World Erotic Art Museum looks at human sexuality in all its forms

A wooden wedding bed carved with 138 figures from the Kama Sutra and a murder weapon shaped like a penis from the Stanley Kubrik film "A Clockwork Orange" are some of the pieces on show at the World Erotic Art Museum, or WEAM, the second-largest of its kind in the world, in Miami Beach.

The museum has more than 4,000 erotic objects and artworks by such iconic artists as Rembrandt, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Fernando Botero, along with ethnic objects and historical documents devoted to something "inherent in human nature": sexuality.

The vast private collection was born of the "uninhibited curiosity" of Naomi Wilzig, an art lover remembered as a "family woman and devout Jew," who for almost 20 years acquired erotic works of art from around the world.

Though the wealthy collector "had a conservative mentality...she felt called to rescue from extinction" thousands of works that for many cultures "are subject to the taboo surrounding the human body and sexual practices."

"This is a collection without precedent because of its origin, its significance and its impact on the art scene in the Art Deco District of Miami Beach," WEAM spokesman Robert Harbour told EFE.

Wilzig, who died in April at the age of 80, left the museum a legacy of statues, paintings and photographs that cover eroticism in Greek mythology, Bible stories, Oriental and South American cultures, and even such fetishes as bestiality and sadomasochism.

Thousands of visitors have passed through the museum since its inauguration in 2005, attracted by the diversity of its exhibits of subjects unique to modern artists like Paul Kagan, or by complete volumes of the legendary Japanese erotic art called "shunga."

The exhibition is divided into 20 sections that reflect the multiplicity of mankind's expressions of eroticism in different cultures down through the ages, divided by themes and noteworthy among which is a giant golden sculpture of an erect penis.

Source: EFE