Museums: Eros in Sweden

For weeks, a Japanese poster drawing of a couple frolicking in sexual intercourse had been visible over much of southern Sweden, including the town of Lund. It heralded an 800-work display in Lund's museum entitled "First International Exhibition of Erotic Art." The nucleus of the show was drawn from the collection of Paris-based U.S. Sexologists Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, who maintain that their interest in erotica is "part of our concern with mental health. We feel very strongly that sexuality is the great remaining pocket of cultural insanity."

Insane or not, it was certainly explicit. At the preview, a large, coffinlike object, covered with black fur and with a slit across the lid, was rolled onto the museum floor. Out from its pink, uterine interior stepped Phyllis Kronhausen, 39, dressed in a see-through minidress and nothing else. Neither she nor a stark-naked violinist offered much competition to the art, which included erotic Indian sculpture, a Guinea fertility goddess, a Rembrandt etching of the artist and his wife disporting in a four-poster bed, a Picasso engraving of a couple copulating, and a vast variety of dildos and phalli.

Within two days museumgoers, including elderly couples, beatniks and housewives with children, had broken all attendance records. Sweden being Sweden, there was no public outcry. Indeed, the show drew favorable reviews. Even the conservative Sydsvenska Dag-bladet ran eleven detailed pictures. Its conclusion: "On the whole, far more harmless than any one of our ordinary men's magazines."