Collecting erotic art

The BBC has an article by Lennox Morrison about erotic art and its collection:

Naomi Wilzig’s first brush with erotic art came about two decades ago when her son asked her to source risque conversation pieces for his new home, through her antique dealer contacts. “They wouldn’t show me anything at first, because I was nearly sixty and they didn’t expect a woman to be collecting this type of art,” said Wilzig, an avid antique collector. “But I kept coming back. I found pieces for my son and I also discovered this beautiful unknown world which shows the history of mankind.”
Now eighty, the banker’s widow, who lives near Miami Beach, Florida, has amassed more than four thousand sexually themed artifacts from 300 BC to the present day.
Her collection— including ancient African fertility statues, a four-poster hardwood bed carved with scenes from the Kama Sutra and etchings by Rembrandt— is on display in the World Erotic Art Museum she founded in 2005 in Miami Beach, Florida, near her home. Also on display are Chinese pillow books, beautifully illustrated sex manuals sometimes gifted to brides as guidance for their wedding night.
The marketplace has changed dramatically, she said. “When I started collecting you never saw a nude at an antiques fair. Now it’s more open than it used to be.” Declining to give specifics, Wilzig said her collection “is priceless. Most things are one of a kind and irreplaceable. The art is constantly appreciating in value.”
Increased openness in many countries towards sexual themes may be prompting interest in erotic art. The surprise success of the sensual Fifty Shades of Grey books comes at the same time auction houses are reporting competition for rare and one-of-a-kind items, which change hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are options for new collectors on smaller budgets, however. One example is the genre of Japanese shunga. These are erotic images, usually executed as wood block prints, which can be purchased for as little as five hundred dollars.
Older erotic literature is selling for high sums. One of the best-known works of the Marquis de Sade, the eighteenth century French libertine whose explicit writings about sexual practice often involved violence, sold in a 2014 Christie’s auction in London, England for over a hundred thousand dollars. The book, La Nouvelle Justine, was just one of the pieces offered at the auction, entitled Highlights from the Erotica Library of Tony Fekete. (It’s from the de Sade name that the term sadism is derived.)
“People who collect in this field are aware that these books are extremely rare. There were a small number of books in the Fekete sale which aren’t even in the British Library or the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, which are the usual repositories,” said Sven Becker, a specialist in books and manuscripts at Christie’s in London. Most interest was from Europe and America, he said.
Meanwhile, in Japan, reticence in this outwardly conservative society about shunga— literally “spring pictures”— is retreating. “Young women are very much interested in shunga. They like to look at them and are writing university theses on them. The girls are much more interested than male students," said Mitsuru Uragami, the owner of antique art dealer Uragami Sokyu-do in Tokyo, Japan and a renowned shunga collector. “In the Edo period, when shunga was made, people were thinking about sex in a more big-hearted way. Maybe later the Japanese became ashamed of art like that. But people’s thinking is changing now,” he said. Uragami said he has spent over a million dollars creating a personal collection of around a thousand shunga, many of which appeared in a Sotheby's exhibition in Hong Kong in 2013. For Uragami, who lent items to the British Museum for an exhibition in 2013 to 2014, sharing is key. “Pornography is something to see by yourself alone, but in the Edo period [1603 to 1868] people went to see shunga together, to discuss and debate and share the happiness of them,” said Uragami. “It’s my pleasure too, to see other people discovering and enjoying shunga.”
Ferry Bertholet, an artist, author and collector of Chinese erotic art, was first smitten about forty years ago, when he was studying art in Amsterdam, Holland and came across an illustration of a collection of late seventeenth century erotic paintings called The Gardens of Pleasure.   “It gave me inspiration for my own paintings; the very bright colors and work that was so decorative and so subtle in its composition,” he said. Now his collection contains albums, scroll paintings, ivories, porcelain, bronzes, and ceramics.
When not on loan to prestigious museums, his four to five hundred artifacts are kept in a CCTV-protected secure storage room near his home in the Netherlands.
Recognised names tend to command the highest prices, said Becker of Christie’s. Works by the Marquis de Sade or Hans Bellmer, a German artist known for his surrealist style, are much sought after, he said. “There’s also a focus on aspects of the unique,” he said. “For instance, there’s a real hunger for books where an artist has taken a standard copy and illuminated it. Books with original artwork in them can sometimes reach ten times their estimate at a sale.” Volumes inscribed by the author or artist, or from an important collection, also offer the singularity prized by buyers. “If a book has good provenance and interesting history, it’s not unusual to see value doubling every ten years,” said Becker. Uniqueness will continue to be important to collectors in the future, he said.
With Japanese shunga, the short list of masters includes Katsushika Hokusai, Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsukawa Shunsho, Suzuki Harunobu, and Keisai Eisen, said Uragami.
“People think of Hokusai as a landscape painter but he’s also very good at shunga. His shunga are very dynamic, nice compositions, fascinating,” he said. The best sources for Japanese shunga are dealers who specialise in ukiyo-e, said Uragami. “If you select genuine pieces in good condition, then profits will follow,” he said. “But it’s not only the artist’s name and the value which are important, it’s your feeling as well.”
When it comes to classic erotic books, some are so rare that even damaged volumes fetch high prices, said Becker. “In the field of erotica there are often only a handful of copies which have survived. In many cases authors and publishers were imprisoned or fined and the books destroyed.”
For instance, despite damage to a couple of pages, an illustrated nineteenth century edition of the best-known erotic novel in English, Fanny Hill by John Cleland, was sold for four thousand dollars by Christie’s in November of 2014, in London. It appears to be the only known copy of that edition, according to Christie’s.
It is important to be on guard for counterfeits. Erotica was often published surreptitiously and with false information. “A book purportedly published in Paris in 1875 might in fact have been published in Amsterdam in 1803,” Becker said. This led to a great deal of piracy, because it was known that the legitimate publishers and authors wouldn’t expose themselves to legal action, he said. “In this field it’s therefore very difficult sometimes to know what you’re looking at,” according to Becker. “If you’re uncertain then you should talk to a rare book dealer or auction specialist.”
In certain genres of erotic art, dedicated collectors are vying for the few exceptional artefacts to have survived destruction by officials or inheritors through the centuries.
So, if you have a hunch that the dusty tome from your great-uncle’s library might be a rarity, it’s crucial to seek expert advice. Thousands of dollars could be at stake.
For new collectors, however, the chance of finding a “sleeper”, or a rare item undervalued by its seller, is now highly unlikely, particularly in the world of Chinese erotic art. In the age of the internet, even dealers in remote regions can check the value of their stock, said Bertholet. “If it’s a good piece, you have to fight for it,” he said. “The romantic way of collecting I’ve known in the twentieth century is no longer possible.”
However, Uragami points to Japanese shunga as a potentially interesting avenue for new collectors. “Many people don’t touch shunga, so you can still find nice pieces quite cheaply.”

Rico says he's got a couple of shunga prints, and treasures them...