Marina Wallace

Martin Kemp

Joanne Bernstein

Art & Sex from Antiquity to Now

Seduced

Barbican Art Gallery

Seduced is a provocative and ambitious survey of representations of sex across cultures from ancient times to the modern day. Featuring such diverse works as Roman marbles, Japanese woodcuts, Indian manuscripts, Renaissance and Baroque paintings, nineteenth-century photographs and contemporary videos, this fascinating book reveals how art with a sexual content has been collected, openly displayed, concealed or prohibited over time. It provokes us to question the lines drawn between art and pornography and to examine our own boundaries of acceptability and censorship. This is the first major study of the visual representation of sex and changing attitudes towards explicit imagery throughout history. It includes works spanning 2000 years by over 70 artists, among them Rembrandt, Kitagawa Utamaro, J.M.W. Turner, Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jeff Koons.

Joanne Bernstein

Books

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