What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [79]
After finding the shunga book, Naomi was hooked on erotic art. If she found something she thought was beautiful or interesting, she’d buy it and keep it for herself. In 1992, at fifty-eight, the floodgates opened after she moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a 3,500-square-foot condo. She began buying paintings, drawings, sculpture, ivory carvings, boxes, mechanical objects, and virtually anything that might be described as erotic. “There was no quality control going on at all,” said British novelist Geoff Nicholson, the author of Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of “Erotica.” “Anything that had a nude woman, she wanted. Anything that had a penis, she wanted. At the flea markets and antique shows, she became known as the old lady who collected erotic art.”
Despite her obsessive enterprise, Naomi did not notice that she was amassing a collection. “I never anticipated becoming a major collector of erotic art, certainly not an authority, and I surely never dreamed that I would write books or open a museum. It just snow-balled,” she said. She did not, she says, collect the art because she was a nudist. But living in a clothing optional community made it easier for her to display the art and it had a social advantage. If she had gone to an antiques show, her neighbors would come by at night to see what she found. Without the presence of her family she had limited social contacts. “Collecting the art became an integral part of my life. People would tell each other, you have to go see Miss Naomi’s collection. It became the center point of my existence and my community.”
Naomi remained concerned about how Siggi would react when he learned the extent of her collection. When she first told him what she was collecting, he recoiled. He didn’t think it was appropriate for her, Noami recalled with evident sadness. Once, bringing a portfolio of photographs from Florida, she broached the idea of publishing a book of her collection with Siggi. As they sat together in their three-story Georgian house in Clifton, he rifled through the pictures. When he was done, he ridiculed Naomi for her foolishness. A publisher would surely rip her off and Asian factories would make knockoffs of her prize possessions without paying her a dime, Siggi lectured.
On another occasion, Naomi brought an inoffensive piece of Deco sculpture to New Jersey. “It had three nude ballet dancers lined up symmetrically. But there was no sexual activity. I took down a flower vase from a pedestal in our dining room, put it there, and went out for the day. When I came home later that night, the piece was gone and the vase of flowers was back on the pedestal. He resented my even bringing a piece like that into the family house.”
Naomi retreated. From then on, she hid her activities from Siggi and his conservative, European sensibilities. “I decided not to inflict it on him anymore. Collecting erotic art became something I just did privately, on my own.”
She never had to worry about Siggi visiting her home. When he ventured to Florida, Siggi preferred to hobnob with powerful, wealthy cronies and schmooze poolside with the card players at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach. As genial as Siggi may have been with bank customers, he was dictatorial at home, where he monopolized the conversation and the limelight. “He knew better than everyone else. He was brilliant, but he never gave anyone else an opening,” Naomi said, as she struggled for words that would honor Siggi’s intelligence as well as the truth of what drove her to seek her own identity and authority in something as unconventional as erotic art.
To the end, Siggi failed to comprehend Naomi’s motivation, and he died, at seventy-six, in 2003, without ever seeing Naomi’s collection. He may have viewed it as indirect commentary on their sex