Otto Rudolf Schatz’s erotic art occupies a fascinating and often overlooked corner of early 20th-century European visual culture. While best known in his lifetime for tavern scenes, landscapes, and commissions designed to keep him afloat financially, Schatz’s deeper artistic investigations centered around the erotic, where he experimented boldly with style, form, and subject matter. A self-proclaimed perfectionist, he maintained a sharp distinction between commercial output and work created “for art’s sake”—a category in which his erotic oeuvre often resided, even if originally produced to relieve financial pressure.
Thousand Erotic-Themed Works
Though well aware of modernist developments, Schatz was not bound to any particular movement or school. Influenced early on by Egon Schiele, he chose instead to follow his own intuition, adopting styles and techniques that best conveyed his ideas. His erotic works, created largely in Vienna between the mid-1920s and his arrest in 1944, reflect a sustained interest in sexuality, power, intimacy, and transgression. Over the years, he is thought to have produced more than a thousand erotic-themed works—drawings, etchings, woodcuts, watercolors, and oils—many for private clients, others purely as artistic exploration.
Fig.1 "Mondfrauen" (Moon Women), 1929
Near-Pornographic
Compared to the often clichéd erotic art produced elsewhere in Europe, Schatz’s work stands out for its technical skill and psychological nuance. He was a master of mixed media, combining stark ink lines with subtle watercolor washes, creating tension between suggestion and explicitness. His compositions range from near-pornographic to lyrical, with subjects including bondage, flagellation, cross-generational encounters, and scenes with ambiguous consent. These images not only explore desire but reflect deeper anxieties—particularly evident in 1930s pieces where erotic punishment becomes a metaphor for societal repression.
Fig.2 Watercolor "Nude", 1941
Fig.3 Watercolor, 1941
Strap-On Dildo
Among his notable series is Zeugnis (loosely transl. School Report), a narrative portfolio from 1954 featuring a depraved "Whip" story involving a schoolgirl who gets spanked by her parents for her disappointing grades, is composed with minimalism and elegance (figure 9 to 11). Equally significant is Extremes Vergnügen (Extreme Pleasures), a series produced in the same year delving into sadomasochism with visual clarity and unsettling candor. The untitled series of drawings made a year later (1955), starts off with a illustration of a strap-on dildo, which is the sex toy alternately used by a young girl and mature woman in their intimate exchanges (figure 12 to 14). Although created in the 1950s, its themes and style feel startlingly contemporary.
Deeply Personal Vision
Long hidden in private collections, Schatz’s erotic works are only now being reconsidered as central to his artistic identity. They reveal a deeply personal vision—one attuned to the complexity of human sexuality, and rendered with uncommon intelligence and craft.
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Fig.9 "Zeugnis (Transcript)" series, 1954
Fig.10 "Zeugnis (Transcript)" series, 1954
Fig.11 "Zeugnis (Transcript)" series, 1954
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Sources: vintage-erotica-forum.com, shapiroauctions.com, otto-rudolf-schatz.info
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