by Roy Stevenson
(06/25/08)
It can take you an hour or two to walk down the busy, crowded tourist promenade Las Ramblas in Barcelona. It's lined with distracting street performers in a bizarre array of creative garb and body paint. Watching the short acts by these street actors or having your photo taken alongside them (for a euro, of course) is irresistible to the first time tourist to Barcelona. Where else will you see a Satan juxtaposed next to a Jesus, elves, a vine covered human fruit bowl, flower people, ogres, and Cleopatra dressed in a gold ball gown than Las Ramblas?
The Barcelona Museum of Erotica is about half way down this wide avenue-- you'll walk past it a few times each day as Las Ramblas is your main route to many tourist sights. Young Spanish hotties in red bikinis, brochures in hand, hang out on Las Ramblas trying to recruit you to visit the museum. I finally succumbed to their wiles and popped in for a look.
The museum is housed in a nondescript building with covered windows. Photos depicting erotic carvings and artwork are depicted on the attention-grabbing museum sign standing by the entrance. And a much-photographed seven-foot-tall wooden penis stands erect, achieving its shock value goal to the visitor.
The museum's introductory sign proclaims it as "the first museum of erotic art and culture where the visitor can contemplate the development of eroticism through the various artistic and cultural facets of the human being through anthropology, archeology, literature, antiques..."
Over 800 historical, ethnic and anthropological artifacts and religious and recreational objects gathered from countries around the world (including America, India, Africa, Greece, and Rome) showcase the development and history of sex and eroticism in culture. This museum is even endorsed and promoted by Tourism Barcelona, and the "Barcelona Institute of Culture."
The first gallery you come to is a small dark screening room with an overhead projector. It shows short, silent, archaic black and white pornography films, apparently made by assignment from a member of the European royalty. The corpulent characters in these films look suspiciously like the ones in the Paris Museum of Erotic Art.
A series of rooms with paintings, pastels and sketches of erotica follows -- not bad so far, but the crowd is different from the one in the Paris Museum of Erotic Art, and so is the ambience. Mainly giggling college co-eds here, not art aficionados.
Next on the walk through is a room featuring erotic fetish photographs by an artist named Hammar. His portraits are of skimpily clad girls wearing black leather/rubber/latex in provocative sexual positions, some with gas masks on their faces (?) They're a little hard for me to fathom after spending the previous two years appreciating the Renaissance masters in art museums in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Oh well, I think...that's art.
However, the next room, "The Dungeon," attempts to highlight SM, and is an eye opener. A white-linen-clad wax female model lies face down on a horizontal wooden bench, strapped to it by a wide leather harness around her waist. The dungeon master wears 18th century dungeon fetish garb: white shirt, pants, long flowing cape, and pointed black hat. He holds aloft a cat-o-nine-tails lash, with metal studs glittering in the strobe lights. In his other hand he holds torture instruments: needles of fire, heretic's forks. Nearby the Marquis de Sade's "Misfortunes of Virtue" engraving is appropriately mounted on the wall.
Erotic Telephones theme the next gallery. Picking up the phones you'll hear a female voice whisper erotic conversations in your choice of French, English, Spanish or Italian. I listened to the French ones -- they sound so much more romantic.
In the next room I hear one young guy yell, "dude, come and check this out" to his buddy, so discreetly follow at a distance to see what's got him so excited. It's the pleasure chair, an artistic weird science contraption described as the world's most unusual chair. A sort of mechanical SM device for female stimulation, if you will.
It's a metal chair sculpture with a sheet of iron for a seatback, with a metal seat. Aligned right at (female) crotch height on this seat is an oval shaped hole cut into it, with a metal penis protruding through. Said penis is attached to an ingeniously designed series of pulleys, wheels, cranks, and other moving parts. It looks like it could actually be a working machine, with a motor and thrusting penis attachment. My mind boggles.
By now I'm ready for a break to recover from this ineffable object I've just seen. Fortunately, an open-air garden with patio and chairs right in the center of the museum provides a nice resting area.
Girding my loins I move on, arriving at a series of rooms with a sizeable number of exhibits that all blur into one; a scene with a model of a woman in bondage, erotic dolls, male and female chastity belts from Victorian times, Japanese drawings. Erotic wooden painted carvings from Northwest India's Naga tribe hang on the wall -- they depict gold painted Indian Rajahs with their red painted concubines in various sexual poses.
Several explicit 18th century Indian Kama Sutra paintings showing an Indian Raja in an orgy surrounded by five busty concubines are quite beautiful. Another painting in this series depicts a palace-wide orgy. Eighteenth century Rajasthan woodcarvings portray different positions of the ancient Kama Sutra treatise. Bas Reliefs from the Kajurahoo Temples in India depict India's tantric sculptural art. Now I realize why India's population is rapidly approaching that of China.
A life sized metal statue of a Greek athlete proudly poses, with ancient Greek erotic ceramics hanging from the wall behind him. Ancient clay figurines of copulating couples stand in glass showcases. Africa, too, is well represented with erotic ivory sculptures from the Ivory Coast and Guinea. These tall wooden painted carvings of males with hands around openings on their crotches from which large phalluses are inserted, hang from the walls.
Small Chinese resin figurines of Qing Dynasty Emperors engaged in sex with concubines, a small blue pond in the background. Chinese rice paper drawings, circa 1900, show erotic acts. The strong sexual aspects of Shinto and Taoism are reflected in the wooden, bronze and buffalo horn phallic carvings, and the 19th century amulets and talismans that were used in rites of fecundity and sexuality.
This Taoist erotic collection highlights the sexual customs of ancient China, showing that its philosophy was as deep-rooted in China's cultural and artistic life as in its everyday life-style and philosophy. Rounding out the displays on Asian erotica is a collection of erotica from Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia. Apparently even today there are vestiges of early erotica and phallus worship in Japanese Shintoism -- some temples still display carvings of sexual acts. There's even an exhibition about how Korean Ginseng is used to enhance sexual performance.
Returning to Europe I come across a superb set of European erotic illustrations dating from around 1900. The set of 1930s era Barcelona brothel photos captures my attention. They're like early erotic comic strips. One of these black and white lithographs shows a naked woman standing on the bed upon which her exhausted lover is sleeping soundly; she's pumping up his penis with an old-fashioned bicycle pump to be able to enjoy him once more. Another amusing lithograph shows a rural scene with a heavily dressed farm girl holding her dress down in front of her against a marauding herd of geese with phallus shaped heads.
Another series of color engravings shows scenes of copulating dancing couples. A chambermaid stands over her master, about to engage in sex with him. Yet another shows a man with two rather plump scantily clad women sitting on his lap, who hold his penis between them. In another, a man bends over backwards, demonstrating a rather astonishing level of flexibility, while a woman mounts him from above, seemingly defying gravity.
Somewhere around here I see a fine ebony and silver walking stick from Victorian times with an ivory vagina carved into it. There's a collection of Prussian, French and German erotic postcards that were distributed to soldiers in the trenches in World War One. Displays on Spanish erotic cinema, Erotic comics, and Erotic tattoos pass by me in a kaleidoscope of sexual images.
There's an amazing array of erotic literature, plastic arts, antiques, paintings, carvings, photographs and SM equipment. The gallery of calendars and erotic magazines that were banned in Europe from 1900-1970 traces the evolution of erotica in modern Europe. Another section shows erotic fantasy photographs, posters and billboards.
Eventually I come to the modern erotic art gallery. Here a series of smallish rooms have dozens of erotic photographs, posters, and prints of all sizes hanging on their walls. As with all contemporary art it's a hit or miss affair -- you either like it or you don't. Some are quite titillating, others boring. A small diorama of Barbie doll like figures dressed in fetish clothes -- leather, plastic, isn't too interesting. Paintings with fetish clad women in various poses. The most memorable painting is of several naked women standing or sitting, with a male lover hovering over one of them.
As I emerge onto the bustling Las Ramblas, blinking in the bright Spanish sunlight, I realize that that this is indeed an impressive collection of erotica. It's worth visiting if you can take the time out from seeing Barcelona's fantastic tourist sights.
Barcelona Museum of Erotica
Rambla 96
Open 11a.m.-9p.m. October to May
10a.m.-12p.m. June-September.
7.50 euros.
