Sex in Museums

“The Eroticism of Things” is the title of a 2018 exhibition at the Werkbundarchiv-Museum der Dinge in 2018. This museum in Berlin is an archive documenting 20th/21st-century industrial design and consumer culture with a collection of some 40,000 mass-produced objects. The exhibition website includes the following explanation: “While nudes have entered many living rooms as replicas of respectable works in the art-historical canon, erotica has often gotten censored, tabooed, and banned. The distinction between eroticism, art, and pornography has always been in constant flux and continues to sway people’s perception and categorization of sexually charged things.”

Nothing has changed throughout history, other than people’s perception. In 2023, parents complained that Michelangelo’s David, which was shown to students in a 6th-grade art class at a school in Tallahassee, Florida, was pornographic, causing quite a stir and the resignation of the principal. But this was not a unique event. Even when it was created, Leonardo da Vinci, while praising the artist and sculptor, suggested that Michelangelo might add a loincloth!

For whatever reason, or maybe it’s obvious, the discovery of an 8-inch carved-bone phallus has made the art news. I read the article in Hyperallergic, but it has appeared in publications around the world. The “discovery” was made in the collections of The Valkhof Museum in Nijmegen, Netherlands, which specializes in Roman archaeology and regional history. The phallus was found when a government-funded inventory of the museum’s 16,000 boxes of archeological specimens was carried out. At the point of discovery, only 300 of the boxes had been gone through! I don’t know how the story got out, but I would like to think it was a brilliant PR agent for the museum🙄

This made me curious about objects with a sexual orientation in other museums. The story of the “Secret Cabinet” in Naples is worthy of a Missive of its own. It is a collection of first-century Roman erotic art found in Pompeii and Herculaneum, today exhibited in a separate section at the National Archaeological Museum. It is called “Secret” because the gallery was closed and opened so many times as attitudes toward sex changed. In fact, at one time the room was bricked closed, and the current installation only dates from 2000. This sculpture of Pan and a Goat is a highlight of the Cabinet.

There have been allegations that the British Museum destroyed sexually related artifacts in its collections. The Museum reassures us, however, that this is not the case with the collection of around 400 such works donated in 1865. Known as the Secretum, the collection was, from time to time, removed from public display but has now been dispersed to the appropriate archeological departments, in effect, hidden in plain sight. It makes me think of a bored child being taken through room after room and case after case of the 8 million objects in the Museum’s collection, until he stops in front of one and calls out, “Mummie, Mummie, look what they have here, why does it look like a penis?” What parent has not been put in such a predicament in public?

In many ways, the U.S. is much more puritanical than other nations. Even in Canada, women can go topless. In Germany, I read about co-ed saunas where men and women are accepted totally naked, but it is not obligatory. However, there are some in the United States who seek to counter this puritanical attitude. In Miami, Florida, in the Art Deco district, you will find The World Erotic Art Museum, library, and education think tank. The museum was founded by Naomi Wilzig (1934-2015) in 2005 and includes 4,000 artworks from around the world, dating from 300 BCE to the present. She had come from an orthodox Jewish home and did not know about erotic art until a request from her son, who knew she loved prowling antique shops and thought they might be a good source. She found that many of the antique dealers kept erotic items off view but would slowly open up and show them to her. Finding the quest fascinating, she built a collection which led to a book, lectures, and finally the founding of a museum. After being turned down in many places by communities believing erotic was merely porn, her son found her a welcoming location in Miami. Here is an example from the collection.

I will end with what is probably an apocryphal story of a highly respected curator of Greek and Roman Art at a major museum. It was said that when she retired after many years, one of her desk drawers was found to contain many of the phalluses missing from sculptures that were on view.

An old friend used to say to me, “The evil is in the mind of the beholder.”