Balthus' Nude With Cat (1949). The work of Balthus does not fit neatly into an art historical category and he deliberately discourages the classification, preferring each viewer to appreciate his paintings directly. This does not imply that he worked in a vacuum, free from discernable literary and artistic influences, but more his desire to be considered as an individual rather than a member of a movement or part of an established style. A number of themes or subjects do recur in his art, the most important being depictions of prepubescent female figures. While such works are not devoid of an erotic content they are actually a coherent examination of burgeoning sexuality. Nude with cat is a study of unselfconscious sensuality, and whether the intimacy is regarded as overly confronting is very much left to the viewer, as the artist intended.

David Hockney's Man Taking a Shower (1966): "Hockney's vision . . . is stamped by his homosexual stance. In one sense, this undoubtedly limits his work: those of us who are not homosexual will never simply feel the same way about those delicate pink lines with which he tints the buttocks in his otherwise black-and-white drawings of young boys."-- Peter Fuller, Art Monthly, no. 49, September 1981.

(This paragraph is taken from Wikipedia): Michelangelo's The Last Judgment was an object of a heavy dispute between Cardinal Carafa and Michelangelo: The artist was accused of immorality and intolerable obscenity, having depicted naked figures, with genitals in evidence, so a censorship campaign (known as the "Fig-Leaf Campaign") was organized by Carafa and Monsignor Sernini to remove the frescoes. When the Pope's own Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, said "it was mostly disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully, and that it was no work for a papal chapel but rather for the public baths and taverns," Michelangelo worked da Cesena's semblance into the scene as Minos, judge of the underworld. It is said that when he complained to the Pope, the pontiff responded that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell, so the portrait would have to remain.

Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia (1601). Much scholarly and non-scholarly ink has been spilled over the alleged eroticism of the painting. Yet the homoerotic, not to say pederastic, content was perhaps not so apparent to Giustiniani’s generation as it has become today. Naked boys could be seen on any riverbank or seashore, and the eroticisation of children is very much a cultural artefact of the present-day rather than Caravaggio's. -- Fragment taken from the Wikipedia

John Singer Sargent's Madame X (1884). The painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1884 as Portrait de Mme *** and created a scandal. It's considered one of Sargent's best works: "The Salon was in an uproar. Here was an occasion such as they had not had since Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe and L'Olympia. The onslaught was led the lady's relatives. A demand was made that the picture should be withdrawn. It is not among the least of the curiosities of human nature, that while an individual will confess and even call attention to his own failings, he will deeply resent the same office being undertaken by someone else. So it was with the dress of Madame Gautreau. Here the distinguished artist was proclaimed to the public in paint a fact about herself which she had hitherto never made any attempt to conceal, one which had, indeed, formed one of her many social assets. Her sentiment was profound. If the picture could not be withdrawn, the family might at least bide its time, wait till the Salon was closed, the picture delivered, and then by destroying, blot it as an unclean thing from the records of the family. Anticipating this, Sargent, before the exhibition was over, took it away himself. After remaining many years in his studio it now figures as one of the glories of the Metropolitan Museum in New York".-- Evan Charteris, John Sargent, Benjamin Blom, NY, 1927