Art, But Make it Hot

The 18th century saw a decadent sexual revolution for the privileged, where the old-world pressures of church and state behaviour waned and the floodgates to libertine perversity opened. And Rococo art was this era’s erotic entertainment. Sexually charged painting and erotic literature were abundant, encouraged and consumed en-masse by all: from tacky prints and scratchy…

Petition to Teach Kids about the Mad Adventures of Nellie Bly in History Class

When Nellie Bly got bored of writing about fashion and gardening, she went undercover as a patient in a mental asylum and faked insanity to expose the institutional abuse. When she read Jules Verne’s book Around the world in 80 Days, she attempted the fictional journey herself, and did it in 72 days, 6 hours,…

The Grace Mirabella Years: A Vogue Editor’s Unsung Legacy

Hailed as the most powerful woman in media, Anna Wintour has been fictionalised, caricatured and propelled into icon status since becoming editor-in-chief of Vogue. Then there’s Diana Vreeland, editor of the American style bible between 1963–1971, an industry legend who was the driving force of the Met’s Costume Institute, and styled a persona that would be remembered…

Art History’s Hidden Sexual Innuendo: The Weasel

Elevated to divine status, unicorns, lions, eagles and the occasional white rabbit are the loved and familiar characters in our romantic bestiaries, but the little weasel has never managed to secure such a position. Always wild, always wayward, it was the ideal material for folklore and fable. Early Macedonian culture saw them as a good…

The Lost Art and Delight of Mexican Calendar Art

Sex sells – and the message couldn’t have been any clearer when it came to advertising in post-revolutionary Mexico. Images of beautiful people served a multitude of purposes: a nationalistic one to quite blatantly plug the new regime, that of a new bountiful and fertile country, modern, productive and populated by good-looking folks from a…

The World’s Smallest Country Hides a Real-Life Garden of Eden

At less than a fifth of a square mile, The Vatican City is officially the world’s tiniest country. As the seat of the Catholic church, it’s also a cultural institution and a major museum that was welcoming nearly 7 million visitors a year before the pandemic. Unbeknownst to most of the tourists however, is the…

Nikola Tesla told him: “Bury your Findings until Humanity is Ready”

Full disclosure, we never gave the Periodic Table much thought – it remains in our memory as a clunky patchwork of confusing titled squares taped to the back of our school chemistry folder that our teachers would occasionally torture us with for a pop quiz on the elements. Walter Russell however, a 1920s Renaissance man,…

The Secret Code of Beauty Spots

You’re looking at a very rare portrait from 1650 depicting a Black woman and a White woman, both appearing to hold equal status, some 183 years before the abolition of slavery act. Curiously, rather than commenting on the race debate in 17th century Britain via the uncommon pairing, the anonymous artist chose to write an…

Summering with the Surrealists: Sea, Sex and Sun

Let us rewind to the sizzling summers of 1936 and ‘37 to holiday on the French Riviera with Pablo Picasso and his international ensemble of friends at the Hotel Vaste Horizon, a modest boarding house nestled in the old town of Mougins. The warren of intimate rooms and courtyards would be the summer home to…

Oh Nothing, Just an 18th Century Masturbation Society

The picture-perfect fishing village of Anstruther is situated in the county of Fife on Scotland’s east coast. The fragments of its ruined castle are still sitting perched on a rock above the harbour, looking across the Dreel Burn, the winding river that washes down to the sea, to the town’s ancient parish church on the…