The CenterSEE Nude and Erotic Art Collections
Unacceptable Nudity
Passion: Artists and Their Nudes
Museum of Sexual History
Sex and Censorship
Magnus Hirshfeld Library
Visual Arts Department
The Sexual Heritage Preservation Project
Through this project, tens of thousands of books, cultural artifacts and works of art have been digitally preserved and enhanced. The results have been incorporated into a number of other Center for Sexual Expression and Education projects.
All of the art goes through an extensive process. The goal is to produce finished works in HD resolution that come as close to looking like new as possible. Chips, stains, blemishes and cracks are removed. The images are color corrected, sharpened, color balanced, brightness and contrast adjusted, and many other steps are taken to make the image look as good as possible. AI has been used on many of the images to accomplish what would have been very time consuming to do by hand.
Several of our projects are currently offline as they were originally created in Flash, which no longer functions. We are working to translate them to more current software, but that will take a while. Passion! and Sex Illustrated will be released in early 2023.
Sex and the Arts – The CenterSEE Nude and Erotic Art Collections
CenterSEE has archives of tens of thousands of images. We have been collecting, cleaning them up and cataloging them over the last 20 years. There will be five books that act as collection catalogs, providing background on the artists and other information. The series is titled Sex and The Arts, and covers five categories: Artists, Illustrators, Movies, Live Theater, and Photography. The five books together will cover 100,000 images from our archives, and the images will also be available for purchase at relatively low cost.
Passion: Artists and Their Nudes – Sex and the Arts Volume 1
This nearly 450,000 word (equivalent to around 1200 printed pages) companion eBook written by CenterSEE founder Jeff Booth is a supplement to the CenterSEE Nude and Erotic Art Collections. It features biographies of 850 artists, and catalogs works of art in two of the CenterSEE Art Collections: Western Masters of Nude and Erotic Art, and the World Nude and Erotic Art Sampler. It covers over 30,000 works of art from over 1500 known artists (the Asian section includes 400 anonymous works as so many Asian artists worked anonymously).
The Western Masters of Nude and Erotic Art collection focuses on 500 Western artists over a period of 500 years for whom nude and erotic works were a significant part of their output. There are over 24,000 works of art in this collection.
World Nude and Erotic Art Sampler includes over 6,000 works of art. This includes 1,000 works of art from artists in China, India, Mongolia, Persia, Japan and Turkey. There are 300 Western artists who generally did fewer nudes than those in our Western Masters collection, with over 2,000 works of art. There are also galleries of one and two images with 779 individual works of art from 693 different Western artists.
It includes biographies of 500 artists in Western Masters of Nude and Erotic Art, and biographies of 350 artists in World Nude and Erotic Art. It is a massive project many years in the making, encompassing over 30,000 works of art
The cover image is based on a painting titled Artist and Model by Victor Schivert (1863-1926). It is made up of 5,000 different tiled paintings, all from the Masters of Nude and Erotic Art collection. Click on the image to see it at full size.
It is now in production and it and the art work will be available in early 2023.
Sex Illustrated – Sex and the Arts Volume 2
This eBook has biographies of 500 illustrators. It also covers a number of different subjects relating to art and print. There are chapters covering several of our collections, including Metamorphic Art, Comics, Marginalia Erotica, Ex Libris, Erotic Calendars, Book Cover Art, Magazines, Figurative Alphabets, and Engraving.
The book covers 30,000 images from our collections. It is now in production and the images and the book will be available in early 2023.
Long Lingering Look: Sex and Photography – – Sex and the Arts Volume 3
The book takes you through our massive photographic collection and profiles the photographers who often risked arrest. It covers 20,000 images from our collections. The images and the book will be available Fall 2023.
Stages of Arousal: Sex in Live Theater – Sex and the Arts Volume 4
This book guides you through our large collection of production and performance related photographs and theatrical posters, including burlesque, vaudeville, tableau vivant, carnival strip shows, opera, ballet, and other live shows that incorporated sexuality and nudity. It shows how extensively sex and nudity have been a part of stage performances since the earliest days of live performance.
It covers 5,000 images from our collections. The images and the book will be available TBA.
Desire in the Dark: Movies and Sexuality – Sex and the Arts Volume 5
This volume chronicles the more than 15,000 images in our collection including publicity stills and posters, and covers the major milestones in movie-making and sexuality.
Click here for other upcoming books from CenterSEE Publishing.
The Unacceptable Nudity gallery is currently available for free on our Sex and Censorship site. Unacceptable Nudity includes over 5,000 works of art from several hundred artists. These are all images that did not meet our high standards of quality for our main galleries, but were acceptable at a lower resolution of 500 pixels.
The museum is currently offline as we are retooling it to upgrade the display technology.
This online virtual museum is part of the Erotic University History Department. It allows you to explore artifacts from our collections. This includes objects incorporating sex related design elements such as coins, stamps, canes, ephemera, and advertising.
We are currently working on adding 3D rotatable objects to the museum. Digitally representing three dimensional works of art is a much more complex undertaking. They need to be 3D scanned and cleaned up, a time consuming process that often requires visiting the collector or museum that holds the original. Once preserved, though, no matter what happens to the original, we’ll always have a digital version that can be viewed from all angles, offering a better viewing experience than even a real museum can provide.
This site promotes our five part series of classes on censorship in the arts currently under development. Each part makes extensive use of our art collections. This project is currently on hold while we redo our development tools
The Library is currently offline while we retool it.
The library is the repository of books in our Sexual Heritage Book Preservation project. Older and out of print books on sexuality are becoming increasingly difficult to find. They provide an important doorway into our past and our views on and expressions of sexuality. To preserve this sexual heritage, EU is working with collectors, publishers, authors, and volunteers to scan books that have fallen out of copyright or are donated to the public domain, and convert them into plain text and the EPub eBook format for free distribution.
We currently have hundreds of scanned books, but that is only part of the process. Scanning and text conversion is not a perfect process, and every scanned book needs to go through an editing process. Our Clean Up Dirty Books project needs volunteers to go through and edit our previously scanned books for scanning errors.
The library also includes exhibits incorporating art from the SHP Project. These exhibits change every month. They includes exhibits on paperback covers and the artists who created them, erotic marginalia, bookplates, illuminated manuscripts, extremely rare foredge erotica, and figurative alphabets.
The Visual Arts Department is offline while we redesign it.