Betty Dodson's Art

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The Betty Dodson Scholarship in Sex Art

Betty Dodson both illustrated and altered the realm of sexuality in the last half of the 20th century. Her work as a sex educator has been one of the most potent forces in clarifying and changing cultural values, not only in the U.S. but also internationally. Through her books, illustrations and videos, she has given vision and permission to other sex artists and birthed more than one generation of imitators, commentators, fans and critics. And in the field of sexology, she has educated the educators and the therapists and many of the researchers as well.

In 2000, Seattle Institute celebrated its Silver Anniversary. To honor that occasion, a group composed of current and former staff, current and former board members, and long-time supporters gathered to discuss the contribution we could make to the future of sexology. At that event we decided to endow a graduate scholarship in sex art. Scholarship in sexuality has always been under-funded. Funding for scholarship in sex art has been non-existent. We unanimously selected Betty Dodson as the artist/educator we wanted to honor.

This scholarship acknowledges the valuable contribution that art makes to better understanding human sexuality and culture. We hope with this support to help preserve cultural artifacts invaluable to understanding the important role sexuality plays in creating human happiness. This scholarship will be awarded to dissertation- or thesis-level students whose work archives, i.e. collects, catalogs and analyzes, art dealing with sexual content. Such archives will serve future students and scholars of sex and/or art.

Funding the Endowment for the Scholarship

We are soliciting donations to fund the endowment. We began this endowment with $10,000 in donations which came from the contributions of the many therapists, educators and other supporters of the Institute's programs over the years. We are very excited about our initial endowment and greatly appreciate your contribution to help it grow. To support this scholarship, Dodson herself has contributed money and time and given us permission to assemble a slide archive of her work.

To date, 500 works of Betty Dodson's art have been photographed and catalogued by Seattle artist and art photographer Jeff Hengst. (See Hengst's article on Dodson's art.) The Institute's copy of the archive is available for viewing at scheduled showings and by arrangement for students or scholars interested in sex art. Funds raised at these showings will contribute to the scholarship endowment.

All donations are tax deductible. Seattle Institute for Sex Therapy, Education and Research is a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization. To contribute to the scholarship endowment, make your check out to Seattle Institute, SISTER, or use our entire name. Specify that you wish your contribution to go to the Dodson Scholarship.

Showings of the Dodson Archive

To attend a showing, contact the Institute by e-mail at education@sextx.com or telephone at 206-522-8588. At your request we will send you an e-mail notification of upcoming public showings. These showings will also be listed under Events on the website. If you wish to receive notification by mail, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope to 100 NE 56th St., Seattle, WA 98105.

To schedule a showing, please send a letter or e-mail outlining the particulars of your request. We will contact you to make arrangements.

Persons seeking purchase or replication permission, should contact the artist directly, bad@bettydodson.com

Betty Dodson's Art

By Jeff Hengst

There are several aspects of Betty Dodson's art that make it worthy of preservation, exhibition, cataloging and collecting. Perhaps most importantly Dodson has made a consistent exploration of sex in visual terms that are easily approachable and comprehensible for the non-art initiated while at the same time complex enough to be satisfying for the more experienced art observer. This exploration includes a deep and enduring commitment to depicting masturbation for men and women as a joyful and natural act. She has also explored partner sex in a loving and straightforward manner. In this, and throughout her work, Dodson has carved out an entirely new terrain for sex as a subject for art that is neither pornographic nor sentimental. Her works in this area are uniquely straightforward and potent. Some convey tenderness while others depict the awkward struggles of couples exploring and finding themselves in sometimes cumbersome or even humorous entanglements. While these works do not appear to be aids to masturbation, there is no doubt that Dodson unabashedly celebrates and honors it through creating a vast corpus of very high quality drawings and paintings.

In addition to Dodson's resounding theme of the positive, joyful nature of masturbation, she has devoted large chunks of her art career to many other aspects of sex. For example, there are entire periods devoted to a kind of artful and exaggerated eroticism similar to Japanese erotica yet informed by obvious exposure to and careful scrutiny of the open line work of Matisse and Picasso. Also, there are large suites of drawings devoted to loving "portraits" of individuals' genitals, both of men and women. There are also folios of drawings and paintings that explore her psyche as she comes to terms with her expanding sexuality and some of the consequences of sex such as abortion, "dick addiction" and sexually transmitted disease.

Dodson also has very large and thoroughly developed works on paper and canvas devoted to depictions of Greek myths which deal with sex using her friends and lovers as models. There are also anatomical drawings meant to convey something of her own psyche or even to serve as tools of divination to gain insight about her future. Additionally, she has done several large oils on canvas depicting orgies including at least one over seven feet tall. These oils on canvas alone would constitute the respectable career of many other artists.

In addition to the corpus itself, there are aspects of her work that make it worthy of all the fuss. For example, throughout there are a remarkable number of black models both male and female. Dodson's attitude about race, and more specifically her near obliviousness to race, is refreshing. There are countless drawings of mixed race couples, which are all the more remarkable considering many of them were done in the late 60's and early 70's. Also, the power of Dodson's work, its voluptuousness along with its superior quality of line and form force us to look again at the work of earlier artists such as Peter Paul Rubens. What would he have drawn had he lived in a freer society such as the one Betty Dodson laid hold of? Or what is he hiding in some of those drawings and oils? What secret messages are there to be read in Rubens' work now that we have Dodson to suggest that sexual robustness and linear robustness may be related. It isn't that these inferences haven't been pondered before. What is compelling is that, because of its depth, quality and quantity, Dodson's work comes as close to proving the relationship as proof can be on such matters. And what's more is that she is still around to talk about all this. Because of the very high quality and quantity of Dodson's art and because she is still living, there are valuable insights to be gained about the working methods and creative processes of artists from even earlier periods. For example, what about Michelangelo's mannerist period, or all the mannerist artists for that matter? What can be learned about the creative process in drawing and painting from a living artist who, despite great pressure from the art world, devoted her life to drawing the figure in full volume in a volumetric space? Did she work from life? From photos? From memory? Why do her figures crowd the picture plane like 16th century mannerist works? Did they, too, work from memory? Or perhaps they composed from memory but painted from life? Dodson's answers to these questions might yield some valuable insight about these earlier artists and how they made their art.

And then there is her "free form" work, more rare but especially interesting to me. These are the strange progeny of Klimpt's swarming figural works and Beardsley's flowing, sexy line drawings. Because of a lone drawing done in 1990, roughly 15 years after she stopped making art, which looks very much of this type, it is my guess that if she were to begin making art again it would be of this nature. And what a great thing that would be. What would Dodson have to say with her brush and pencil about sex and aging, about the nature of reflecting back upon a life of sex, about AIDS, about the nature of libido late in life and so on?

It is also worth mentioning that the only artists of the 20th century who dealt with the figure in "realistic" terms and with any seriousness used the figure to project the deep sense of loss that followed WWI and then, even more emphatically so, WWII. The wars were for artists and intellectuals the utter proof of the futility of their idealism and optimism for a new world order freed from the tyrannies of the aristocracy by the triad of Democracy, Capitalism and Socialism and freed from the tedium of everyday life by machines and technology and freed from the threat of disease by science. Instead, the wars proved that aristocracies could be replaced by Fascists and machines and science could blow up the whole world and that people had the will to do it.

Artists like Lucien Freud depict flesh as the torpid wreckage of this heroic loss. And America's own figure painter of note, Philip Pearlstein, has created a figure type so dry and stiff that the figures in his paintings seem to be made of plastic. They are seriously cropped and usually doing nothing except modeling. It is as though Pearlstein and his paintings are just this side of dried up and dead, leaving one with the feeling that even the act of painting at all is a heroic deed, like the first spindly weeds that poke up through the broken concrete.

In stark contrast, Dodson's paintings seem to be at nearly the other end of what can be expressed through the depiction of flesh. Her figures pulse with life and sensuality. The figures are having sex or making love or just pleasuring themselves. Rarely are they cropped, and usually they are so absorbed in themselves or each other that they don't even seem to be aware that they are in a painting. And despite her obvious infatuation with the style of the late Renaissance and Mannerist Italian artists, she quickly developed her own figure types based largely on her friends and lovers and her own way of arranging figures. And nowhere in the history of Western Art is there such a lexicon of sexual positions painted or drawn with such alacrity and depth of feeling. And I am not even counting the numerous "how to" drawings she created to illustrate her books on sex. I would also argue that her preference for drawing over painting is indicative of her preference for a more "artful" approach to art-making and life. While one might think that the inherently sexy nature of paint would be more attractive to someone like Betty Dodson, it is my suspicion that the tendency for oil painting to become more "realistic" as well as the weighty historical precedents associated with it were just not as appealing as the relatively fresh and immediate nature of drawing. Besides, I would further argue that "realism" wasn't in fact what Dodson was after. Her art is only realistic when compared to what was considered important art in the 60's and 70's, namely abstract expressionism and Pop. In fact, it seems what she really needed was volume and anatomical verisimilitude to express her sexual energy and social/political/sexual ideas. She did not really even need much 3rd dimensional space as can be seen by her figures crowding up to the picture plane which also makes them more commanding and even a part of the viewer's space. Dodson doesn't want her figures to exist inside the picture, safe from everything but the viewer's gaze. Instead, she wants them in our lap.

And finally, it is important to mention the courage it must have taken to pursue "realistic" art at a time when anybody who did so was thought to be hopelessly backward and sentimental. Nevertheless, she pushed on, doing more work than all but a few artists and suffering the neglect that came from working outside of what she herself saw as the unofficial "academy" of pop art which demanded that to be taken seriously one had to work in this particular mood. Dodson was intuitive enough to realize the irony of an art world that had set itself up as being free from the confines of the old academic traditions of the 19th century but had in fact hardened over the years into a kind of academy without walls where, in order to enjoy the rewards of recognition, respectable venues to display one's work and the prospect of meaningful sales, one had to paint and create according to the rules which at the time were late abstract expressionism and pop.

Of course, even as late as 1970 it really didn't matter whether you played by the rules or not if you were a woman. Despite all the supposed enlightened thinking, you still couldn't really be taken seriously if you were a female artist. Perhaps the hypocrisy in being rejected for being a woman by a collective of art professionals supposedly ahead of the rest of society in social and intellectual matters tipped Dodson off to the inherent ridiculousness of that same world of artists, dealers and art clients pretending to be avant-garde on the one hand while dealing in terms more rigid than old-time academies on the other.

Instead of folding, Dodson dug in. She devoted herself even more intensely to her craft and drew the figure with even more vigor. Other subjects such as landscape and portraiture, which she experimented with in art school and during an early trip to France, now fell away completely. Instead, she devoted herself entirely to the figure and more specifically to sex. Her devotion to her craft was matched only by her devotion to the idea that, if women are serious about liberating themselves, they must begin by liberating themselves sexually. They must learn how to give themselves an orgasm before seeking a man to do it for them. She felt women must take hold of their bodies and take ownership of their pleasure. She felt that women should disallow men or society to make them feel shame about the beauty of their bodies, their cunts and their sexual feelings.

Dodson is certain, and perhaps rightly so, that it was her books and more specifically her personal classes and one-on-one workshops that had the most impact on people. Nevertheless, I feel strongly that much of that impact was based on her considerable charisma and energy, all of which will pass on with her. Books, too, especially ones written colloquially as Dodson's are, have a shelf life and eventually will not be widely read. Her art, on the other hand, because of its high quality on basic artistic terms, is likely to communicate to countless generations to come Dodson's deeply felt convictions that women must know how to give themselves an orgasm, that sex is a joyful, positive gift, that dicks and cunts are beautiful and that there are a multitude of wonderful ways to fuck.

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