Sex

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Sexual imagery is ancient and appears across cultures, sometimes sacred, sometimes playful, often policed. The sandstone temples of Khajuraho in central India, built around 950–1050, carry embracing couples among gods and dancers on their outer walls. In Renaissance Italy, Marcantonio Raimondi's engravings after Giulio Romano's designs of lovers, known as I Modi (1524), were suppressed by the papacy, and Correggio's Jupiter and Io (c. 1532) wraps a swooning nymph in the god's embrace of cloud.

Modern art made the subject more direct and more personal. Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World (1866) was painted for a private patron and kept out of public view for most of its history. Louise Bourgeois gave sexual forms a wry, disquieting presence in latex and plaster sculptures such as Fillette (1968). Betty Tompkins began painting close-up, photorealist scenes of intercourse from pornographic photographs in 1969.