Who’s afraid of the male nude?

The male nude has always been something most museum curators would rather not deal with, much less consider as a subject for a major exhibition. Maybe this is because the typical museum goer can confidently contemplate female nudes but would not be as comfortable lingering in front of a male one. The female nude, in fact is so omnipresent in art, not to mention in advertising and other media, that we are jaded when it comes to women showing off their bodies unclothed. The naked male, however, is another story. 

That’s why it was quite courageous for the Musee D’Orsay to mount “Masculine/Masculine,” featuring the virtually taboo subject as depicted in art from 1800 to the present. “I’ve been wanting to do it for the past 10 or 15 years but ... society had not evolved to the point it has today,” said museum president Guy Cogeval, referring to the recent French debate over legalising gay marriage.

The title seems to be the answer to “Feminine/Masculine, The Sex of Art,” one of the exhibits presented by the Pompidou Center.  It may also have been a marketing strategy to get more people into the museum with such a provocative theme.  The British Museum has organized a sensational exhibit of its own with “Shunga: Sex  and Pleasure in Japanese Art.” These are the two hottest tickets at the moment for art aficionados who can cross the Channel to see both. 

Before the exhibit even opened, however, there was already a big uproar on YouTube and Facebook. As if nude artworks were not challenging enough for the masses, instead of featuring the paintings and sculptures, the show’s video trailer utilizes a male nude model to recreate the classic poses. YouTube promptly gave it an X-rating, locking out viewers below 18 years of age.  Facebook users met similar censure when they posted an article from the French daily Le Parisien because of a photograph with frontal nudity. Their postings were removed “for violation of community standards.”

To prevent further backlash, the curators cautioned that “We must distinguish above all between nudity and the nude: a body simply without clothes, that causes embarrassment with its lack of modesty, is different from the radiant vision of a body restructured and idealized by the artist.”

The ubiquity of the female nude today was not always the case. Its popularity is actually a legacy from the 19^th century when it was established as an absolute and as the accepted object of male desire. Much earlier, however, it was the more structured and muscular male nude that was favored. Greco-Roman art established it as the ideal human form. During the Renaissance, man as represented by the perfect masculine body symbolized the universal being, a synonym for Mankind.  Since most artists were male, they narcissistically found their “ideal” in the male nude.  With these beginnings it comes as a surprise that later on, up till the middle of the 20th century, the depiction of male genitals was met with apprehension and embarrassment. Stories abound of how popes would have the “crown jewels” of marble sculptures sliced off or covered with fig leaves.

If you were a talented and privileged artist from the 17th century, you received the highest standard of training, which had the ultimate aim of mastering the representation of the male nude.  It was considered central to the creative process, with preparatory studies that trained you to capture the articulation of the body as realistically as possible and hone your skills in draftsmanship. In France, at the Acádemie Royale then at the Acádemie de Beaux-Arts, the life models used for classes were exclusively male, even up till the late 20th century.  Social morality was a consideration but this was done also because a male was considered to have the archetypal human form. But it could not be the body of the ordinary man — the features of the model had to be tempered in order to give the subject a nobility worthy of artistic representation.  The artists of Antiquity and the Renaissance were idolized for establishing an ideal synthesis of the human body without the distractions of individual characteristics. Although this classic male nude may have been challenged and reinvented by the 20th century avant-garde, it was still influential and a source of fascination throughout the years, all the way up to the present day.

Aside from the Classic Nude, the exhibit also tackles the Heroic Nude, the demigod or mortal who transcends his human condition to become an exemplum virtutis possessing all the ideal virtues that should be emulated.  Heroes abound in Academic painting, particularly in history paintings depicting the exploits of supermen with perfect bodies.  Linking the ideal physique with heroic virtue to convey the noble and the universal has its origins in the Neo-Platonic concept where beauty and goodness are inseparable. 

Towards the end of the 18th century, the Romantic movement  gave artists free rein in expressing their feelings. The painter Anne-Louis Girodet, a pupil of the preeminent neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David, started adding eroticism to his paintings like in “The Sleep of Endymion” (1791), where the subject is shown in a languid and sensual pose, a sharp contrast to his teacher’s severe and rationalist style.

The Realist aesthetic dominated the 19th century, transforming the representation of male nudity.  From its idealized image viewed from an Academic distance, it was now seen the way nature intended and was subsequently seen as an affront to modesty in the male-dominated society of that time. It was considered more obscene and shocking than the unclothed female.  Although it became less common than the female counterpart, it did not disappear completely. The study of the body became more scientific with new techniques discovered like chronophotography or the decomposition of movement through a series of photographs taken in rapid succession, bringing advances in the study of anatomy and transforming the lessons in draftsmanship at art schools.  Artists from then on were less concerned about reproducing a canon of beauty from the past as they were about depicting the harmony of the model’s true characteristics.

The fascination for reality brought a renewal of religious painting in the mid-1800s. Even if religious dogma dictated the emulation of the classic idealized body, artists like Léon Bonnat showed less pretty but more realistic depictions of the physical conditions of biblical figures. Bouguerau exploited the power of the image of a corpse in his “Equalty Before Death” and Rodin made no enhancements to Balzac’s corpulent physique. Contemporary artist Rod Mueck  continues this tradition today with his intense, hyper-realist sculpture, “Dead Dad.”

By deviating from the restraint of classical norms, artists were able to show more expressive representations of the body in torment or in pain. There was a predilection for ordeals like Ixion’s being condemned by Zeus to an eternally spinning wheel of fire.  The writhing body could also express a more psychological form of torment which relates to power issues between men and women. The male body in its nakedness shows the male at his most vulnerable, a demeaning representation as in Louise Burgeoise’s sculpture,  “Arch of Hysteria.” 

The martyr is the typical influence for tortured bodies in art but in some cases like in Camille Felix Bellanger’s painting of Abel who was killed by his brother Cain, the resulting image is that of a relaxed body at the point of death.  The body seems to be displayed for us to relish.  Suffering is used as a device for fetishism.  For depictions of the martyred Christ and Saint Sebastian, the Catholic concept of the body comes to play, where the body is merely the corporeal vessel from which the soul is freed at death. Christ’s body, shown vulnerable with wounds, is evidence of his humanity, while his inspired expression and idealized body shows his divinity. In Saint Sebastian’s case, his image gradually deviated from Catholic dogma, acquiring a freedom and life of its own.  His suffering is sublimated by the overwhelming sensuality of his youthful and beautiful body to the point where the arrows that pierce his skin almost seem superfluous.

The nude later gained such an evocative power that inspired artists like Egon Schiele to create nude self-portraits that were angst-ridden, sometimes with a Christ-like dimension  that moved beyond realism and were more introspective.

 By the 20th century, there emerged a new way at looking at the body with the focus on medical aspects, health and athleticism.  Physical education movements and gymnasia became popular, with the figure of “the sportsman” capturing the imagination.  Eugene Jansson’s work featuring active, muscular men like his 1913 “Pushing Weights with Two Arms” fascinated those who wanted to covet such virile power.  The body was likened to an object that could be fashioned like a work of art.  The athlete becomes a god, linked with the affirmation of national identity, a symbol of a country’s brute force, with the strength to defend the country in times of war.  The cult of the athlete was so potent that totalitarian regimes exploited it to advance their ideology:  In Nazi Germany it was linked to the concept of the racially superior “Aryan” race. In Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, athletic marble idols were erected in the Stadio dei Marmi.  The star athlete today is a demigod idolized by millions and earning the same numbers in salaries and endorsement contracts. The rugby players of the Paris-based Stade Français team even lend their nude bodies to Dieux du Stade, a lucrative franchise of calendars, books and DVDs.

From the middle of the 20th century onwards, works became bolder with the acknowledged desire for the male body and the liberalization of social conventions. Aleksandr Deyneka’s “Shower After the Battle” (1944) shows a group of men taking a communal shower while Paul Cadmus’ “The Bath” (1951) has two nude men in a domestic setting, one scrubbing in the bathtub and the other looking at the mirror.  The works of Pierre et Gilles make no qualms about this desire when they portray models in unabashed, sexually charged images. Their 2001 “Mercure” may portray the Roman god in a classical pose but it has obviously broken free from centuries of tradition, exemplifying how much we have been liberated from the past and how the male nude has evolved since then.