What happens when both the female and male image are removed from the associations society has created? The exhibit Protected Beauty that opened at Miami’s International Art Basel fair provides a controversial answer to the question nobody asked but fluttered around art history.
A collection of over half a century’s worth of American art, Protected Beauty has more than 40 paintings, photographs, prints, and illustrations from famous artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and George Platt Lynes, as well as from emerging figures like Paul Cadmus, Wilhelm von Gloeden, and Michael Miksche.
The exhibit is the result of a collaboration between the Kinsey Institute and the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami (WEAM). Famed sexologist Alfred Kinsey began collecting art in 1947 and was always interested in exploring the different faces of human sexuality.
Kinsey’s collection is important because, together with field studies and interviews, it serves as a basis for the focus and development of his research of human sexual behavior, which he published in 1948. These studies, as well as the subsequent ones on female behavior, provided the necessary tools to create the Kinsey scale of homosexuality and heterosexuality.
The paintings correspond to plural and diverse expressions of the human body. They capture the vulnerability contained in the assumed traits of strength of the male figure, as well as the composure and determination of female tenderness, that is, all the assigned characteristics to each gender, given by sociocultural factors such as religion, politics, and eventually media and marketing.
Alfred Kinsey started his collections during the first half on the twentieth century. At the time, political situations made the exhibition and commercialization of this kind of art difficult in countries like the United States and several European ones because their content was deemed as immoral and aggressive. Through the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and National Research Council, he was able to start the largest collection of erotic art in 1947.
The Kinsey Collections includes erotic art from Iran, Japan, nineteenth-century photography, explorations on the figure of the human body, as well as paintings from artists such as Marc Chagall, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Andrey Avinoff.
Most of the pieces shown in Protected Beauty were not allowed in other places due their representation of male beauty. The collection began in 2005 as a new way of exploring the ideas of pleasure and the pain of love, as well as to become a message of tolerance and understanding of human diversity. The collection is considered to be the greatest group of erotic pieces which includes paintings, drawings, photographs, street art, among others.
Translated by María Suárez
