A short history of erotic art, from Pompeii to Instagram

Pompeii and the Secret Cabinet

When excavators reached Pompeii and Herculaneum in the eighteenth century they found erotic images everywhere, and not in the places a modern visitor would expect. They were on the walls of ordinary houses, in gardens, on lamps and on drinking vessels, alongside everything else a household owned.

The eighteenth century had no way of filing this. The objects were moved to Naples, and in 1819 the Bourbon prince Francis, later king of the Two Sicilies, had them gathered into a single locked room in the royal museum — the Gabinetto Segreto, the Secret Cabinet. Access was by written permission and, in the wording of the time, restricted to persons of mature age and known morals.

The room stayed shut for most of the next two centuries. It was opened to the general public in 2000, and since 2005 the collection has been on permanent display in its own gallery in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Two thousand years old, and it took until the millennium to be hung on a wall where anyone could walk past it.

Shunga in Edo Japan

The European story is not the only story, and the Japanese one runs differently. Shunga — erotic woodblock prints and paintings — were produced in enormous numbers during the Edo period by the same artists who made everything else. Utamaro made shunga. So did Hokusai, whose Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife dates from 1814 and is probably the single most reproduced Japanese image of its kind.

This was not a specialist trade. Shunga circulated widely, was owned by men and women, and was printed with the same craft and on the same presses as landscapes and actor portraits. Then the Kyoho reforms of 1722 banned erotic books outright, and production carried on regardless, unsigned and undated, for another century and a half.

The afterlife is the interesting part. Shunga was largely unshowable in Japan itself for decades. The British Museum mounted a major exhibition in 2013; Japan’s own first large public shunga show followed at the Eisei Bunko Museum in Tokyo in 2015. The work came home last.

Mythology as a licence

Renaissance and Baroque Europe solved the problem a third way. Rather than lock the image up, it gave the image an alibi.

A naked woman was permissible if she was Venus, or Danae, or Susanna surprised at her bath. The subject arrived with a classical or biblical label attached, the patron got the picture he wanted, and everybody agreed to discuss the mythology. Titian’s Venus of Urbino of 1538 hangs in the Uffizi; Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus hangs in the National Gallery in London.

The alibi worked for centuries and it had a limit, which Manet found in 1865. Olympia is the same reclining figure in the same pose, but she is nobody from mythology, she is a Parisian, and she is looking straight back out of the canvas. The scandal was not the nakedness. Paris had seen a great deal of paint devoted to nakedness. It was the missing label.

Courbet, and the panel in front of the painting

In 1866 Gustave Courbet painted L’Origine du monde for a private client, the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey. It is a close-up of a woman’s body, painted with complete seriousness and without a mythological excuse anywhere in the frame.

For more than a century it was effectively invisible. It passed between private owners; the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who owned it from the mid 1950s, kept it behind a sliding wooden panel with another painting mounted on the front. You had to be shown it deliberately.

It entered the French national collections in 1995 and hangs in the Musée d’Orsay. The picture did not change. The room did.

Schiele, and the drawing burned in court

Egon Schiele was arrested in the Austrian town of Neulengbach in 1912 and spent twenty-four days in custody. At the hearing the judge burned one of his drawings in front of him.

It is worth being precise about what happened, because the case is often told as pure censorship and it is messier than that. The most serious accusations were dropped; the conviction that stood was for displaying erotic drawings where children could see them. What survives from the episode is the image of a judge holding a sheet of paper to a candle, which is the most literal version of the locked room in this entire history.

Schiele died in 1918, aged twenty-eight. Vienna now has a museum built substantially around his work, and the drawings that were once evidence are the pieces people queue for.

The post office

The nineteenth century industrialised the image, and the reaction was not a locked room but a delivery ban.

Photography made erotic pictures cheap, portable and, for the first time, mass produced. Legislation followed the technology closely: Britain’s Obscene Publications Act of 1857 gave courts the power to order material destroyed, and the American Comstock Act of 1873 made it a federal crime to send obscene matter through the mail. The plain brown envelope is a piece of postal law, not a joke.

Something else happened at the same time and it still shapes the argument. Once an image could be produced by the thousand, cheapness became evidence against it. The engraving in a gentleman’s folio and the photograph in a plain envelope could show the same thing; only one of them was a scandal, and the difference was the print run.

The moderation policy

The room is now a set of rules enforced by software, written by companies, applied at a scale no museum director ever had to think about.

The examples are almost too neat. In 2011 Facebook disabled the account of a French user who had posted Courbet’s painting; he took the company to court in Paris and the case ran for seven years. Tumblr banned adult content outright in December 2018 and lost a substantial part of its userbase doing it. Campaigns against the asymmetric treatment of female nipples have been running for over a decade, and the rules have shifted only at the edges.

What is genuinely new is not the restriction but the speed and the reach. The Secret Cabinet took a royal decree and had one door. A classifier runs everywhere, instantly, and there is nobody to write to. What has not changed is the shape of the thing: a category of image, a body that decides who sees it, and a polite word for the decision.

The same room, century by century

Read the last column downwards. That is the actual history: not a sequence of images, but a sequence of people who got to decide.

What never changed

Three things run the whole length of it.

The work kept being made. Under a ban, under a licence, under a moderation policy. No period in this history produced less of it than the one before.

The restriction was always about the audience, not the object. The Secret Cabinet did not object to the frescoes. It objected to the wrong people looking at them. Every subsequent version of the rule has the same structure.

The category is unstable, and it moves in one direction. Courbet went from a locked panel to a national museum. Schiele went from evidence to a queue at the door. Shunga went from contraband to the British Museum. Nothing in this history has ever gone the other way for long.

Which is a useful thing to know if you are standing in front of a painting and wondering whether you can hang it. The paintings in this series are the current instalment of a very old object: Veronika (American Girl) is one canvas, of a named woman, made from a photograph she published herself. The argument about what separates that from the other thing is here, and it is the same argument the nineteenth century was having.

What the category means now that it has arrived here — and what it still does not tell you about any given work — is on what erotic art is.

Questions people ask

Has erotic art always existed?

Yes. There are erotic wall paintings in ordinary houses in Pompeii, mass produced shunga prints in Edo Japan, and a continuous European tradition from the Renaissance onwards. What varies from century to century is not whether the work is made but who is permitted to see it, and what that restriction is called.

What was the Secret Cabinet in Naples?

A locked room in the royal museum in Naples, created in 1819, holding the erotic objects and wall paintings excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Entry was by written permission only. It was opened to the general public in 2000 and the collection is now on permanent display in its own gallery.

Why do museums show erotic art now when they once locked it away?

Because the objection was never really to the work. It was to particular people seeing it, and those judgements move. Courbet went from behind a wooden panel to the Musée d’Orsay, and Schiele from a courtroom to a museum built around his drawings. In this history the category has only ever loosened.

Is erotic art the same as pornography?

No, and how explicit something is turns out to be the least useful way of telling them apart. The questions that do work are what the image is for, whether the subject is a specific person, how many exist, and whether it survives being looked at repeatedly.