Christopher Davison, demurred. Davison makes pretty darned sexy works himself, (his drawings of male and female nudes interacting in dark, eerie forest settings were a staple at the former Jenny Jaskey gallery). “While it would seem like I would have something meaningful to contribute on this topic I am actually not the best person to provide feedback,” he said, adding “Strange but true!”

They're On Their Way Flashe, watercolor, acrylic ink, gouache on Rives BFK 22" x 30" 2009

Gabriel Martinez, a mischievous artist known for his autobiographical works — and for a recent series of sexually-charged masturbation photos featuring anonymous men’s legs and feet at moment of orgasm — wrote back “I will think (hard) about this one…” Then he slipped away into the ether never answering the question. But Proximity Gallery owner and artist Janel Frey responded immediately and directly naming Philadelphia artist, Pete Checchia who, she says, “captures women in a very sensual and complex way.”

Gabriel Martinex, Self Portraits by Heterosexual Men (Anonymous), 2007. c-print

Artist and FLUXspace co-founder, Chris Golas, sent in an anecdote from his own life. While a student at Tyler he did a performance that was arguably erotic. He stood behind a shower curtain half-naked while a woman slapped him after her hands in different colored paints. Golas said “My intent was not to make erotic work but as I reflect on the experience it clearly had meaning that bridged into a certain eroticism for me. This particular performance could border on fetishism as well.”

Pete Checcia, Photo collage

Chris Golas, photo from a performance

Artists now don’t seek to titillate per se, but still the erotic will out especially in work by those who court the unconscious mind, like Louise Bourgeois, Lisa Yuskavage, Pipilotti Rist, Patty Chang, R. Crumb, Paul McCarthy, Philadelphia artist Tony Ward, Andy Warhol (films) and Marcel Duchamp (Etant Donnes) for starters. There are more of course.

Louise Bourgeois, photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1982

These artists all work in a narrative tradition and use figures or figure fragments (Bourgeois) and their works might give off a pleasurable erotic charge along with whatever other message is there. Warhol is in a class all his own with experimental movies that are sensual (Blow Job, Sleep) and those that are sexually explicit and close to porn (Blue Movie).

Andy Warhol, Blowjob

But postmodern erotic art usually has a conflicted sexuality. Pleasure is subsumed under oozing gooey messes (Paul McCarthy, Santa’s Cholocate Shop); or it’s accompanied by embarrassment (R. Crumb). In the case of Duchamp’s Etant Donnes — on view in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection — the erotic is tempered by a dose of pure weirdness as you look through a peephole at the work and what’s portrayed — the lower half of a nude woman on the ground, her legs splayed, one hand holding aloft a lantern and an eerie waterfall in the background — is creepy and inexplicable.

R. Crumb drawing

Artists now might deny the erotic in their art. Louise Bourgeois said “I wouldn’t say my work is erotic, even though this side of it seems obvious to many people.” Tony Ward, on the other hand, in an interview with Corey Armpriester on artblog, embraces sexual imagery as a way to put human sexuality into the art history canon. But even this artist — who shows with Sande Webster Gallery — seems to waffle on the erotic charge of his works saying he’s “looking for a means to express the art of it (human sexuality) not the sex of it.”

Photo by Tony Ward

Feminism took some of the sexy out of art by attacking the male gaze and by empowering women to make works about their own sexuality. Many early feminist works are angry, and while graphic, not sexy. The Visible Vagina at Francis Naumann Gallery which Andrea told you about recently, exposes many feminist works focused on the female sex organ. But as with much feminist work eroticism wasn’t the point of it and it doesn’t seem to be the byproduct.

Marcel Duchamp, Etant Donnes

But even before feminism, abstract expressionism and minimalism — both about as sexy as Benjamin Moore paint chips — put eros on the shelf.

Lust Caution, Ang Lee's movie about the Japanese occupation of China has scenes that feel like they're based on Japanese Shunga drawings

Photography went where painting and sculpture wouldn’t go and nude photography is our latter day erotic art. But more than that, today’s erotic art is the movies. Films may be the closest thing we have to Rubens, Boucher, Caravaggio, Bronzino. Movies use narrative– often extremely over the top dramatic — and add romance and the erotic scene or two. Art house movies are full of that mixture. These movies deliver erotic content without irony. It’s seriously sensual stuff, just like the old masters used to provide.

So if movies are how we get our erotic art it’s not a bad thing. It’s just another example of pop culture taking over what used to be in art’s domain — or art ceding something it didn’t want to deal with to pop culture, which very much wants to deal.  Hollywood sells sex because sex sells.

>>Etant Donnes, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gallery 183, Modern and Contemporary Art, first floor. 26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway Adults: $16 Seniors (ages 65 & over): $14 Students (with valid ID): $12 Children (excluding groups) ages 13–18: $12 ages 12 & under: Free First Sunday of each month: Pay what you wish all day.

>>The Visible Vagina, to Mar 20. Francis Naumann Gallery, 24 W. 57th St., Suite 305. NY NY 10019. 212 582 3201.

Manon, The Salmon-Colored Boudoir, installation view, 1974/2006

In 1974 she placed the entire contents of her maximalist and erotically-charged bedroom on display as The Salmon-Colored Boudoir; a satin and fur-covered bed at its center was surrounded by mirrors and every square centimeter of the room was covered with objects to indulge touch, taste, smell, sight, and that most erogenous organ, the mind; among the stuff which crowds the space are Colette’s novels, plastic lingams, seashells displayed vertically to emphasize their distinctly vaginal apertures, jewelry and clothing strewn about, a left-over plate of oyster shells, pictures of people she admires, …. In turning her domestic environment into art and offering it to public view she created herself as the artist, Manon. Her private space was charged with sensuality, fetishism and memories of both fictional and historic women. Manon’s subsequent work as performance artist and as protean subject before the camera mined similar territory.

Manon, detail from The Gray Wall or 36 Sleepless Nights (1979), black and white photograph, 51 x 37 cm

The exhibition begins with a recreation of The Salmon-Colored Boudoir then a selection of thirty-some black and white photos (part of a larger group) from The Grey Wall or 36 Sleepless Nights (1979). We see Manon as the vamp, the innocent, as a nude boy or a young man in jacket and tie. With no more than makeup, changes of costume and an actor’s ability to project character, the artist presents a self with ever changing identity. The series overlaps with Cindy Sherman’s slightly later exploration of constructed female identity, but with a distinctly bisexual edge.

Manon, She Was Once Miss Rimini (2003), projection still

The most recent work, She Was Once Miss Rimini (2003) is a slide show of the possible middle-aged incarnations of a woman who was once a provincial beauty queen: glamorous actress with a lap dog, yoga student in meditation, straight-jacketed mental patient, frumpy middle-class housewife, stripper with hands clutching nude, enhanced breasts. All are played by Manon and shot in the featureless space of her studio. This conceit may underline the artifice behind the work but its exploration of une femme d’un certain age who had traded on beauty in her youth has an obvious personal truth for the artist and for women in general that gives the charade its depth and poignance.

Unica Zürn, Untitled (detail), 1961. Ink on paper, 12 3/8 x 9 1/4" © Brinkmann & Bose Publisher, Berlin

The Drawing Center has another U.S. debut: Unica Zürn; Dark Spring emphasizes the drawings of the German artist who worked in Berlin and Paris, although it includes several of her paintings as well. Originally a writer, Zürn turned to drawing and painting during the 1950s-70s, influenced by the automatic drawing of the Surrealists with whom she was associated. It’s hard to avoid the biographical with Zürn, who was the companion of Hans Bellmer (he of the nude, life-sized and dismembered dolls) and turned to art during a period of recurring mental illness that ended with her suicide.

While all the work is minutely-detailed and fantastical, it ranges in quality. Some drawings resemble the doodles of an adolescent, but her small paintings in opaque watercolor on board and the finest of the ink drawings exhibit a remarkably-controlled technique, more virtuosic than obsessive, and a truly fascinating and fecund imagination. They are peopled with imaginary, composite beings of only partially recognizable form (some are marine-like, others resemble mythical beasts) and created with detailed, rhythmic pen-strokes and often subtle overlays of slightly differing polychrome inks (or more fully colored paints). They recall some of the minute calligraphy of Paul Klee as well as the biomorphic abstraction of Kandinsky’s Munich period.

Zürn’s work is much too sophisticated to be characterized as a symptom of her illness; it is as fine as that of any of her Surrealist contemporaries and should be known more widely.

I previously reviewed a monograph on Marilyn Minter (here) , whose work can be seen concurrently at the gallery Salon94 Freemans and at a MTV’s billboard-sized HD screen in Times Square as part of Creative Time’s series At 44 ½.  Minter curated the Times Square video program CHEWING COLOR, which includes a short version of her video, Green Pink Caviar as well as Patty Chang’s Fan Dance and Kate Gilmore’s Star Bright, Star Might (through May 31, 2009).

Marilyn Minter still from Green Pink Caviar (2009)

Perhaps we’re now more willing to see Minter’s images of women derived from pornography for what they are: a provocation and critique rather than complicit tantallizing. The exhibition includes billboard-sized paintings of women’s mouths, and the video, Green Pink Caviar (playing in its entirety) which leaves us wondering at our varied reactions to the commercial and erotic implications of a woman’s mouth and tongue both savoring and spitting out viscous fluids. The video (which is for sale as a cd) is hypnotic and I’m terribly sorry not to have caught it in Times Square, although I can imagine it there. I wonder what a younger generation will make of it in a neighborhood now controlled by Disney; for those of us who remember Times Square as the center of Manhattan’s peep shows and adult movie theaters Minter’s in-your-face tongue activity is both captivating and repulsive. The video  in its various locations becomes an exploration of private erotic pleasure versus public and commercialized sexual display.