On November 6, 2016, the exhibits of the Erotic Museum will be sold at auction, bringing the story of the temple of love at 72 Boulevard Clichy in Pigalle, close to the Moulin Rouge. 650 items are on offer to the public, ranging from thirty to ten thousand euros each.
The Museum of Erotica in Paris: Dildos from East and West
The museum opened its doors in November 1997 by two passionate collectors, Joël Califa and Alain Plume, with the aim of glorifying erotic art. Joël was born in Morocco, participated in the events of May 68 and was a French teacher in Japan for five years in the early XNUMXs. Alain, the museum's curator, was born in Pigalle and embodies the spirit of the district. Both of them traveled around the world, brought fascinating exhibits from its four corners and decided to show them to the general public. Erotic art, religious and secular, in all its varieties was spread over seven floors. Paintings, engravings, prints, posters, cartoons, sculptures, masks, art objects, photographs, films, graphic art, newspaper clippings and more filled the spaces.
https://youtu.be/a3Jj56piUf0
The first two floors of the museum were dedicated to ritual erotic art. Among them were masks from Mexican festival processions, genital statues intended to ask the gods for fertility from Nepal and Tibet, illustrations of the Kama Sutra, or “pedagogical vases” from Peru: a woman accompanied by a skeleton is supposed to illustrate the danger of abuse. Healthy enjoyment of sexual pleasures is also the philosophy espoused by the museum’s founders. Asia, Latin America, and Africa were well represented, but Europe was also well represented, not just Greece and Rome, but also rare works from the Middle Ages that had been saved from destruction, popular art at its best: a monk dressed in sackcloth that could be revealed by operating a mechanism, a half-naked Saint Antoine, mobile installations that revealed hidden figurines.
Parisian brothels are also documented here.
The top five floors were dedicated to contemporary art and temporary exhibitions. It was impossible not to smile at Petra Vorla’s sculptures made of bread, rock and toothpicks. Petra Vorla, the bread sculpture, is the friend of bakers and lovers. The founders’ goal was more to please than to teach. And a piece of history known as the “Roman Collection,” named after the journalist who collected it, took up an entire floor and will be up for sale. It is a documentation of the large and small brothels, a world of splendor, splendor, entertainment and amusement but also of poverty, suffering, exploitation and disease, that arose in Pigalle, from the end of the 19th century until their closure in 1946. Several drawings by Edgar Degas, memories of his visits to the brothels in 1876, grace the collection. In the basement, the museum's "hell," were kept the more daring exhibits, such as posters in the spirit of Charlie and the Ink Machine, "widow chairs" equipped with dildos, or 19th-century chastity belts.
I would like to point out that many years ago I visited the museum and I don't remember being shocked. This is not a cheap and vulgar sex shop, but rather a museum that combines erotic art with history. The visit was an entertaining, enjoyable and educational experience for me. I was even struck by a Talmudic motto that appeared at the entrance, a kind of motto for the museum, but unfortunately I don't remember its content. Maybe it was the sentence describing the two cherubs connected in an erotic embrace above the Ark of the Covenant? (No vow):
“The cherubim that were skinned one over the other and said, ‘See your affection before the place as the affection of a male and a female’” (Tractate Yoma, page 54, a).
