Porn In Watercolors
Porn is timeless. New technologies make it easier to make, easier to distribute, and more immersive. But there is nothing new about porn itself. A hundred years ago, people were making porn with brushes and watercolor paints — and that porn wasn’t remotely tame. The 21st century, or the 20th century for that matter, did not invent raunch — not one bit of it!
Today’s post features the art of George Grosz, a watercolorist who got crosswise with the censorious authoritarians and warmongers in his native Germany. He wound up emigrating to the USA in 1933. A prolific painter who is perhaps best known for his anti-war work, his painted porn phase seems to have been in the decade or two after about 1915. (As is typical with fine artists, the usual art histories don’t concern themselves with the details of an artist’s erotic output. Thus, it’s hard to be specific.)
From a porn perspective, there’s nothing revolutionary in these initial images of voyeuristic group sex, doggystyle boning, or good old fashioned missionary-position sex. Perhaps the bodies have more hair and heft than is popular in 21st-century porn, and certainly the artist has lingered to an excessive (obsessive?) degree on the vein patterns visible on those ejaculating cocks. But that’s no more quirky than some current directors who can’t shoot a porno that doesn’t have spitting in it.
What I find entertaining is how thoroughly modern so many of Grosz’s sex scenes seem. The most exciting porn, I believe, shows the viewer a sexual scene they find arousing but which they have little prospect of recreating. The double blowjob scene above is a perfect example. Very few men have the seductive chops, money, or sheer good luck needed to get two beauties sucking their dick at the same time. I mean, it happens… but so do lightning strikes.
Another thing that makes for good porn is a scene that reveals something quirky about its creator. These are scenes that make you go “Uh… that’s hot, sure, but I never would have thought of it. That photographer (or artist, or director) is kinda freaky!” Obviously this is a highly individualistic reaction. Many people are voyeur enough to enjoy watching a pretty girl do obscene things with vegetables; not everybody finds the idea of getting naked to watch her do them, and then wanking furiously, interesting enough to painstakingly commit to watercolors. But that’s good porn for you — if that’s your fantasy, you’ll love to see it!
This last image in our little George Grosz retrospective is modern in another way. It grapples with complicated notions of sex and gender. Porn often does that in 2019, too! Watercolors on paper don’t have gender or sexual identity, of course. But in 2019, if we met this person, we’d probably consider them trans, at least until they said different:
At first I thought that they were masturbating by sounding the urethra in that overwrought cock. (Sounding, if you don’t know, is the term for carefully jamming things into dicks.) Zooming in on the action makes it clear they are “just” masturbating with a nice stiff feather:
Don’t let anybody ever tell you that porn from a century ago was lame, tame, or boring!
