Customer Reviews

Twentieth Century Masters of Erotic Art

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If your interest is in understanding trends in 20th Century art, and erotic figurative art in particular, this book should fit the bill. Bradley Smith has provided a broad overview of works by many artists, mostly through paintings, but a few sculptures and a couple of photos as well. To it's credit, the collection includes a wide range of painting styles, abstracts, primitives, impressionist, surreal, montages and others. There are works by some artists I was already familiar with, and many that I was not. The images are large, mostly full page, and well printed. There's lots of stark unblushing figures, frequently engaged in sex, but regretably few images that come close to the masterful realism of the famous figure artists of the late 19th and early 20th century, and few images that show any degree of sensitivity for the artists' subjects. There's also virtually nothing from the late 20th Century masters of sci-fi and fantasy figure paintings. Call me old fashioned, but if this was the best of the 20th Century, I'll look to other genres...or to other centuries for inspiration. Thank goodness, were into another century.

This collection, dated 1980, offers a remarkabel cross-section of artists, styles, and sensibilities. Familiar masters like Warhol, Dali and Picasso appear, of course, but most of the artists' names were new to me. Some, like Ovendon's disturbing nymphs, open doors I prefer to leave shut. Others, like Ljuba, create windows into magical worlds of fantasy. Hyper-realism, comic book pastiches, neo-shunga, H.R. Geiger's grey nightmares, Fukui's elegant romanticisim - this spans a remarkable range of styles, subjects, and moods.

Still this collection ends at 1980, with a fifth of the century left to go. As a result, it couldn't capture the burgeoning fantasy art of last decades, or the blossoming of computer assisted rendering, or - well, an explosion of art combined with wider acceptance of physical affection in all its forms.

This one's enjoyable (the art at least, I found the commentary unmemorable), but not a must-have for any collection.

-- wiredweird