BLURRED LINES VOLUME 2: Kink and Fetish, Sex and Secrets. Oil on Canvas - Naughty Paintbrushes of Famous Artists

18 juni 2025

Editor’s Note: Art history has always had a dirty little secret—it’s dripping with desire.

Strip away the dusty curatorial tone and you’ll find bodies in heat, canvases pulsing with lust, and a long lineage of artists who lived for pleasure as much as paint. Welcome to “BLURRED LINES”, a new chapter that slips between the sheets of the world’s most celebrated creatives—uncovering the obsessions, fetishes, and forbidden thrills that shaped their work, their lovers, and their legacies.

Here, genius is kinky, inspiration is erotic, and the line between the studio and the boudoir is always—deliciously—blurred. Because every brushstroke is a confession. Every masterpiece has a climax. And in the history of art, no one ever really keeps it in their pants. So let’s get scandalous.

Fig.1 Amanda Lear was first introduced to Salvador Dalí in 1965, while clubbing at Le Castel in Paris. Dalí, at the time some 40 years her senior, was struck by Lear’s looks

Fig.2 Amanda Lear was Dali’s muse, a disco queen in the 70’s, a model, and possibly, but never confirmed, transsexual

Fig.3 Artist and Sitter, manual foreplay, ca 1830-40 (colour litho) by Achille Devéria. Private Collection, photo credits Bridgeman Images

Fig.4 Amanda Lear on the cover of NOVA Magazine, 1971.

Behind the Canvas. The Cult of the Twisted Genius

In the velvet shadows of cultural legend, it’s almost inevitable that our most iconic artists come wrapped in myth—many of them as bizarre, baroque, and kink-soaked as their creations. Forget the trope of the celibate, tortured genius sipping red wine in solitude. Behind the masterpieces often lurk voyeuristic fetishes, secret obsessions, and transgressive pleasures that shaped the work just as much as the paintbrush or pen.

The line between genius and fetish is paper-thin. Visual artists didn’t just flirt with taboo—they built entire oeuvres from it. Whether driven by shame, desire, trauma, or radical curiosity, they found erotic power in breaking rules, distorting norms, and turning private kinks into public spectacles. Behind every masterpiece is a locked drawer, a voyeur’s sketch, or a very naughty doodle on the back of a grocery list.

When Art Gets Horny: Lilith, Nuns, And Incubus Nightmares

Erotic art has always known how to flirt with danger. Long before pop culture reclaimed the witchy woman as a feminist icon, artists were already painting trouble in Paradise: John Collier’s 1887 nude of Lilith is voluptuous, golden-haired, and lounging like she owned Eden. Inspired by Rossetti’s poem Lilith, or Body’s Beauty, she’s the original femme fatale and seductress: Adam’s first wife, according to Jewish mythology, made from the same clay as him—but exiled for refusing to submit and comply. Her cascading locks were said to have given the world “its first gold,” but her beauty, as Rossetti warned, was a deadly weapon. Scholar Dr. Holly Brown cuts to the chase: The demonization of Lilith was designed to keep women alienated from their own power and spiritual authority. Now that’s what we call girl power!

In art, Lilith appears with flowing hair, serpentine curves, and demonic allure—a femme fatale turned feminist icon. But nothing says taboo like nuns gone wild. In Thomas Rowlandson’s 18th-century satirical prints, the cloister becomes a cabaret of kink. One infamous image shows a nun pleasuring herself while reading a naughty book. In another, monks and sisters cavort in bacchanalian orgies. Was it satire? Blasphemy? Porn? Yes to all three.

Even Romantic art got a taste for the forbidden. Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) shows a sleeping woman in a sensual trance, draped in white, her body arched as a demonic incubus perches on her chest. It’s not just gothic fantasy—it’s a visualization of sleep paralysis, erotic terror, and Victorian fascination with female sexual hysteria. Dream or desire? Art doesn’t decide.

Fig.5 Amanda Lear was briefly engaged to party animal Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music in 1973 and posed on the cover of the band’s classic rock album For Your Pleasure

Fig.6 Betty Page, pin up fever

Fig.7 Cat Power by Ellen von Unwerth Models Masha Novoselova & Vika Kuropyatnikova for V Magazine #56, Fall 2008

Fig.8 Charlotte Gainsbourg, Nymphomaniac film still

Egon Schiele: The Masturbating Muse and the Erotics of Angst

Fast-forward to early 20th-century Vienna, and we find ourselves deep in the Freudian subconscious with Egon Schiele, the boy wonder of expressionist eroticism. His self-portraits twist with tension, his figures bend and spasm, and the line between pleasure and pain is never quite clear. Schiele didn’t paint women—he painted want. And guilt. And obsession. And himself, over and over, masturbating into the void.

At barely 20 years old, Schiele was sketching underage girls, contorting lovers in cramped rooms, and producing a stream of nude drawings so explicit that even his mentor Gustav Klimt raised an eyebrow. Schiele’s women stare back, legs splayed,

fingers dipped between their thighs. There’s no idealization, no seduction—just raw, animal honesty. The body is fragmented, bony, emaciated, beautiful, broken.

It’s the male gaze, yes—but it’s a narcissistic gaze. Schiele wasn’t just aroused; he was haunted. Sex wasn’t safe. Desire came with death. He was jailed for corrupting minors, and even his trial included the burning of some of his drawings in court—literal censorship by flame. Yet Schiele’s erotica isn’t pornographic in the usual sense. It’s confessional. You’re looking at his arousal, his shame, his loneliness. Masturbation isn’t a show—it’s a scream. And in that vulnerability, something taboo becomes transcendent.

Fig.9 Kneeling Girl, Resting on Both Elbows by Egon Schiele (1890-1918) - 1917 - Black chalk, Gouache on Pape, Leopold Museum, Vienna

Fig.10 COCO HAUS Montreal, Plus Size Boudoir Glamour Photoshoot

Fig.11 COCOHAUS Montreal, Boudoir Glamour Photoshoot for Secret Magazine 2024

Fig.12 Catherine Deneuve for Esquire, Paris 1976 (right). Photoshoot by Helmut Newton. (Copyright Helmut Newton Estate)

Become a Premium member now and check out the (VERY) extended version of the article including:

Gerda Wegener’s lush, rebellious nudes and her femme-fatale and lesbian fantasies in oil and ink
Picasso’s erotic fetishes revealed
Francis Bacon's bruised boys and violent ecstasies
Warhol's daily love letters to Truman Capote
from Buñuel to the dungeon: cinematic history and BDSM,
Buñuel's psychosexual violence and bourgeois shame
Catherine Deneuve’s Séverine in Belle de Jour (1967)
Buñuel's Catholic shame and surrealist kinks
masturbation, voyeurism, and candaulism in Dali's universe
erotic horror in high-definition by H.R. Giger
John Water's perversions
Pasolini's saints, sex and subversion
47 additional pics
and MUCH more...

Click HERE for a blog article about artists fascinated by a masturbating Adolf Hitler (Dali a.o.)

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