CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/2/2017

"Not just anyone makes a good pisser"

A third-century Roman sarcophagus with a pissing bacchanalian Cupid, Pieter Breugel the Elder’s 1558 oil painting of a man “pissing at the moon,” an early twentieth-century pornographic photograph of three Parisian courtesans pissing in unison, and artworks by modern and contemporary masters like Picasso, Takashi Murakami and Marlene Dumas (featured here) all make an appearance in Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s engrossing new study of art-historical Pissing Figures, 1280-2014. Throw in Renaissance masters like Titian and Michelangelo, Edo-period erotica, Fascist postcards and images from twenty-first-century video games, and you’ve got a book like no other. The newest in David Zwirner Books’ pocket-sized ekphrasis series.