What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [84]
“We start with Adam and Eve and a little Garden of Eden art—the original erotic art,” Naomi explained, in a flat, I-have-seen-it-all intonation. We moved swiftly from a glazed clay sculpture of God admiring the resting figures of Adam and Eve, to a Spanish colonial altarpiece, circa 1850, to Naomi’s favorite Adam and Eve piece, perhaps her favorite piece in the entire collection, a one-of-a-kind white plaster statue of Adam being created out of the dust of the earth. The young Cuban artist who made it had intended to cast it in bronze but ran out of money. “I love the simplicity of it, the way the arm is coming out of the swirl of dust and the hands are resting on the space of eternity and the perfection of the man’s body, as if God got it right the first time,” Naomi said.
But Naomi does not dwell. She practically race-walked—despite her bad tennis knees—into a large room grouping about one hundred paintings and sculptures based on the myth of Leda and the swan. In the ancient tale, the Greek god Zeus took the form of a swan and seduced the beautiful, mortal daughter of the Aetolian king Thestius after she resisted his advances. Naomi believes her collection of Leda art is the world’s most extensive on the theme that has fascinated artists for centuries. From there, we moved through the centaur and satyr art, stopping momentarily in a narrow gallery to consider an oil painting, by contemporary American satirist Charles Bragg, of an obese satyr embracing an overweight woman. “There are no Twiggies in erotic art; the women tend to be Rubenesque. It’s the voluptuousness of the female body that captures our attention,” Naomi said. We pass a painting of an elderly religious Jew who can’t seem to get a close enough eyeful of a naked woman and an Inuit soapstone carving from Alaska of a tumescent native hunter. “The spark of eroticism is within us all, regardless of age or background,” she notes.
Erotic art often has a hidden aspect. And it was that element of surprise and subterfuge that came to most fascinate Naomi. And so we made a quick stop in a room filled with erotic music boxes, double-lidded boxes, boxes that unscrew or have a painted erotic lid hidden beneath a false lid, painted with a commonplace subject. “A lot of it is meant to show a sense of humor,” she said. “See this one. You wind it, the curtain opens, and you see a couple going at it. Other things were erotic for their time, even though there’s no sex act going on, like the paintings in which women lift their skirts and show their undies and garters and belts.” We practically careen from Art Nouveau and saloon pinups (“Their purpose was to entice men and keep them in the saloon, drooling and drinking”) to one of the museum’s showstoppers: a hand-carved, gilded replica of the throne of Catherine the Great, the supremely powerful nineteenth-century empress of Russia, whose legendary sexual appetite is hinted at in the carvings (though, truth be known, she died of natural causes, not in nexus with a horse). We stop, too, at a room-filling, eight-piece bed, with all 138 sex positions described in the Kama Sutra, carved by German carpenter Dieter Sporleder, on its giant phallus-shaped bedposts, foot rails, and headboard. Naomi bought the bed set from Sporleder off eBay for an undisclosed price.
My head was spinning by the time we passed one of WEAM’s most noticed works, a polished white fiberglass dildo-sculpture prominent in Stanley Kubrick’s film classic A Clockwork Orange. Slapping it lightly, as did the movie’s protagonist, played by Malcolm McDowell, Naomi laughed. She swore her glee was unrelated to the object’s fivefold increase in value from the $3,000 she paid at auction for it.
Lori Mitchell, a professor of human sexuality and a certified sex surrogate, is among Naomi’s biggest fans. She requires students who take her course at Barry University in Miami to visit the museum. Mitchell’s goal is to help students step outside the narrow views of sexuality inherited from their parents and community. The museum helps to teach her students the