An exhilarating new exhibition at the British Museum features over 150 works of Japanese erotic art. But is it art, or pornography? Alastair Sooke investigates.
It is one of the most salacious images in the history of art: deep underwater, a gigantic pink octopus drags a naked young woman into a cleft between two rocks. As his coiling tentacles slither over her blemish-free body, caressing a nipple and encircling her nubile legs, this unlikely molluscoid lover pleasures his prostrate captive, who throws back her head in ecstasy while a second, smaller octopus plants a tender kiss upon her mouth.
To modern eyes, it may look like a piece of titillating filth. But this woodblock print, which is known in the West as The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife and was created in 1814 by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), who also famously depicted a tumultuous wave apparently about to swallow up Mount Fuji, is in fact a sophisticated work of art belonging to a genre known as 'shunga', or erotic 'spring pictures', which thrived in Japan between about 1600 and 1900.