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THE ERA OF SEX MUSEUMS
They're Popping Up All Over Europe and Soon Here
By Marianna Beck and Jack Hafferkamp
By its very nature, erotic art is subversive. Its function always has been to arouse, offend, even shock the viewer and the larger community. It’s not surprising then that museums, especially in the United States, traditionally have steered clear of exhibiting sexual artifacts as well as erotic art. The notion of an entire museum devoted to sex would no doubt strike terror in the hearts of most curators and trigger nightmare thoughts of being trapped forever in Cincinnati.
In Europe, however, where attitudes aren’t quite so hysterical and sex is less culturally marginalized, museums devoted to sex and eroticism have mushroomed. From Barcelona to Copenhagen they have enshrined everything from ancient dildos and fertility icons to contemporary interactive sculpture and sex toys. And guess what, they are big hits.
In booming Berlin, for example, the Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum attracts a quarter million visitors annually and is one of the top five visited museums in the city, according to Dr. Bernd Buhmann, head of the press and public relations department of Berlin Tourismus. One has only to imagine New York City’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani beaming over the high tourism rates of a sex museum to savor the vast differences in attitude. Nonetheless, plans are indeed afoot for a New York erotic museum in Spring 2001.
We visited six erotic museums in four cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg and Paris. Each varied dramatically in presentation and content and ranged from a fun-house atmosphere (Amsterdam) to more dignified settings apropos of serious collections (Berlin, Hamburg and Paris). Some were attached to tacky sex toy shops, others to elegant bookstores. Yet all are worth visiting; the objects provide insight into the times and places they were created and appreciated, from Japanese wood block prints and Sumatran fertility figures to 18th-century French lithographs and 19th-century Viennese condoms, through 20th-century art, artiface and excess.
AMSTERDAM:
Sex museum/venus temple
Erotisch Museum
This free-spirited city of canals, bicycles, tulips and liberal marijuana laws features two erotic museums, one decidedly more upscale and informative than the other. The one to see is located on Damrak, one of Amsterdam’s main thoroughfares, and a short distance from the Central Train Station. Calling itself both the Sex Museum and Venus Temple, it has been open since 1985, attracting over a half-million visitors annually, according to manager Jacob Nentjes.
The collection features an enormous array of objects from different time periods, shoehorned into a typically narrow Amsterdam building. The arrangement is somewhat chaotic and haphazard, from the sublime to the ugly, and there is little in the way of explanation -- although happily, whatever documentation there is appears in English as well Dutch, German and French.
But for every complaint about the facility -- it’s far too noisy -- there are some stunning treasures for the praticed eye. On the ground floor alone we saw fine erotic carvings from the Tang dynasty along with 18th-century engravings by Peter Fendi -- an Austrian erotic-genre painter who was a favorite of the Hapsburgs and who specialized in producing paintings of upper-class orgies. Neighboring display cases provided more eclecticism: early 20th-century German pencil drawings as well as erotic cartoons of the Flintstones, and an Aubrey Beardsley.
One of Venus Temple’s historic curiosities is “Sex Through the Ages,” a 19th-century-style painting on a large rotating drum that shows visitors just what the title offers, from Adam and Eve on -- with narration in your choice of four langauges.
Meanwhile, Venus Temple is not above playing a vulgar fun-house joke on visitors. A few steps inside the museum, guests gazing at the artifacts are startled by a loud “Psst, hey.” When they turn toward it they are confronted by a life-sized kinetic statue of an elderly flasher flinging open his raincoat. The shrieks and self-conscious laughter of this spectre can ring through at least three floors. While annoying, the response demonstrates that the flasher does serve to break the ice for people feeling a bit tentative about entering a sex museum. The one display that was genuinely unattractive -- garish, badly lit, poor quality still photos from porn films -- was mercifully confined to a small area.
The brief incursions into bad taste, however, are largely forgivable given that Venus Temple possesses an enormous range of artifacts from around the world. Here you can find a phallus-shaped oil lamp dating from Roman Carthage (c. 100 AD), 19th century ivory dildos from Austria, wood carvings of copulating figures from native New Zealand peoples, penis-shaped walking sticks from 1920s Europe, along with samples of erotic playing cards and a requisite amount of less than interesting modern art. There is also a naughty postcards section and a set of private-screening film booths.
Much of the collection, according to Nentjes, has been purchased from art dealer Hans-Jürgen Döpp, a renowned art collector and expert in erotic art. If this museum does anything it’s to amply illustrate the extraordinary variety of erotic expression from many different cultures over time. To fully appreciate it, Venus Temple deserves at least two visits.
The Sex Museum or Venus Temple, Damrak 18. Admission: 4.50 guilders or about $2.25. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Less interesting yet still worth a quick look when you’re strolling Amsterdam’s famous Red Light district, is the Erotisch Museum. This collection is quite small, a hodgepodge, really, featuring among other things, a very early version of a vibrator with a wind-up mechanism and the original packaging, and a series of erotic drawings by John Lennon presented to Yoko Ono on their wedding day. Additonally there are some Picasso prints and a small number of works by other artists. Least interesting are its dioramas of serious S/M play.
The Erotisch Museum also houses a most curious little theater, done up in a pseudo-Disney style with toadstool-shaped chairs grouped around TV screens showing a pornograhic cartoon version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The people watching as we passed through seemed to think it quite funny.
The Erotisch Museum is located at Oudezijds Achterburgwal 54, walking distance from the Sex Museum. Admission 5 guilders or about $2.50.
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BERLIN:
Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum
Berlin’s erotic museum is the brainchild of Beate Uhse, the septuagenarian grandmother whose name has been a household word in Germany since the 1950s. It was then that she opened the world’s first shop for “marital hygiene,” ultimately championing the right to sell contraceptives. These days, Uhse heads up what is probably the world’s largest sex products merchandising business -- an empire that includes a mail-order division, video and publishing sections, sex shops throughout Germany and since 1996, a multi-level museum devoted to the art and history of sex.
How well known is this museum around the world? Berlin Tourismus’ Dr. Buhmann says his surveys show that in Asia the best known tourist destination in the whole city is the Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum.
The four story collection of over 5,000 sexual artifacts from around the world tends toward the classical with a lot of Asian and Indian erotic miniatures mixed in with carved phalli from Bali, African fertility masks, 2,000 year-old Peruvian drinking vessels as well as more recent expressions of the horizontal urge. Best of all, given the enormous numbers of foreign tourists, the objects and artworks are described in three languages -- German, English and French.
Unlike the connected first floor sex shop, the museum has a quiet but seductive feel without being garish. It even has a comfortable coffee bar for taking a break. Where Venus Temple is all hard floors and loud noises, the Beate Uhse Erotik- Museum is carpeting and quiet -- although here, too, there seems to be some need to have the occasional diorama to visually explain certain topics like fetishism and S/M, as well as a life-sized kinetic sculpture of Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grate and catching her up-flying skirt.
While it might be easy to dismiss the self-promotional side of Beate Uhse -- part of the top floor is devoted to “the story of Beate Uhse” -- we couldn’t help respect her energy and drive, especially after learning that she fought a bitter lawsuit for the right to sell John Cleland’s classic novel Fanny Hill in Germany in the 1960s. For that matter, Uhse claims that altogether she’s faced some 2,000 legal cases.
Her museum, assembled over several years effort, has an excellent permanent collection of objets, rivaling Venus Temple. On the top floor one starts with the impressive Oriental collection, including fine examples of Japanese Shunga art, with its outsized genitals, by Utamaro, Harunobu and others. Also noteworthy are the Chinese “Wedding Tiles,” 18th- and 19th-century paintings on silk that had a definite sex education role, 19th- century Chinese brothel tokens and 20th-century Chinese porcelains.
Plunging on, what one finds is a similarly impressive collection of European objects -- erotic pipes, snuff bottles, porcelains, plates and art. There is a theater showing vintage erotic silent films and cartoons. In addition to the permanent collection, there are also temporary exhibits of both contemporary work and older things. When we visited we were lucky enough to catch a superb show called “Sodom Berlin,” featuring the works of Weimar era artists George Grosz, Heinrich Zille, Rudolf Schlichter, Otto Schoff, Hans Bellmer, Gordal, the divine woman illustrator Charlotte Berend-Corinth, and others.
In the 1920s, Berlin flourished as one of the most avant-garde cities in Europe and the work of these artists clearly reflects an intense, if not visceral, sexual energy. While the show was scheduled to close in October, public relations spokesperson Gabi Barton said the museum was considering incorporating parts of the show into its permanent collection.
The Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum is centrally located at the corner of Kantstrasse and Joachimstaler Strasse near the Zoo train station. Special catalogs and postcards relating to the museum’s contents are available near the main entrance, but there is also a rather lurid adult toy store next door. Open daily from 9 a.m. to midnight. Admission: 10 marks or approximately $5.50.
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HAMBURG:
Erotic Art Museum
Privart Museum
Hamburg is Germany’s second city, a seaport town. The Beatles honed their sound here at the Cavern Club in the early 60s and this city has long been known for having a raw edge.
The St. Pauli district is the city’s poorest, and its main drag, the Reeperbahn, has a definite pre-Guiliani Times Square feel, a little sleazy, a lot gritty. Our instant joke was calling it the grim Reeperbahn, but right there, in the thick of it rises the five floors of Claus Becker’s magnificent Erotic Art Museum. The Reeperbahn location is the real estate magnate’s second multi-million dollar paean to sexy art in this city. What once was a hat factory has morphed into a seductive, streamlined four-story receptacle of glass and light -- a perfect setting for what is probably the most comprehensive collection of erotic paintings, lithographs, and drawings in Europe.
Becker definitely has been single-minded in his erotic mission. In 1990, he was offered access to an enormous collection of art from an “anonymous banker.” It included works from the Renaissance to the present. Feeling that erotic art almost always has been either ignored or destroyed -- and most certainly withheld from public view -- Becker bought the collection and installed it in a beautifully rehabbed warehouse in St. Pauli. The museum became Becker’s personal answer to what he perceived as the “unholy renaissance” of puritans and moralists -- not to mention the “state managed culture sector” -- all of whom he was convinced, preferred keeping erotic art out of the public eye.
With the collection continuing to expand, Becker moved to the new location on the Reeperbahn last year, keeping the original site as the Privart Museum, a revolving modern art gallery, exhibit space, bookstore and cafe. Becker spent 11 million DM, preparing the new space. Last year visitors to the two sites topped 80,000, according to a museum spokesman who added that Becker is also contemplating a similar museum in either eastern Europe or Russia.
Since 1990, Becker has managed to amass a treasure throve of over 1,800 works ranging from Barent von Orley’s “Neptune and Nymph” (c. 1520) to the edgy 1990s S/M work of French photographer Gilles Berquet. The only disappointment in this otherwise world-class museum, which clearly caters to many foreign visitors, is the limited amount of German-only text with the art. The collection of 18th-century French erotic prints, for example, is sublime and would have been even more fascinating had there been some shred of information beyond an approximate date and the author’s (often anonymous) name. So many of Becker’s works in this museum begged for some explanation, some historical context, something.
Still, no museum we saw matched the breadth and depth of Becker’s assemblage. If 18th- and 19th-century French, German and Italian images of eroticism drip too much with dreamy, sentimentality, then the fractured 20th-century dalliances with surrealism, nihilism, cubism and all manner of isms, explodes with terrific energy. You’ll find a surprising array of major 20th-century artists here including Otto Dix, Jean Cocteau, George Grosz, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Tomi Ungerer and legions of others along with some less-than-major ones like Henry Miller and John Lennon.
As a businessman who has spent several fortunes acquiring a vast amount of erotic art, Becker is both to be respected and admired for making this kind of challenging art available to the public. In a time when most American museums, at least, are at the mercy of funders and forced to embrace “safe” art and banal blockbuster shows geared to everyone from grade-schoolers to conservative grandmas, Becker’s contribution borders on courageous.
The Erotic Art Museum in is located on the Reeperbahn between Gr. Freheit Strasse and Holstenstrasse. The Privart Museum is a short walk from the main museum and is located at Bernhard-Nocht Strasse 69. Admission to each location is 15 marks (about $8.30) or 20 marks (about $11) for both. Open daily from 10 a.m. to midnight. Both locations have excellent bookstores with selections in both German and English.
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PARIS:
Musée de l’erotisme
When Joseph Khalifa and his three partners first decided to open their Musée de l’erotisme in the Pigalle section, local city administrators were delighted. Not only did they support the idea of an upscale tourist attraction in a somewhat run-down neighborhood, one local council member is reported to have said, “We take sex seriously in France and it’s about time we had a museum dedicated to it.”
Khalifa and partners clearly spared little expense in renovating the building, which once housed a cabaret, and opened in late 1997. Le Musée de l’erotisme has the contemporary feel of an expensive art gallery or well-endowed museum. Cool marble stairs and soft, subtle lighting make its seven floors inviting to wander through while taking in the mostly contemporary erotic art, interactive sculpture and photography.
“Most people who come here expect to see classical examples of erotica, but we try to emphasize modern art more,” says Khalifa, adding that four of the museum’s floors change exhibits every two months. In anticipation of the World Cup in France, the museum featured work that integrated soccer balls and Vargas-like models — a series that we found both funny and sexy as well as bizarre.
For those who prefer more traditional examples of erotic art, the museum does feature a collection of Japanese netsuke along with examples of African fertility fetishes, Hindu temple friezes of acrobatic couplings, and most intriguingly, in the Mexican section, depictions of gay Aztec men. The emphasis, however, is clearly on contemporary sculpture and photography -- an area Khalifa believes is generally under-represented in both museums and galleries. His future plans include an exhibit of erotic art produced exclusively by women -- due in part to positive press from several European women’s magazines.
“More and more of the 8,000 or so monthly visitors to the museum have been women who have come to realize that what we have here is serious art and not pornography,” says Khalifa. “The big difference between pornography and eroticism is this: pornography is to eroticism what American fast food is to French gastronomy.”
The Musée de l’erotisme is located at 72, boulevard de Clichy in Paris and is open daily from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. Admission is 40 francs or about $6.65. Postcards and some art objects available for sale. The museum’s website is: www.erotic-museum.com
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OTHER SEX MUSEUMS
COPENHAGEN:
Museum erotica
Copenhagen’s Museum Erotica has been drawing annual crowds of 125,000 since opening in 1993, says curator Ole Ege who describes the collection as “a rich cross-section that illustrates the history of erotic expression.” The museum features erotic paintings, sculpture, French postcards, photos, magazines, films and sex-toys; a brochure promises visitors the opportunity of studying the sex-lives of such luminaries as “Hans Christian Andersen, Onassis and many other famous people.”
Museum Erotica is located at Købmagergade 24 and is open daily May 1 to September 30 from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. and October 1 through April 1 from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is 59 krone (approximately $8.60).
BARCELONA:
Museo de la Erotica
The Museo de la Erotica in downtown Barcelona boasts a quarter million visitors annually, according to owner Morten Sondergaard, a Danish businessman who opened its doors in 1996. Plans are apparently underway for a similar enterprise in London, he says.
Sondergaard visited many of the already-established erotic museums in Europe before enshrining his own collection and describes the Museo de la Erotica as a cross between the Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum in Berlin and the Venus Temple in Amsterdam. The emphasis, says Sondergaard, is on traditional representations of erotic art: Indian reproductions of the Kama Sutra, African wood carvings and European illustrations from the 15th to the 20th century. Other highlights include a collection of early erotic postcards, comics, and works by Picasso and Miro.
The Museo de la Erotica is located at Ramblas 96 and is open daily from 10 a.m. to midnight. Admission is 975 pesetas (approximately $6.00). For more information, the museum’s website is: www.eroticamuseum.co
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 CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA
National Museum of Erotica
Opened by the Eros Foundation on March 10, 2001, The National Museum of Erotica stole the national media spotlight from the National Museum of Australia which opened just down the raod. Appropriately, the Eros Foundation are making the statement that a National Museum which ignores sexuality denies a universal part of existence for Australians. The museum features over 500 works of art as well as artifacts from erotic nutcrackers to a pair of Chinese foot-binding shoes. The museum is supported by an excellent web site which contains previews and a shop of erotic art.
Postal Address: PO Box 9080,
Deakin, ACT 2600 Australia.
Museum Location: 37 a Northbourne Ave,
Canberra City, ACT 2600 Australia.
Email: info@nationalmuseumoferotica.com.
Fax: 61 (0)2 6230 5044 or 61 (0)2 6282 1499.
Phone: 61 (0)2 6230 5022
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NEW YORK:
The Museum of Sex
Presidential peccadilloes aside, Europeans have long been fascinated by American attitudes about sex. To them, we exhibit a kind of cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously prurient and puritanical. While Michelangelo might have received a grant from the NEA, exhibiting his nude statue of David would be another story. Controversy would rage over fears of sexual harassment (depending on where the statue was placed), exposing children to nudity, promoting the homosexual agenda (whatever that is), and so on. While beleaguered community leaders would ultimately conclude that one person’s view of eroticism is another’s vision of the obscene, David would likely never play in Peoria -- or most other places on the fruited plain.
But then there’s always New York City. In fact, plans are underway for the Museum of Sex -- or MoSex -- scheduled to open in Spring 2001 at 233 Fifth Avenue at 27th Street. Co-founder and program director Alison Maddex, describes MoSex as a “world-class cultural institution with an academic, multi-disciplinary approach that won’t be limited to just the art and artifacts of sex. The Museum of Sex will be a like a mini-Smithsonian, a mixture of history and hi-tech,” says Maddex, adding that independent curators will also be brought in to deal with contemporary issues and themes.
Along with a permanent exhibit covering Sex in America, 1600-2,000 and a permanent collection of sex-related art, there are plans for numerous exhibits, programs, and interactive displays running the gamut from sex in the animal kingdom to fetish fashion. MoSex will have a multi-media performing arts space for concerts, lectures and workshops as well as a street-level restaurant and cafe. Already Maddex’s partner and museum board advisor Camille Paglia is planning a series of events based on her controversial best-selling book, “Sexual Personae.”
At press time financing for the ambitious project was not fully in place. But Maddex and co-founder and CEO Daniel Gluck are optimistic. Says Maddex: “We have a subject here of equal or greater importance than art and we will not be dependent on government support, either at the state or federal level,” she says. “This is a museum that will be driven by the public.”
Gluck has heard of the numbers of people visiting Europe’s sex museums, and he is optimistic about raising the $3.5 million needed for the museum’s archives and exhibits. “We’re still in the embryonic stages of this project but we’ve had some very interested parties.”
Just how interested -- or dismayed -- New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is in MoSex is unclear. But considering that socialite, political activist and columnist Arianna Huffington threw a fundraising party for the museum at her Los Angeles mansion last summer reveals that at least some well-heeled people with Republican ties think about sex in a positive way from time to time.
Visit MoSex on the web for current information.
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ON THE WEB
Erotic Musems and Galleries
If you can’t afford a whirlwind tour of Europe just at the moment, you can get a pretty good dose of erotic art via the internet -- much of it free. A great place to begin is a charming site called, believe it or not, The Erotic Traveler (www.erotictraveler.com). It’s a mini travel guide documenting the locations of erotic art at various museums and other locales around the world.
Probably most valuable is the links page, which will catapult you to a number of other sites, our favorite being Tara’s Sheela-na-gig Home Page (www.members.tripod.com/~taramc/sheelas.html). Sheela-na-gigs are somewhat mysterious pre-Christian fertility figures from the British isles.
World Art Erotica (www.wae.org) is a kind of National Geographic tour of erotic art. It bills itself as an an online gallery of sensual art -- most of it available for sale -- from cultures and tribes around the world.
The World Museum of Erotic Art (www.opkamer.nl/amea/index.shtml), the product of a group of Dutch artists dedicated to the proposition that viewing erotic art never ruined anybody’s health, provides another thorough glimpse of sexy art through the ages. Here you’ll find nearly twenty categories including the usual stable of scenes from the Kama Sutra to the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette, individual artists like Austrian court painter Peter Fendi, plus examples of 19th century daguerreotypes, Parisian photographs of the 1920s and some contemporary art. This site also features a Picture-of-the-Day.
If you want to view as well as buy, a superb site is The Erotics Gallery (www.eroticsgallery.com) which specializes in erotic art from the third quarter of the 19th century to the present. Here you can purchase European bronzes, Chinese paintings and porcelains, books, portfolios, prints and jewelry. For edgier material, the gallery also has a “back room” where for $18 (for two months), you get to see the rare collection of both contemporary and centuries-old erotica.
The Erotic Print Society (www.eroticprints.org) is a site from which you can order books and limited edition prints. This organization publishes its own review, and in addition to an 80-page catalog, features a large assortment of limited edition lithographs by artists like Thomas Rowlandson, Aubrey Beardsley and some lesser known but talented 20th century artists: Suzanne Ballivet, Fedor Rojankowski and Georges de Sainte Croix to name just a few. The Erotic Print Society also has produced limited edition monographs of photographers Trevor Watson and China Hamilton.
Venusberg.de is the forum of an private collector who was responsible for building up the Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum in Berlin. Venusberg boasts one of the biggest collections of European erotic art from the 17th to the 19th century. These watercolors, drawings and prints are an invaluable documentation of social mores and cultural history. They also trace the history of taboo, secrecy and prohibition. There is also a gallery in which visitors can peruse erotic art for sale..
And don’t forget The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University which quietly has one of the largest collections of erotic ephemera in the United States. From time to time, the Kinsey Institute has exhibits although its profile these days is so low, it’s almost underground. Nonetheless, this is the place to find the outstanding catalog from last year’s show, “The Art of Desire” -- an exhibition of the KI’s erotic treasures. To keep track of upcoming events or to purchase catalogs from past exhibitions, check out the Kinsey Institute at: www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/events.html.
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