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Title: Erotica 17th-18th Century (TASCHEN Icons Series) by Gilles Neret, Taschen, Gilles Néret ISBN: 3-8228-5535-9 Publisher: TASCHEN America Llc Pub. Date: 15 April, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Art has gone a long way
Comment: Yuk. This rating isn't the fault of editors or such, but the criticism of someone who was interested in whether people of yore generated high-quality nudes of ladies of their age (I'm male, nude males don't interest me). If they did, they didn't make a living doing erotica. I wasn't interested in the erotic side of this (if you've seen it in one collection, you'll see pretty much all that's offered in others - it's quiet repetitive and boring and so unimaginitive that you can pretty much guess what the next generation will do... A parade of genitals and often some sick-statement art saying bad things about sex.).
The single-star rating illustrates an art critics dissappointment in the quality of the artwork. Women were almost always drawn like men with breasts, all muscles and heavy bodied. Art style has advanced greatly - I've seen and am a fan of many modern artists who's sketchings and paintings break my heart in their ability to render people as real (some of the prettiest of which are of normal, non-glamor model people!) An art apologist will state "But people of that era often viewed fat women as the eye of beauty." That isn't what is wrong here; I've seen heavy women portrayed in realistic artistry and they are pretty. What is wrong is that the painters and etchers managed to render butt-ugly women! Literally, the paintings and drawings are just childishly ugly.
As a passing art scholar I learned a lot in buying this; the artwork is true-to-norm for the age (art has always grown and improved over the years), and varied, and for fans of the age would be great. But the quality of it based on pure true-to-life norms and beauty which a normal person would base it one is: it stinks. Look at later series and you will see a slow progression in the quality of artwork to the point where modern artists could drawn naked women who looked like real naked women. Not galmor girls, just real naked women! Indeed, if you've never seen it, check out some good art instruction books who use real people for models - it's impressive how a person doesn't have to be a glamor girl to be attractive. If they are presented in a quality piece of art, at least.
Rating: 5
Summary: Successful erotic art
Comment: This is a small scale (pages measuring 5" by 8") high quality art book of explicit erotic painting and engravings - along with a spirited and sensitive ideological introductory essay by Gilles Neret. He starts out with the far-reaching assertion that "there is only one real antidote to the anguish engendered in humanity by its awareness of inevitable death: erotic joy." This collection focuses on the representation and the provocation of that erotic joy. Those who enjoy explicitly graphic erotica (including those who might prefer to call it 'pornography') will not be disappointed in this book.
Neret has an abiding enthusiasm and a curatorial talent, for he has assembled a wide range of examples of erotic paintings, drawings, and engravings. In addition he has a sturdy confidence in the rightness of erotica's goal for its admirers: the enhancement of sexual experience. So yes, at least some of this art will do the customary and expected job of successful 'erotica.'
The approximately 170 plates are by European painters and printmakers. When color was used, it has been faithfully reproduced. The range of media and mood is wide, and the subject matter is consistently explicitly sexual.'Everything' is revealed at times. Threesomes, orgies, assorted combinations and recombinations are sometimes the subjects of these works.
There are boudoir scenes from the 1700's ( paintings of French artist Francois Boucher; the golden and voluptuous paintings of Jean-Honore Fragonard (softly beautiful women: dreaming - attended by cherubs - or sated and asleep in appealing disarray) and an assortment of anonymous politically satirical aat the same time sexually explicit paintings. There are social and cultural satires and a series of explicit and graphic paintings "for the education of the dauphin" that Napoleon hung in his bathroom. (Only several survived). A 1797 Dutch edition of de Sade's "The Story of Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue" featured detailed and often gruesome illustrations - and some are included here.
From Italy, Carracci's series of engravings, "The Loves of the Gods," done in 1602, shares similarities of mood and topics with much mainstream pornography of today, but Carracci named his exuberant couples after classical gods, and inserted edifying visual details into his scenes of frank and explicit sexual activity: the satyr's hooves, Bacchus' grapes, Achilles' warrior equipment, discarded in favor of Briseis, etc.
Rembrandt (yes, Rembrandt) loved to paint women and evidently loved sexual subjects, for he did numerous erotic paintings, often of his wife and himself. His women (and his men) are real, often in a sort of sensuous and happy disarray, wrinkled and classically imperfect - and beautifully human. The attitudes of the lovers are unidealized, sensuous because so natural - and the drawings are lovely.
English painter Thomas Rowlandson published a series of graphic and consistently and deliberately insulting caricatures of "the sexual practices of the English aristocracy" in the early years of the nineteenth century. Orgies, various sorts of sexualized cruelty, and an assortment of sexual embarrassments pervade his paintings. They were published then, and are reproduced here.
This is a great little book. Art history enthusiasts will not be disappointed in this collection. More to the point, those in search of explicitly sexual art that succeeds at erotica's primary goal will not feel that they have wasted their money on yet more Art History.
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Title: Erotica Universalis by Taschen Publishing, Benedikt Taschen ISBN: 3822881619 Publisher: TASCHEN America Llc Pub. Date: February, 1997 List Price(USD): $3.99 |
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Title: The Mammoth Book of Illustrated Erotica by Marilyn Jaye Lewis, Maxim Jakubowski ISBN: 0786709219 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: 09 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Pussycats by Gilles Neret ISBN: 3822824607 Publisher: TASCHEN America Llc Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $9.99 |
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Title: Best of Bizarre (TASCHEN Icons Series) by Eric Kroll, Taschen ISBN: 3822855553 Publisher: TASCHEN America Llc Pub. Date: 15 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $9.99 |
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Title:Vintage Erotica Anno 1930 ASIN: B000059TO4 Publisher: Cav Distributing Corp Pub. Date: 04 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $22.46 |
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