Erotica

Gerda Wegener A Summer Day Lili Elbe Masterpiece Stories

Masterpiece Story: A Summer Day by Gerda Wegener

This Pride Month, we invite you to explore a compelling work by Gerda Wegener, an artist whose dazzling contributions to the early 20th-century art...

Alessia Caldana 15 June 2025

Thomas Eakins, Wrestlers, 1899, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Detail. Masterpiece Stories

Masterpiece Story: Wrestlers by Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins was one of the greatest Realist painters of 19th-century America. Wrestlers explores the interesting dynamic between sports and...

James W Singer 15 June 2025

Pop art

Masterpiece Story: Once Upon a Time by Keith Haring

Keith Haring’s Once Upon a Time mural is a 4-walled orgiastic display of penises, eager orifices, splashing ejaculate, and extended tongues tangled...

Theodore Carter 15 June 2025

Erotica

Sex, Love, and Death in Ancient Peru: Erotic Gallery—Museo Larco

Hidden underground for hundreds of years, depictions of sex, love, and erotica in Andean pre-Columbian art are now proudly displayed in the Erotic...

Bruno Guerra 13 June 2025

Ancient Greece

There Were Really Hot Guys in Ancient Greece: The Barberini Faun

Drunk, sleeping men are rarely, if ever, beautiful and sexually appealing, but this is not the case with this really sexy faun from ancient Greece.

Marta Loza 11 June 2025

Erotica

Let’s Talk about Courbet’s Origin of the World

In the 19th century, the display of the nude body underwent a revolution – and a massive critique. Gustave Courbet, one of the main scandalous...

Zuzanna Stańska 10 June 2025

Erotica

The Scandalous Nudes of Gustave Courbet

In the 19th century, French painter and rebel Gustave Courbet generated outrage with his scandalous nudes. What exactly was so scandalous about his...

Kelly Hill 10 June 2025

Artist Stories

Powerful or Problematic? Robert Mapplethorpe’s Photographs

Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe shocked the world with his images of bondage, gay sex, female bodybuilders and naked black men. Technically brilliant or politically problematic, what do you think?

Candy Bedworth, Guest Author 9 June 2025

male beauty in art: Michelangelo, Ignudo, c. 1512. Erotica

Are You a Connoisseur of Male Beauty? A Nude Invasion!

According to the famous poster by Guerrilla Girls, 85% of nudes in Western art history are of women. They were subject to the male gaze, presented on...

Magda Michalska 9 June 2025

Male nudes in art: Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, Study, Young Male Nude Seated beside the Sea, 1836, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Erotica

The Greatest Male Nudes in Art History (NSFW!)

Nudity started being an important subject in art in ancient Greece. The male body was celebrated at sports competitions or religious festivals, it...

Anuradha Sroha 9 June 2025

Masterpiece Stories

Masterpiece Story: Portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters

To a 21st-century viewer, the portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées might seem homo-erotic. However, pictured with her sister, the Duchess of Villars,...

Anna Ingram 9 June 2025

Erotica

Celebrating the Male Body in Renaissance Florence

The adoration of the male body was an inspiration for many artists and there is no medium better suited to presenting the full beauty and complexity...

Joanna Kaszubowska 9 June 2025