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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Döpp, Hans-Jürgen, 1940-
[Erotik-Museum in Berlin]
Sex in the cities: Berlin / Hans-Jurgen Döpp.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Erotic art – Catalogs. 2. Erotic art – Germany – Berlin – Catalogs. 3. Erotik-Museum – Catalogs. I. Döpp, Hans-Jürgen, 1940- Erotik-Museum in Berlin. Translation of: II. Title.
N8217.E6D59 2013
704.9 42807443155 – dc23
2012051231
© Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA
© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA
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© Berthommé-Saint-André Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
© Chimot Édouard, All rights reserved
© D. Larrivaz, ADAGP, Paris
© Dalí Salvador, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid
© Dulac Jean, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
© Estate Man Ray/ Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation (IVARO), Dublin, IR/ADAGP, Paris
© George Grosz Estate, Artists Right Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
© Hildebrandt Ernst, All rights reserved
© Pellar Hanns, All rights reserved
© Petitjean Armand, All rights reserved
© Rojankovsky Feodor, All rights reserved
© Schatz Otto Rudolf, All rights reserved
© Sternberg Nicolas, All rights reserved
© Tauzin Mario, All rights reserved
© Vertès Estate
© Von Herrfeldt Marcel, All rights reserved
© Vorberg Gaston, All rights reserved
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers, artists, heirs or estates. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.
Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du monde or The Origin of the World, 1866.
Oil on canvas, 46 × 65 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
A Geography of Pleasure
The Erotic Museum in Berlin invites you to take a special journey, one that will open up a vista of pleasures and desires. An abundance of images and objects from both art and cult present eroticism and sexuality as a universal, fundamental subject.
By opening ourselves to the exhibits’ origins in a variety of cultures, some of them strange, we may enrich our own cultures as well.
The many and varied points of view encountered in this museum demonstrate the multifarious aspects of sexuality. The exhibits reveal that nothing is more natural than sexual desire; and, paradoxically, nothing is less natural than the forms in which this desire expresses itself or finds satisfaction.
Items long hidden in the vaults of public museums and galleries of private collectors can be seen here. Many of these images and objects were forbidden in a western society which was less open to sexuality and anything associated with it. So they grant us a rare, and therefore more fascinating, glimpse of what is part and parcel of human nature.
Eastern societies, on the other hand, have always known how to integrate the sexual and erotic into their art and culture. For example, Chinese religion, entirely free of the western notions of sin, considers lust and love to be pure things. The union of man and woman under the sign of Tao expresses the same harmony as the alternation of day and night, winter and summer. One can say – and rightly so – that the ancient forms of Chinese thought have their origins in sexual conceptions. Yin and yang, two complementary ideas, determine the universe. In this way, the erotic philosophy of the ancient Chinese also encompasses a cosmology. Sexuality is an integrated component of a philosophy of life and cannot be separated from it.
One of the oldest and most stimulating civilisations on earth thus assures us through its religion that sex is good and instructs us, for religious reasons, to carry out the act of love creatively and passionately. This lack of inhibition in sexual matters is mirrored in art from China.
The great masters of Japan also created a wealth of erotic pictures, which rank equal with Japan’s other works of art. No measure of state censorship was ever able to completely suppress the production of these images.
Shungas depict the pleasures and entertainment of a rather earthly world. It was considered natural to seek out the pleasures of the flesh, whichever form they took. The word vice was unspoken in ancient Japan, and sodomy was a sexual pleasure like any other.
The art of ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating, transitory world) inspires works that are technically and artistically perfect. The fantastic and the grotesque blossomed early, especially in Japanese art, as well as literature.
Chinese shunga (Images of springtime), 19th centuries.
Painting on silk from a marriage book.
Chinese shunga (Images of springtime), 19th centuries.
Painting on silk from a marriage book.
Chinese shunga (Images of springtime), 19th centuries.
Painting on silk from a marriage book.
Chinese shunga (Images of springtime), 19th centuries.
Painting on silk from a marriage book.
Indian Tantra relief, 11th-13th centuries. Marble.
Lovers. Marble relief with Greek motif.
Indian miniature painting.
Sexuality and its associated matters have more than 10,000 representations, different ones in different cultures. In India, eroticism is sanctified in Hindu temples. In Greece, it culminates in the cult of beauty, joining the pleasures of the body with those of the mind. Greek philosophy understood the world as interplay between Apollo and Dionysus, between reason and ecstasy.
Only Christianity began to view eroticism in a context of sin and the world of darkness, and thus creating irreconcilable differences. “The devil Eros has become more interesting to man than all the angels and all the saints,” a tenet held by Nietzsche, which would probably find no sympathy in Far Eastern Japan: Eros was never demonised there. In fact, that which Nietzsche lamented in the West never occured in Japan, nor in many other Eastern cultures. “Christianity,” in Nietzschean words,