Vogue: "Erotic Art, Through the Eyes of a 93-Year-Old" – Review of "Erotic City" Curated by Martha Edelheit

Here is the definition of erotic, according to 93-year-old artist Martha Edelheit. “It’s sensual, nonviolent, consensual, warm, inviting, sometimes funny, witty, amusing. Erotica assumes shared association, touching, stroking, licking, looking, playing, exposing. It digresses, teases, laughs, arouses, without harming.”

This is all further laid out, to vivid effect, in “Erotic City,” a group exhibition of more than 40 artists from the 1950s to the present, including Joan Semmel, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Cadmus, and Tom of Finland, on view now through April 26 at Eric Firestone Gallery at 40 Great Jones Street.

The show is curated by Edelheit, the pioneering feminist artist whose 1960s works address female desire, the body, and skin as a canvas for tattoo imagery. (A handful are on view in the show.) Imaginative, playful, transgressive, and highly erotic at a time when that wasn’t acceptable for women artists (“radical eroticism,” as art historian Rachel Middleman later called it), her oeuvre tacitly challenges social expectations of women and traditional ideas of figurative painting and the nude.

Edelheit’s work has seen a resurgence of interest in the past few years, especially after the 2022 Jewish Museum show “New York: 1962–1964” prominently featured one of her paintings. An active member of the 1960s and ’70s downtown New York avant-garde scene, she lived in Sweden for three decades before recently returning to her hometown of New York City.

Until lately, she’d received little market recognition. In 2017, art critic Blake Gopnik called Edelheit’s midcentury pieces “truly prescient feminist works” and lamented that so many—women and people of color in particular—had been left out of art history’s grand narrative. “​​Imagine if, in the late 1950s, Martha Edelheit had managed to attract the attention that went to figures like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns,” Gopnik wrote in Artnet. “Our art history textbooks might have ended up looking a whole lot more colorful and lively—and strange—than they do.”

Not to mention erotic, although Edelheit shies from applying the term to her own work. “I didn’t consider them erotic in 1960,” she tells Vogue. “They were sort of dream stories. I’d start to draw, and these things just came out. I was stunned by them.”

Around that time she had what she calls a “revelatory” encounter with the Edo-era series Poem of the Pillow. “It was the first erotic art I’d ever seen,” she says. “I mean, I knew pornography, but I had never really seen anything like this. It certainly didn’t exist, as far as I knew, in American culture.”

She was impressed by the exquisiteness and fantasy of the woodblock prints. “It was a pussycat looking under the screen in the corner, the detail of the fabrics, the plant sitting on the tatami mat—all this attention to detail that made it very real. They were beautifully made works of art, not just something pushed out to stimulate an audience. It also had a lot of humor, and humor doesn’t exist in pornography.”

The line between pornography and eroticism is one the show considers: Edelheit eschewed harmful or hurtful images, like bondage, beatings, or domination and those where bodies were abused in any way. Cutesy was another thing she felt erotic was not. Instead, she sought out sensuous work that had a high aesthetic quality. “I wanted it to be beautiful and to have power,” she says.

But what is seen to be erotic can vary greatly according to cultural, political, and religious contexts; ankles were sexy in Victorian times, Edelheit points out, as was a geisha’s nape in Japan. “Eroticism is not something that any two people see quite the same way,” she notes. And she doesn’t consider images with breasts or genitals as erotic per se. “One very important part of my work has been that bodies are what they are. The presence of genitals or breasts is a part of what a body looks like, and it’s not erotic.”

She’s also observed over the past six decades the fluctuation of erotic tastes—not to mention the juggernaut impact of the internet. “It’s made a profound difference in what’s available,” she concedes. “On the other hand, one of the things that has turned up in the visual media culture is the shaming and the abuse, really, of the male or female nude. That, to me, is a real tragedy—to go shaming people is just a horror.”

That’s why now is the right time for this show, Edelheit says, given our dire political context. “We are going through a revolution politically that is moving us back to McCarthyism and the ’50s and a much more repressive and stupid piece of history,” she chuckles. “So it’s very timely in that sense. We’re living in a very fragile and scary time.”

The show also contests the idea sexuality is solely the domain of the young. “Certainly, when I was your age, the idea that somebody my age might have sexual interests of any kind would have been utterly astonishing,” she says. “It never entered my head that my grandmother might have some kind of sexual fantasy life, for instance. But as I have aged, I have discovered that all my friends do.”

And what do her children (and, indeed, grandchildren) think of her first attempt at curating—and a rather risqué one at that? “They’re sort of delighted,” she smiles. “I think they think I’m a very funky old lady.”