Men have painted naked women for as long as paint has existed. Well before that, their predecessors were using hammers and chisels to carve erotic nudes of both genders out of marble.
The point of these gauzy oils of dancing nymphs and stone statues of recumbent shepherds has always been to put a respectable, if not unapologetic, face on lust: This is not pornography, its beholders can argue. It is art with a capital A, and that painting is not smut, it’s an allegory.
As a society, we accept this narrative, both out of convenience and because, oftentimes, it’s true. (Michelangelo’s David, for instance, is a work of art and a work of eros.)
So when Sotheby’s held its inaugural Erotic sale last year to coincide with Valentine’s Day, it felt a little transgressive—not so much telling the emperor he had no clothes as telling the emperor with no clothes that he was, in fact, a sex symbol.
The 2017 auction featured art by such 20th century giants as Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, Egon Schiele, Anton Gormley, and Aristide Maillol, mixed with antiquities such as a 2nd century Roman marble torso of Pan. To the surprise of basically everyone (even, it seemed, the auction house), the sale went gangbusters, selling for more than a million pounds above its high estimate.
“We were planning to hold them every other year,” says Constantine Frangos, the specialist who organized the sale. “But we had so many demands, from both buyers and sellers, that we put together a second auction a year later.”
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Frangos notes that “The subtitle of the sale is ‘Passion and Desire,’ so not all of the objects in the sale represent actual acts.” Instead, he says, “it represents admiration of the human form.”
That’s absolutely true, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy to get consigners to contribute to a sale that would market its contents—19th century nudes, tasteful black and white photographs, and treasured antiquities—as leaving bidders “hot under the collar.” (Sotheby’s language, not ours.)
“Most clients were very open to the idea,” says Frangos. The sale offers a fairly unique platform to showcase objects that might otherwise be overshadowed by comparably flashier artworks. “It gives [the work] a broader range of exposure,” he says.
Under normal circumstances, in other words, a Roman terracotta plaque with a brothel scene from the 1st century AD (estimate: 20,000 pounds to 30,000 pounds, or $27,700 to $41,500) might not attract much attention. But when it’s displayed alongside an ink drawing of a gay orgy by Pavel Tchelitchew (2,000 pounds to 3,000 pounds) and a brush-and-ink sex scene by Picasso (250,000 to 350,000 pounds), that plaque might take on a very different sheen. “If you look at the coverage of certain works—if they were put in another sale, they would be lost,” Frangos says. “Here, they’re highlighted.”