Description: Explores the long history of erotic visual art in German culture, connecting it to wider political and economic shifts and modern sexual liberalization
Brief description: Camilla Smith is Associate Professor in Art History in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, where she specialises in modern art, architecture and design in Germany and Austria. Her research into aspects of German modernism is published in leading journals such as New German Critique, Oxford Art Journal and Art History, and she has contributed to international exhibitions held in London, Berlin and Vienna. In 2019, to celebrate the centenary of the Weimar Republic, she co-edited a special issue of Art History with Dorothy Price, and explored Jeanne Mammen's watercolours for BBC Radio 3's 'The Essay'. She is currently working on a book-length project on German erotica in the early twentieth century.
Review Quotes:
"An exciting, wide-ranging collection that guides the reader into new ways of seeing erotic art, and the erotic past. It reveals an underappreciated breath of sexual desires, bodies, genders, and sexual practices, in a tour de force of empirical richness and cross-disciplinary conceptual sophistication. A serious contribution to the field!" --Jennifer V. Evans, Professor of History, Carleton University, Canada
"The history of the erotic far too often goes unexamined. This highly-readable collection changes this, with a bold, multifaceted look at German erotic art from monarchy to fascism, highlighting marginalized and queer perspectives and confronting difficult questions and histories." --Katie Sutton, Associate Professor of German and Gender Studies, Australian National University "This valuable collection of essays, by many of the leading scholars of this period and place, approaches the visual culture of Germany for what it is; namely, the largely untapped, but arguably largest archive concerning the birth and promulgation of our modern ideas about sexuality." --Jonathan D. Katz, Associate Professor of Practice, History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA