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.

A Look into R. Crumb’s Twisted World
by Lisa Hanson

Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky Crumb
Aline & Bob on Human Depravity, 2004, ink on paper

Robert Crumb
Complete Crumb Comics #10
18 7/8” h x 16 15/16” w x 1 1/8” d, framed
Cover, 1991
Ink on paper
Courtesy of Denis Kitchen Art Agency

Social satires, politics and science give an electric charge to the fall art season. From Peter Saul’s paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) to R. Crumb’s comics at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), we’ll be laughing as we cry with these artists about history, war, injustice, incompetence and sex. “Global Suburbia” at Abington Art Center and “Global Warming” at the Icebox promise both serious and irreverent views on two hot-button issues.

And in this election season—which also happens to be midway through the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth—let’s not forget art and science have evolved into companionable bedfellows. Evolutionary exhibits are on the docket at the Academy of Natural Sciences, the American Philosophical Society Museum and the Wagner Free Institute.

Peter Saul, Cold Sweat, 1999, at PAFA.

Peter Saul and R. Crumb have energized generations of young artists with their feisty antiestablishment work. To have these two career- spanning shows here at the same time is an amazing stroke of luck. Saul’s traveling retrospective of 50 paintings and drawings at PAFA brings the master of acid-colored narratives to Philly when young artists are turning in droves to the medium. Because Saul is underexposed, this show will be an eye-opener for many. The Academy has programmed up a storm, including panel discussions, lectures, a symposium and a mixer for local art students.

Lee Stoetzel, VW Bus, 2007
Pecky cypress, cypres, steel
courtesy of Mixed Greens Gallery, NYC

The suburbs used to be considered benign. Now we know better. “Global Suburbia” dips into the suburbs and mines all the conflict therein. Lee Stoetzel’s almost full-scale pecky-wood sculptural VW bus is one great reason to make the trip north.

Ben Pinder
Return to Symzonia
still from video

“Global Warming,” a Philadelphia Sculptors’ show, rounds up a group of international artists to sound the alarm about our melting ice caps, extreme weather and other byproducts of humankind’s dirty ways.

Winifred Lutz, Drawing Dock Creek, blue elastic bands demarcate where the now buried creek used to lie.

Winifred Lutz’s installation “Drawing Dock Creek” in Independence Park is an imagined recreation of the once visible, now buried creek. Lutz’s project has evolved with the seasons, and right now you can “see” the creek’s swale—set off with blue elastic bands—running through the park. Exhibited as part of the American Philosophical Society Museum’s continued programming, the work is up until Sept. 27.

All in the Bones, published by the Academy of Natural Sciences, tells the biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, inventor of skeletal dinosaur exhibitions as we now know them.

Hadrosaurus foulkii, the first complete dinosaur exhibited in a museum—at our own Academy of Natural Sciences in 1868—is making a reappearance at its old venue, this time, with a new casting of the bones. The exhibit focuses on British artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who invented the dinosaur exhibits we now know.

where to see it
“Drawing Dock Creek.” Through Sept. 27. American Philosophical Society Museum, Philosophical Hall, 104 S. Fifth St. 215.440.3440.

“Hadrosaurus Foulkii: The Dinosaur That Changed the World.” Nov. 22-April 19. Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy. 215.299.1043.

“Global Suburbia.” Through Nov. 30. Abington Art Center, 515 Meetinghouse Rd., Jenkintown. 215.887.4882.

“Global Warming.” Philadelphia Sculptors at the Ice Box, 1400 N. American St. Oct. 5-Nov. 15. 215.413.9126.

Mark Dion: “Inspired by the Wagner.” Wed., Oct. 1, 4-7pm. Wagner Free Institute of Science, 1700 W. Montgomery Ave. 215.763.6529.

Peter Saul: “A Retrospective.” Oct. 18-Jan. 4. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, 128 N. Broad St. 215.972.7600.

R. Crumb: “Underground.” Through Dec. 7. Institute for Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St. 215.898.7108.

Before I get embroiled in the silly stuff that sets my mind spinning, I need to say that for R.Crumb fans–I’m one of them–the show Robert Crumb: My True Inner Self at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery offers more than just a review of the range of his comic book drawings, but also a mix of his cartoons and drawings on things like napkins and paper towels and other non-standard drawing surfaces.

Crumb is one of those obsessive guys who has to express what’s on his mind, and the more it irritates people, the more he has to express it. He came along in a time when doing that was de rigeur politally and socially, the ’60s. If he’d come along now, he might have been quickly repressed by the Bushies, except maybe he’d use the Internet to broadcast what in those days was broadcast by underground comics and alternative newspapers.

I think of Crumb as my people, my generation, and I love that he’s got a young following now. (Although I often marvel at how the tastes of the ’60s are so popular right now, from bell bottoms to communes, I’m not so sure that the spirit of rebellion is more than skin deep; only the repressive politics of W. are keeping the spirit alive, I suspect).

I remember poring over ZAP comics and Mr. Natural and all the scatological and stoner humor as a legitimization of the “freak” world that we felt was ours. It’s the verso of Little Orphan Annie, with Mr. Natural being the anti-Mr.Am. But even then, it was clear that Crumb was wilder by a half than we ever were, though we fancied ourselves on the edge of civilization.

Crumb’s drawings insult nearly everybody. Any number of activist groups have taken offense at his work.

I was lucky the day I stopped in at Rosenwald-Wolf and caught a class viewing Terry Zwigoff’s film Crumb. So I joined the group and watched the second half with them. It sort of sputters along, sometimes fascinating, sometimes draggy, but worth the watch. (Yes, you can rent it yourselves).

BTW, the show includes a local reference. One of the pages displayed is from Yarrowstalks, a Philadelphia underground newspaper of the time.

In all of this, though, my heart went straight out to his drawings on blue-lined notebook pages–you know, the marble-covered notebooks that kids write their school notes in before they graduate to spiral-bound and then looseleaf notebooks.

Using this kind of notebook for a sketchbook is right in keeping with his drawings on napkins and then saving them.

The downside is evident in what happens to those drawings. The notebook paper is so acidic that it is starting to turn to brown. The rate of change is stark, emphasized by the Wite-Out corrections in the drawings. The Wite-Out, true to its name, is white, white white. The page is white no longer.

Now Crumb probably never gave the staying power of Wite-Out a thought when he used it. After all, who knew that Wite-Out was more archival than marble-covered notebook paper? I sure didn’t. I never gave the archival qualities of Wite-Out a thought. The then-invisible corrections flash neon on the muted page. Of course, Crumb probably never gave a thought to the archival qualities of marble notebooks. (A friend of mind who owns The Framer’s Workroom in Jenkintown recently told me that archival matting is less than 30 years old)!

What he must have given a moment or two’s thought to was how funny to interrupt the blue-lines pattern in the course of making a correction. After all, those blue lines were already there, and the correction was not so invisible, therefore, right off the bat.

I know I’m once again writing about everything but the excellence of R.Crumb. It’s just that in my world, his excellence is a given. He’s legitimized nerdiness, teaching the culture how to absorb computer geeks before they were twinkles in their daddy’s eyes. And he’s father to social geeks in comics like American Splendor, by Harvey Pekar, and Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes (the movie based on the comic book also was directed by Zwigoff, by the way). Crumb is pretty thoughtful, with a kind of existential wonder and cynicism all mixed up together. All his outrageousness is nearly a by-product of a mind that’s thinking about what it all means.

Comic book page by Aline Crumb

The story is mostly about what it’s like being Mrs. Crumb–wife of the famous cartoonist but also a free spirit (in an open marriage with several liaisons) and also a cartoonist in her own right soon to have a comic memoir and a solo show in New York at Adam Baumgold Gallery, Feb. 15 through March 17.

According to the Times, on Feb. 14, Mr. Crumb is scheduled to interview Ms. Crumb at the New York Public Library. (Tickets, $15–it’s Valentine’s Day and billed as a love event!!!)That sounds like a great one. Mr. Coudurès, Ms. Crumb’s second husband, also plans to be present. That should be interresant too.

Now, the topicality of this article could not be more topical, since our town is hosting a solo show of Robert Crumb’s drawings (and some sculptures) and a sketchbook or two at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Mr. Sachs’ emporium of art.

Here’s the low down on that show:

R. Crumb: My True Inner Self
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts
333 S. Broad Street
January 22 – February 27, 2007
Weekdays from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Wednesdays from 10 a.m. – 8 p.m. and weekends from 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Opening reception, January 26, 5 – 8 p.m.

Pages from an early — 1960s era– sketchbook by R. Crumb that will be on view at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery.

I stopped in Rosenwald-Wolf last week to see the show and it’s great–here’s a few photos at flickr. Crumb has a Philadelphia connection. He grew up here. And the show at Rosenwald-Wolf — unbelievable as it may seem — is his first solo exhibit in Philadelphia.

Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, from Masters of American Comics

Mikhail Baryshnikov once said No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business. Likewise, artists have long recognized the brilliance and virtuosity of comics artists from Winsor McCay and George Herriman to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman. Museums are now catching on. You can see an extraordinary range of brilliant work in Masters of American Comics. Organized jointly by LA MoCA and UCLA’s Hammer Museum, it is currently on view in two parts: the early work at the Newark Museum, and work from the 1950s through the present at the Jewish Museum (through January 28, 2007).

Gasoline Alley, 1931, by Frank King

An absolutely stunning catalogue accompanies the exhibition (distributed by Yale University Press). It includes luscious illustrations, a long introductory essay and short articles from various comics fans including artists, novelists, journalists and academics from varied fields; it would make a great Christmas (or Hanukah) present.

So far I’ve only seen the part at Jewish Museum, so I can only comment on their presentation. Three galleries show six artists (Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Gary Panter and Chris Ware) hung as individual bodies of work. A fourth gallery is devoted to the development of the action figure during the 1940s and 50s, placing it within the political and social history of the period.

Comics and the Canon

R. Crumb, downloadable poster from MAM.

The opening text states that the exhibition endeavors to establish a cannon of fourteen of the most influential artists working in the medium throughout the twentieth century. “Canon” has been a fraught concept in art history and literary studies in recent decades, attacked from all sides as exclusionary. Some scholars have turned to cultural studies, which specifically rejects the judgements of hierarchy and quality associated with bourgeois culture and museum values. Cultural historians and theorists take a broad interest in popular and high art; are museums getting in on the act? How do comics fit within art museums? When old enough, there’s no problem; Hogarth, Gilray, and Daumier all worked in cheaply-printed popular forms which now reside comfortably in museum print collections. Lots of other museum objects were once popular or even industrial products: historians now tell us that Greek figured ceramics, so highly-valued since they were excavated in the Eighteenth Century, were not prized as a high art form in Classical times. And museums change their ideas of collection worthy-ness: Japanese woodblock-illustrated books that entered museums through their libraries have been transferred to the Asian Art departments, just as 19th century books with printed photographic illustrations have found their way into photography departments. Ditto for Ed Ruscha’s soft-cover, off-set printed books of the early 60s.

Embrace the drawings, embrace the comics: Why no comics in the show?

Chris Ware, from Jimmy Corrigan

But this exhibition, for the most part, does not exhibit comics; it exhibits drawings and studies for comics, with an occasional example of the real thing in table cases. Now the drawings and studies certainly have all the visual interest of the published versions and occasionally the great advantage of a larger scale, making them easier to read. I particularly found this true of Chris Ware’s work. I’ve long appreciated Ware’s great originality in choreographing imagery on the page as well as the poignancy of his mostly visual story-telling. His graphic inventiveness challenges conventions of reading as a strictly left-to-right, up-down sequence. But his published work is extraordinarily difficult on middle-aged eyes, and I give up quickly. In other examples the working drawings convey interesting information about the artists’ methods: a model sheet for Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America was never intended for publication; it was drawn as a pattern for the characters’ outfits and relative sizes (necessary since the comics were produced by a workshop of draughtsmen). But this use of the drawings was infrequent. Mostly they were simply presented as if that was what comics artists made.

detail, Page 22 from Jimbo #6

Gary Panter’s Jimbo in Purgatory was new to me, and some of the most visually-sophisticated work in the exhibition. He created sequences of panels where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, the background in each panel creating a mosaic that resolved into a page-sized image. He’s an artist who has clearly studied a long history of manuscript and book illustration and utilized it all. But with no example of the printed book and no reference to scale on the label (or in the catalogue), I have no idea how he intended it to look, since Panter does not work for a commercial publisher of standard-format (10 1/4″ x 6 7/8″) comics.

Will Eisner, downloadable poster.

When museums propose modern comics as an art form, mightn’t they show them as they are – a cheap and populist form? And a form to be appreciated page-by-page (with the longer ones), at a comfortable focal distance, and sitting down ? Why not include seats, and an abundant supply of the actual comics, which are available (cheaply), in original editions of contemporary work and in suitable reprints for much of the earlier material? And if they must exhibit the drawings, couldn’t they indicate their relation to, and the dimensions of, the published work?

The Catalog

Here the catalogue is more respectful, with details, enlarged to full-page size, which convey a marvelous idea of mass-market, half-tone color printing in all its Benday glory. The designers (Green Dragon Office) clearly appreciated their subject, and should get a hand of applause. John Carlin‘s article approaches both the visual and verbal artistry with scholarly appreciation and gives useful technical information on the mechanics of comics production, if you read the footnotes (I always do).

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, 1941, with the woodpecker (lower panel, left) staring at the painting of the tree, ala Pliny who talks of birds pecking at a life-like painting of grapes.(lower panel, left).

My only complaint is that perhaps he held back in crediting the sophistication of artists such as George Herriman and Frank King; or was he afraid of sounding pedantic? In an episode of Krazy Kat (1941) which Carlin discusses as a marginal gloss on the meaning of the primary scenes (fig. 19), a woodpecker stares at a painting of a tree and Krazy comments but he’s a ‘ott krittik’ ain’t he?, to which Pupp responds Yes, but he’s also a ‘woodpecker.’ This refers to the earliest recorded writing about painterly realism, which Herriman clearly knew: Pliny, describing Xuexis’ painting of grapes that was so life-like that birds pecked at it. And Frank King makes keen art references in an episode of Gasoline Alley (1931) which Carlin says resembles modern art abstractions, particularly those of Robert Delaunay and Stanton McDonald-Wright (p. 64). In fact, King goes beyond resemblances; he directly cites a famous color diagram of J.F.L.Merimee’s 1830 painting manual, while in another episode of 1929 (fig. 202) King’s character, in the guise of describing the landscape, precisely outlines the nineteenth-century theory of complimentary colors that had such a major influence on Neoimpressionist painters. Populism with a wink.

I’m working on resources for seeing, and reading comics in Philadelphia. As they say, to be continued.

[Ed note: Masters of American Comics was also at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the only venue that housed the entire show in one place. I was fortunate enough to see it there. See my post on the New Jersey/New York split of the show and Art Spiegelman’s withdrawing his work in protest. And see here for more on comics and for my post on Spiegelman's's talk at Penn in 2005.]

–Andrea Kirsh is an art historian living in Philadelphia. See her newest Philadelphia Introductions piece on inLiquid.com.