Tarzan’s Erection: Erased
Remember this Frank Frazetta painting detail I posted way back in 2005?
It turns out that in the original piece:
Tarzan was shown with a huge erection. This made the piece. One of the slave girls was looking down at the erection with obvious lust in her eyes. The Queen was lifting herself off the throne and thrusting her pubic area toward Tarzan. Great Frazetta ribald humor! A masterpiece. Frank put a lot of work into the details.
Alex wanted it. Frank said that he would have to remove the penis. Alex agreed. I was thoroughly despondent sitting there watching this scenario play out before my eyes. “My God, Frank, you can’t take out that penis. It will ruin the piece.” I said it calmly and quietly while Alex was looking at other potential acquisitions. Frank simply said: “I can draw another one.” I’ve heard this before and it never happened. Alex was willing to pay 45K for the piece.
Frank got out his gouache bottles and a little water. In a few minutes he had scraped off the penis and flawlessly filled-in the open area. He matched every tone perfectly. It was an amazing thing to see. It is impossible to see that anything different was there before.
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I saw this on BoingBoing, but Noone had a link to an actual image of the original, untouched piece. From the angle of the woman’s eyes, it was pretty epic.
There is no image of the original piece. From the link: “Frank did not take any pictures of the piece in its original state” and “Frank never made a photograph of the original. It is lost to history.”
Fortunately or otherwise, this is pretty common with art, throughout the ages. Artists have to pay the bills, too, and if someone’s willing to pay that much, well, it’s worth making some changes. A nose straightened, a chin reduced, a penis removed and re-painted – all normal.
What a waste of a perfectly good boner…
This sounds like a great project for someone with better digital painting skills than I. I’m sure there’s someone out there who could re-create the boner! :P
Reading the piece at the link, it seems as if the idea to delete the erection was entirely Frazetta’s. The buyer, it seems, would have been perfectly happy with a graphic representation of Tarzan’s manhood.
And who wouldn’t. . .
By the way, if you visit the original Frazetta link, click on the pic, and then magnify that full-screen image by about 200%, you will also gain an appreciation for that image of that third pussy “reading” from the left. YUM!…