Serious collection of intimate art

By GRAHAM REID

There was no real excuse to be standing outside Barcelona's Museu de l'Erotica. It was a dreary mid-morning and the sky had a hangover. An unglamorous day to be outside a narrow door on the busy Las Rambla boulevard where a young man with a wooden hand would take my €7.50 and gesture me up the stairs to a palace of earthly delights.

I have never been to a gallery of erotic art. If there was an excuse for climbing the stairs in Barcelona we should blame great artists. After a couple of days poking around the nearby Museu Picasso and making the hike to the Fundacio Joan Miro to see elaborate squiggles with titles such as Naked Woman by a Window it was time to see real representational art where "naked" meant all kit off, real proper starkers.

Maybe it was also, to hell with culture, let's get down'n'dirty. Either way the Museu de l'Erotica offered a marathon of sexual voyeurism.

With new-age music and video surveillance cameras in the half-dozen rooms, the gallery of this most intimate of arts was in fact an equally intimate revelation of the erotic arts.

Sure there were pieces - mostly contemporary - where you might argue the line between the erotic and pornographic has been crossed, but otherwise the museum has a collection of lovely Japanese scrolls, delicate and interlocking Chinese porcelain figures, and deftly realised images from the Karma Sutra.

There was also a maharaja being royally serviced but still managing to keep a finger - and toes - in other pies. And The Pleasure Chair with manacles and a large wooden penis placed for maximum effect.

Some observations? Japanese artists have obviously seen too many men with genital-specific elephantitis, and Indian artists, in the course of rendering sexual gymnastics, didn't seem too fussed where they put certain things.

Of course anyone who takes their sex and eroticism seriously knows it is hilarious. The deliciously amusing works by the 19th-century Belgian satirist Martin van Maele captured some wonderful absurdities: a lover playing his erect penis like a lute while the object of his ardour hangs her buttocks out of the window above, and a courtier bows and removes his hat to reveal himself as literal dickhead.

A man commits suicide by hanging himself with his penis thrown across the roof beam and around his neck. An auto-erotic suicide Michael Hutchence would have admired.

There were delicate line drawings by the late-19th century artist Franz von Bayros, phallic objects as small as snails and as big as a body-builder's thigh, ferocious metal chastity belts for men and women, telephones which allowed you to hear erotic suggestions, cleverly evocative photomontages and fine 19th-century English watercolours. It was fascinating.

There were vagina monologues, dialogues and full-blown choral groups. There were erotic - actually just naughty - cigarette cards from the 20s, stills from silent films from the 30s, and a ride-on toy of the kind you see outside shops with a sign which says parents should supervise their children. It was a naked woman on her back with her legs apart.

Some art was for sale, but it was of the panel van variety. Unlike the Picasso and Miro museums, there were no postcards, shot glasses, tablecloths or writing pads for sale in the gallery shop. It was a shame. I kinda liked the idea of the busy maharajah on a tea towel.

The Museu de l'Erotica - founded in 1999 and in most major gallery listings of Barcelona - was alternately intriguing, edifying, compelling and repulsive. But never less than interesting, a word which suspends judgment.

When confronted with the universality of this collection it makes you wonder if this isn't the only universal art humankind has. From Melanesia to Madrid, the ancient Greeks to downtown New York City photographers, erotic art has been a constant.

Inevitably when we owe our existence to sex, we have portrayed it in its many manifestations, and with erotic intent.

So Barcelona's discreet and professionally curated Museu de l'Erotica is not to be sniffed at. The day I was there I was untroubled by porno-pilgrims until two swaggering English wideboys bellowed in - and were immediately reduced to silence by a piece of auto-erotic equipment designed to terrify as much as turn you on.

If you do add it on your gallery route in Barcelona it might be interesting to learn the Catalan for "Very interesting, I'm glad I came" to say when you leave.

And watch the one-hand man leap to his surveillance footage.