Here is the definition of erotic, according to 93-year-old artist Martha Edelheit.
Its sensual, nonviolent, consensual, warm, inviting, sometimes funny, witty, amusing.
Erotica assumes shared association, touching, stroking, licking, looking, playing, exposing.
Rose Nestler,Ballet Bag, 2021
It digresses, teases, laughs, arouses, without harming.
(A handful are on view in the show.)
Until lately, shed received little market recognition.
Martha Edelheit,The Dinner Table is Set for Dessert, 2015
Our art history textbooks might have ended up looking a whole lot more colorful and livelyand strangethan they do.
Not to mention erotic, although Edelheit shies from applying the term to her own work.
I didnt consider them erotic in 1960, she tellsVogue.
Martha Edelheit in her studio
They were sort of dream stories.
Id start to draw, and these things just came out.
I was stunned by them.
GaHee Park,Little Pietà, 2023
Around that time she had what she calls a revelatory encounter with the Edo-era seriesPoem of the Pillow.
It was the first erotic art Id ever seen, she says.
I mean, I knew pornography, but I had never really seen anything like this.
Rosalyn Drexler,Hooker, 1963
It certainly didnt exist, as far as I knew, in American culture.
She was impressed by the exquisiteness and fantasy of the woodblock prints.
They were beautifully made works of art, not just something pushed out to stimulate an audience.
Lauren dela Roche,Raw Milk, 2025
It also had a lot of humor, and humor doesnt exist in pornography.
Instead, she sought out sensuous work that had a high aesthetic quality.
I wanted it to be beautiful and to have power, she says.
Christabel MacGreevy,Good Omens, 2025
Eroticism is not something that any two people see quite the same way, she notes.
And she doesnt consider images with breasts or genitals as erotic per se.
One very important part of my work has been that bodies are what they are.
Its made a profound difference in whats available, she concedes.
That, to me, is a real tragedyto go shaming people is just a horror.
Thats why now is the right time for this show, Edelheit says, given our dire political context.
So its very timely in that sense.
Were living in a very fragile and scary time.
The show also contests the idea sexuality is solely the domain of the young.
It never entered my head that my grandmother might have some kind of sexual fantasy life, for instance.
But as I have aged, I have discovered that all my friends do.
Theyre sort of delighted, she smiles.
I think they think Im a very funky old lady.
Christabel MacGreevy,Good Omens, 2025
