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Nekkid art poll

Christina of ataraxy and I have been discussing our respective plans to put art in our bathrooms and the subject of nekkid women came up. We agreed that we hate Patrick Nagel. But what I want to know is, do women find erotic art in men's homes (and nekkid women in particular) to be creepy or nice? Hence a little poll for my women readers. (Links are NSFW!)

The question: How do you feel about erotic art on a guy's walls?

	Uck. Creepy.
	A little Matisse or Picasso is okay, but it's gotta be tasteful.
	T&A is fine as long as you maintain the pretense that it's "art". Anything in black and white or with romantic lighting will pass.
	Crank it up but keep it highbrow. Modigliani, Klimt and Schiele put me in the mood.
	Go for the Nagel, the Vargas, the Helmut Newton, even the supermodel swimsuit posters. Let your het flag fly!
	Irony can make anything safe. Put up Bettie Page and Coop and we'll think you're just being hip.
	Nekkid women are acceptable only if you give us nekkid men, too. We demand Mapplethorpe.

Click here to view results.

Disclaimer(s) for my response:
1. I wouldn't choose Nagel, but I like Vargas. Nagel is in a schmaltz category all of his own. Goes with black chrome furniture and octagonal black dinner plates.
2. One work by Helmut Newton in a guy's pad would be sexy, but not if there were other b&w nudes in the place.
3. Bettie Page with whips or in the nude = sexy. Cartoons of similar scenes (like Coop) = gimme a break!
4. Schiele and Klimt are not sexy, rather scary. The stories about Klimt's misogyny, for example, make me shudder and feel sorry for his models.

(the survey threw an error, will try to replicate)

Nekkid ladies on a guy's wall make me a bit uncomfortable -- if it's a date, it makes me feel like there might be a proposition to fend off, rather than friendship or seduction to evolve. If it's not a date it's wierder -- a friend of a friend of mine showed me a demo of a software he was developing, at his home office, and he had a number of magazine-lit nekkid-ladies on the walls. It made me cautious of him.

I'm not a prude, just private.

/asl

If you have naked lady pics on your bathroom wall, it will be assumed that they are masturbation aids, and nobody wants to think about that. "Uck, creepy" or "is this guy gay?" for the rest of the house too. The Modigliani example was the only choice of those given that wouldn't oog me out.

Thanks for the votes and the comments!

I've gotten a couple of reports of errors, which confuse me because the poll is working for other people. If you have any trouble, I'd be much obliged if you'd send me a bug report with as much detail as you can manage. Thanks.

(Hanging chad! Hanging chad! Aughh!)

Ah, I think I may have fixed the bug. If you tried voting before and had trouble, feel free to vote again.

(The devil sent me, but at least I didn't vote.) How does being the co-parent of two pre-teen girls affect your aesthetic choices here? Do they have their own bathroom (as well as their own bedroom) in your bachelor pad?

Gabriel, you guessed right -- my aesthetic choices are rather constrained by my daughters, the older of whom doesn't even like to go to Conan's Pizza because of the semi-naked Frazetta posters covering the the walls. (Her little sister, meanwhile, stares very carefully at the adult bookstore two doors down now that she's caught wind that there's something forbidden inside.)

At present nothing on my walls would offend even the "Uck, creepy" contingent, with the possible exception of some slight innuendo in a couple of postcards in the bathroom gallery (fully clothed and on the top tier, no less). It's crossed my mind to put up some art in the highbrow or ironic vein, but I'll probably hold off given daughter no. 1's vocal objections.

Which seems a bit overprotective -- they've seen nudes on the walls at their friends' houses, among other places -- but I'm nothing if not an indulgent father.

I agree with anonymous numbers 2 and 3 above. If I was going to a man’s house for the first time, especially if I did not know him well, I would be very uncomfortable seeing naked pictures of any sort in the bathroom. Pictures can portray the human body either as art or sex objects. When the human body is presented as a sex object, that may not only be offensive to some people, they also reflect the views of the poster of those pictures. As I said above, if I go to the home of a man I don’t know very well, I might wrongly take those pictures for the man’s view of women/men.
That said, I would not mind black and white artsy (not suggestive) pictures of both men and women someplace other than the bathroom. However, of the choices you provided, I voted for “Crank it up but keep it highbrow”. Those are the least threatening to my sense of security in a man’s home regardless of where they are placed.
For those of you who own your own home here is a suggestion for how to decorate the bathroom without damaging the art by all the steam. I had a colleague who used various pictures, newspaper clippings, small postcards and posters to decorate her bathroom floor. The floor was concrete. After putting the pictures etc down, she covered them with the stuff you put on the outside of boats that makes them waterproof and shinny. It was highly unusual and very durable.

Thanks for all the comments, to which I'll respond later.

One small detail: I'm not just talking about the art that goes in the bathroom, but the art that goes anywhere.

And I'm not necessarily talking about *my* place, for reasons I explained to Gabriel above.

Keep those comments and votes coming...

Hi Prentiss

I have two naked ladies in my apartment: an egon schiele's beauty with her bottom sticking up and a botero chubbie reading a letter and eating oranges.

I've had the egon schiele print for a long time and now with my renovations going on, I think I am going to take it down. Dunno. I kinda got tired of it (or maybe even the sexual position it depicts, gotta have variety!).

But I am keeping my botero, because, above all, there is a gentle, dreamy and funny quality to it.

I also have in a forgotten cupboard a night lamp showing Gabrielle D'Estree et sa soeur, from the Ecole de Fontainebleau. It's lovely and kinky!

I don't see a problem with naked pictures around when it comes to Sofia (but I draw the line at porn movies :-). I often have my art books everywhere and many of them are about
the glorious human body. My mom was such a prude, I want to raise my daughter without any hangups about nudity.

Which reminds me, I actually thinking of having my shower curtains custom-made with an image from Ingres. I'm thinking one of those harem scenes. In Brazil right now digital printing for surfaces is all the rage. You just take a picture you like and have it stamped in a shower curtain or a wood panel. Could be a fun alternative to the walls...

As for male nudity: I voted for Mapplethorpe because I love his work, but if you put a male nude in your bathroom, I think that you'll be sending off the wrong message to your visitors. I don't want to offend anybody, but male nudity on walls has been for so long characterized as a sign of being gay.

ME

i wasn't qualified to vote, but
on my blog i have already opined
that the 20c. is poor in erotic
art (as opposed to pornography),
with a rare exception being Modig-
liani's nudes...

Ok, I was too lazy for the links, but here they come

Gabrielle et sa soeur

Ingres

Botero's The Letter

Olympia, possibly the most scandalous nude ever or would that be Courbet's Origin of the World?

As a mom: I don't mind my daughter (almost 13 now) seeing female nudity, when it's in an artistic rather than sexual context (and it's a really fine line sometimes), or in instances where women are presented in their varying forms rather than as simply an extension of the accepted beauty norm. It's an education in appreciating beauty afaic.

As for male nudity...honestly, I've never really thought about it, maybe because it seems to be much less available, for whatever reasons. The male nudes I've seen generally come off as much more sexual than the females, and I do my best to keep her away from gratuitously sexual a/o violent images, because the part of her lifetime that's spent in relative innocence is short enough as it is.

As a woman: I'd take painted over photographic nudity any day; no matter how low-lit and artsily composed, nude photos always strike me as somewhat pornographic.

Placement-wise: if it was in your living room? Maybe a bit too much, depending on the content. In your bedroom? Too much pressure, I have enough esteem issues as it is. Bathroom: I agree with what someone said above about jacking off. Me? I'd keep it in the den or some other not-as-public place.

But it's your home and your walls and you are the best judge of what you believe to be acceptable or not, and I would assume, especially considering how creative you are, you would want the people you invite into your home to share your aesthetic mores.

Honestly, if I was dating you and went to your place for the first time and saw a bunch of nude chicks in the bathroom, I would wig out. Not because I'm offended by nudity, but because I'd immediately think "this guy is gonna be pawing me up ASAP whether I like it or not." Not a good sign, you know?

My husband and I have a black velvet nudie painting that hangs on our bedroom wall. His step-father bought it for him in Mexico. The woman's breast have been outlandishly exaggerated by the painter, but, that aside, it's a beautiful piece of art. How can one not love a BLACK VELVET nudie painting?

Also, I have a (male) friend who cut out pictures of women from Maxim magazines, arranged them behind matboard (with holes in it for the pictures), framed the whole thing and put it in his bathroom. The obvious effort he put into it makes it tasteful and enjoyable.

They're not nekkid (sorry) but I would recommend anything by photographer George Hurrell. He took beautiful black and whites of Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, and many others. He even made Bogart look handsome. He had an amazing mastery of lighting that few others can match. Check him out. His work is sexy and glamorous and evokes another era, when women were beautiful mysteries. (As opposed to, say, Britney Spears, who doesn't leave much to mystery.) Check him out.

Artistic depictions of naked women (and men, for that matter) are as valid, I think, as any other form of art. Would you rather have the painting of a mutilated body of a woman? When I grew up, we had a reproduction of one painting by Obregon, La violencia, which portrays this subject.
All art is subjective, and the appreciation of its abstraction and the intention of the author are to be taken into account. A pin-up poster is definitely too much – but then you are dealing with pop art, with all its camp quotient.
And certain Picasso nudes are certainly much more racier than any Modigliani.

Agreed about Picasso. A bit of Googling turns up an exhibition of Picasso's erotic works which took place in 2001. Daze Reader has a page of resources on erotic Picasso, most of them unfortunately no longer available, but for an NSFW taste (no pun intended) see here, here, and here. I love those drawings but I don't think I'll be putting any up soon. (Hey, daughters of mine, when you read this in the Internet Archive around 2016 or so, drop your old man a line to let him know you're no longer bothered by such subject matter, okay?)

By the way, I think it's interesting that the earlier respondents to this utterly unscientific poll provided mostly conservative votes, whereas more recent ones have shifted strongly into the "crank it up", "irony rulez OK" and "Mapplethorpe" camps. Probably much of the shift is due to a kindly link from Uffish Thoughts, not exactly a watering hole for shrinking violets...