The Barbican turns a mature 25 next month but the sexually explicit exhibition that it announced yesterday will still quicken the pulses of hormonal teenagers everywhere.

However, most of them will not be allowed into Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, because the content has been deemed too provocative for anyone under 18. Only adults will be permitted to gawp at what the arts centre describes as a “serious art historical essay” on sex and the portrayal of sex across diverse eras and cultures.

About 250 works spanning more than 2,000 years are lined up for the show, which will run from October 12 to January 27, 2008. They include salacious fragments from a Pompeii brothel wall, little-known depictions of sex by Turner, Rodin and Picasso, and Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, a short 1963 film of a man receiving fellatio.

Fleshed out with risqué illuminated manuscripts from India, eye-opening Renaissance paintings, pornographic Japanese woodcuts and artefacts from the 500,000-item collection of Alfred Kinsey, the celebrated sexologist, the exhibition sets out to investigate the shifting boundaries of sexual taste and frankness.

Graham Sheffield, the artistic director of the Barbican, denied suggestions that the arrival of so much naked flesh signalled the onset of a mid-life crisis for the centre in its anniversary year.

“We did not set out to shock with this. We thought it was a serious show that merited our attention. It’s a sign of the Barbican’s maturity that it can deal with a subject as complex as this in a serious way.”

Kate Bush, the head of art galleries at the Barbican, promised a “no-holds-barred exhibition” that would explore a kaleidoscopic range of sexual practices and preferences.

“Auto-eroticism and fetishism are in. Paedophilia and violent imagery are most definitely out. The sex is not just between two people; it can be with objects and ideas.

“It takes a very wide definition of what sexual experience is. This exhibition is the first major survey of the visual history of representations of sexual experience and union.

“Sex is absolutely a subject that preoccupies all of us, whether we are having it or not having it. We are not defining what’s shocking. Everybody’s boundaries are individual”

Art lovers will be particularly intrigued by the insights offered into the private fantasies of some of history’s best-known artists, including sexually explicit watercolour sketches by J. M. W. Turner and a glimpse of Auguste Rodin’s private notebooks. The loan of La Douleur (scène érotique) — a rarely shown Picasso oil painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — has yet to be confirmed. It shows “a man and a boy engaged with each other”, Ms Bush said.

“Sex has fascinated artists since time immemorial. You wouldn’t have imagined Turner as an artist who was delving into this area,” she added.

However, the dirty raincoat brigade may return to Soho disappointed.

“This isn’t a sex show. It’s a serious scholarly, art historical essay. It asks difficult and challenging questions of its viewers by looking at how artists through the ages and in different places have approached the subject. What we understand as explicit now is very different from in Ancient Greece or 19th-century Japan,” Ms Bush said

The Barbican believes that this will be the first major art show to be entirely off-limits to impressionable young people, she said.

“There have been exhibitions with areas limited to over 18s but we haven’t yet found an exhibition that’s closed to them. It contains imagery for which you need to be able to understand the context.”

Some of those images have never been seen in public. Many have never been shown in Britain before.

Controversy sells tickets and the Barbican needs all the help it can get. Sir John Tusa, the managing director, said that the funding from the City of London is now in decline.

Unless the “extremely uphill” struggle to locate new sources of funding pays off in the next few months, he said, then the Barbican will have to start preparing to scale down its artistic programme.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette