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This is a thread about the nude male body as the central motive in art, physique photography and vintage gay male porn photography.
The kind of art I'll be showing and discussing will mostly be sculpture, painting and drawing from Antiquity and centering on the early modern period (16th, 17th, 18th and early 19th century), so it's really not about modern and contemporary art.
I also want to make a case for the connections between early modern academic male nudes and what - from the turn of the century 1900 - became a very prolific type of popular art to become very important in commercial gay male culture: Physique Photography. And while we're at it I'll also have a look at vintage gay porn photography - and vintage in this case will be photos from about 1870 to 1920.
I really hope I've managed to find a lot of smashing pictures you've never seen before and this is the fun and pleasurable part of it, but I'll start today on a much more sinister note and talk about the sorry conditions that really motivated me to make this thread.
So I'll start with things that makes me angry because it has robbed us all of a splendid cultural heritage, an artistic heritage with the nude male body taking center stage!
Mrs. Grundy said: "-We can't have that!"
My reply with this thread I hope is to make all ridiculous Mrs. Grundy's shut up...
How do you go about to make a visible image invisible? What do you do to make pictures disappear, how to make it impossible to see?
As an example take the picture below!
It's an oil painting by French artist Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) made in 1778, a formal academic male nude titeled Hector.
Of course you can use many different methods for destroying a picture. If it's an oil painting you can slash it with a knife or an axe and other metods could be to spray it with sulphuric acid or put it on fire.
The metods I'm going to look into will be less violent, but in the long run probably more effective since they concern changing not individual things but concepts and categories in ways to make whole categories of images "unthinkable" and thus excluding them from our common culture and damn them into oblivion.
Excluding a category of images will also mean to exclude the desire to look at the said kind of pictures.
Laura Mulvey and John Berger.
This first post is about two very influential British intellectuals who in the 1970s-1980s articulated theories on visual culture, art and cinema, characterized by deeply sexed dichotomies, resulting in an equally sexed arc of male scopic desire for the visual object - always taken for granted to be female.
If the male is thought to "own" the desiring gaze and it at the same time is taken for granted that the male gaze by definition is heterosexual, then the male nude becomes the "unthinkable" object.
The two British intellectuals were Laura Mulvey (b. 1941), film maker and film studies professor, and John Berger (b. 1926), poet, novelist, painter and art critic.
After publishing her seminal essay on film theory, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in the British Film Institute's journal Screen in 1975 and its 1981 follow-up, her essays were to become among the most influential and most frequently reprinted and anthologized writings ever published in the new academic field of Film Studies.
Actually I don't have any serious problem with Mulvey's notion of a male gaze or the idea that the gaze will transform its object into the mode of To-Be-Looked-At-ness. But what I do have the most fundamental problem with is the - plainly rediculous! - idea that the visual object by necessity and definition must be female! This is nothing more than the theoretical confirmation of total heteronormativity, telling all and sundry that gay male desire actually doesn't exist. Which is patently offensive and just plain untrue.
Instead let's move on to one of John Berger's most influential books, Ways of Seeing (1972, latest Penguin reprint 2008), based on a BBC doentary with the same title, in many ways close to Mulvey, but focusing not on cinema but on western art and commercial visual culture, and publised a few years before her essays.
Berger's opinion of himself is obviously that he's a radical inbibed in Marxism and Feminism, spiced with a tad of psychoanalysis - a pretty typical 1970's mixture. But you could also say, that he suffered from a serious professional self-misconception: Marxism, Feminism and whatnot - at rocks bottom he ate and drank the Romantic concept of art. Maybe a Romantic with Marxist and Feminist sympaties, but his notion of art, what it was, is and should be, is thoroughly Romantic.
Changing notions of Art: Romanticism v. Classicism.
The Romantic concept of art would become dominant from the early 19th century on, and differs basically from the Classicist conception dominating in the 17th-18th centuries. German poets and close friends Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798) and Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) were instrumental in starting the Romantic discourse on die Kunstreligion (Art Religion), in particular Wackenroder's collection of essays Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders,1797, (english translation: "Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar").
Wackenroder's idea was to emphasize the spirituality of art and its capacity to embody and transmit religious emotions, and a practical consequence of this theory would become to stress easel painting as the central art medium most fit for conveying the artists religious imaginations and ideas.
Another practical consequence would become to portray the male artist painting the picture of a beautiful woman as the archetypal Ur-Scene of post-romantic art; an influential example would be Jean Auguste Dominique Ingre's Rafael painting La Fornarina 1808 :
But what had been the case before, when Classicist and Neo-Classicist notions determined the dominant game in town in earlier centuries?
First of all: in Classicist thinking beauty is always something you primarily find in Nature (including the human body and figure), NOT primarily what you find in art. And the very pinnacle of beauty was thought of as "our hero" - the nude male body!
In other words: beauty in art on Classicist terms will always be secondary. A work of art becomes beautiful because it depicts something naturally beautiful - as a sculpture can be beautiful because it portrays a naturally beautiful boy. Putting clothes on him ruins what's beautiful...
Things in nature are inevitably three dimensional, and, hence, the central artistic medium in Classicist art is sculpture - NOT easel painting!
Two examples of sculptural Classicist beauty, starting with one of the most famous pieces of all times, Michelangelo Buonarrotti's David:
About 300 years later Antonio Canova made this statue of Perseus with Medusa's head:
Ways of Seeing as BBC TV Series, episode 2.
But let's go back to the BBC Series from 1972! You can find all four episodes on YouTube, but in the context of this post I'll post only episode 2, since it's of immediate importance to our discussion.
In my opinion there are two things central to this clip, of which the first is that Berger establishes a chain of heavily sexed dichotomies. What in Mulvey's terminology was "the Male Gaze" v. "the Female Image" in Berger's vocabulary becomes "men act/women appear", followed by "men look at women/women watch themselves being looked at" and "men are the universally presupposed spectators/women turns themselves into visual object".
The second thing to note concerns pair of words peculiar to the English langage: naked/nude. Berger followed art historian Kenneth Clark's magisterial study The Nude: A Study in ideal Form (1st ed 1956, many later editions) in the sense tht they both think that nakedness and nudity shouldn't be considered simple synonyms, but as different concepts. The difference between them is that Berger forcefully argues for - so to speak - a different difference.
Clark's idea was that to be naked was just to be without clothes; a naked body was the natural body not wrapped up in textile or fur. His concept of the nude is a lot more complicated; the nude was not just an important motive in visual art, it was nothing less than a specific form of art with it's roots in ancient Greek art and it's own history. Clark was very well aware that the earliest Greek nude sculptures were from the 7th century B.C. and were figures of young men or boys. Hence, he was far from the idea that the nude by definition was female.
But Berger's idea was precisely just that: the nude is female by definition. He starts by giving nakedness a definition differing poignantly from Clark: to be naked is to be oneself, but to be nude is a woman's nakedness transformed through the alienating gaze of the male spectator. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. Or in other words: nudity is a form of dress.
The Berger-Clark argument on the correct interpretation of the pair of concepts naked/nude has managed to dominate the field for almost half a century. I wanted to do something about this situation; that's why I decided to start this thread!
As always you've opened a fascinating chapter in the book of truth. I admire your ability to develop interesting topics for discussion. I'd love to live close enough that we could have coffee and talk about life.
I look forward to every new installment in this journal.
As always you've opened a fascinating chapter in the book of truth. I admire your ability to develop interesting topics for discussion. I'd love to live close enough that we could have coffee and talk about life.
I look forward to every new installment in this journal.
You know, talking to good friends and drinking enormous amounts of coffee is just about the best thing in life in my opinion, so we'd have a ball if we could move closer to each other - the kind of ball elderly gentlemen like me and you can have
This should be interesting - from Michelangelo to Mapplethorpe and all the stops in between.
Funny how sexism and heteronormativity go hand-in-hand - especially in art criticism. The art world has always been a haven for bohemian philosophy and rule-breaking. Add that to the long list of famous artists into male-male sex, and it is kind of surprising to see all of that excluded in some art theory.
Maybe this in an example of the veil drawn between the artists and the audience. A kind of "don't talk about fight club" mentality that deliberately draws a separation between public discussion of art and what was going on after hours in those studios and lofts.
Anyway, here is a video done as part of the 2013 Masculin / Masculin exhibit on male nudes in art at musée d'Orsay in Paris. You will probably recognize some of the work that the video recreates.
1) About colours: Yes you're totally correct! Greek and Roman stone sculptures were normally painted, just like ancient architecture, so the statues were polychrome, not monochrome. We know this for a certain fact since investigations of ancient pieces with modern technology (UV and Infra red light, microscopic investigation of the stone) clearly shows that the sculpture has been painted. Not even Greek bronze statues were fully monochrome - we know examples of bronze pieces with red copper for the lips and silver for the teeth welded into the bronze!
Astonishingly often it's even possible to come up with a good guess about which range of colours were used! While some pigments (let's say yellow and gold) can be almost impossible to distinguish between as small traces on stone buried in the ground for 1000 years or more, but other pigments can be distinguished close to certainty!
Renaissance sculptors like Michelangelo Buonarrotti, Benvenuto Cellini, Giovanni da Bologna and others though that they were resurrecting an ancient sculptural genre, the monochrome stone sculpture, but they were totally wrong - the monochrome marbles sculpture was a new invention!
However, I definitely think that this was an honest mistake in the Renaissance. Things got much more sinister from the late 18th century on!
2) About white marbles and racism: I'm sad to say that you're at least partially correct on this point too!
White marbles sculpture could be used as a powerful symbol of the superiority of the white race, but at precisely the same time (late 18th & early 19th century) evidence started to amass that ancient greek and roman sculpture probably was neither monochrome nor white.
French architect Quatremère de Quincy published an important book around 1810 where he collected and analyzed all ancient textual evidence against monochromy, and just a few years later German archeologists made epoch in the excavations of the Temple of Afaia on the island of Aegina: the traces of colour on the temple statues were so many, so big and so obvious even without any microscope at hand. So you could say that after the publication of the Afaia-excavation, among archeologists and art historians there wasn't much doubt that ancient monochromy was nothing but a myth.
But lots of people continued to believe in - continued wanting to believe in - the white monochromy myth, and I think that the simple fact that making plaster cast copies on an industrial scale in the second half of the 19th century of ancient sculpture was quite important : Every single museum of art history in Europe and the US wanted a complete collection of ancient sculptures, and they bought plaster copies. And so did thousands of upper middle class art lovers.
I should have said that Sundays will be my ordinary posting day in this thred, though not next weekend when I'll post on Saturday 21 January, not on Sunday 22.
While the center of this thread will be early modern European art, there's no denial that the visual arts of this period had its symbolic basis in thousands year older sculpture of Ancient Greece and Rome.
I want to start this thread with some examples of the oldest colossal stone sculpture in the 7th century B.C. and look in particular at its connection with the much older Egyptian sculptural tradition.
Two examples of archaic kouroi (plural of the Greek kouros meaning "boy/young man").
There had been several other kinds of statues before the 7th century B.C. - mostly much smaller, mostly made of other materials, mostly looking very different - but the colossal statues made of stone and of the human figure was something new in Greek culture, and the older types doesn't much resemble what WE would recognize AS typically Greek sculpture.
The Greek sculptors who made this new type got their inspiration, craft and technical knowledge from abroad, from outside Greek society. It isn't particularly difficult to see how much alike archaic Greek statues and Egyptian statues are - but the Egyptian represents a tradition more than 1500 years older than the Greek.
An easily detected difference is of course, that while the Egyptian figure has at least a loincloth on, the Greek kouroi are totally nude.
But what about Greek statues of girls/young women, the korai (plural of kore)? Female colossal figures were made in the same period as the young male figures, but with an important difference: While the young male figure always were fully in the nude, the young women were draped, clothed, wrapped up in textiles.
The female nude didn't enter Greek sculpture until after more than three centuries, in the mid 4th century B.C. Possibly the very first female nude was "Afrodite of Knidos" by Praxiteles.
The visual style of the statues of young men changed a lot in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. We saw that in archaic statues the figures were totally static and frontal, but in the later classical statues we start getting dynamics in the figures. They started in a way looking as if the figure moved his body and was about to start walking. The best way to explain what I mean is to look at one of the most influential works of art ever made: Polykleitos's Doryphoros (The Spearcarrier) from about 450 B.C.
The following statue below is about 120 years later than the Spearcarrier. The late classical bronze original, probably made by Leochares, is long since lost, but we got a Roman marbles copy made about 130 A.D., which in Renaissance Europe would be given the title Apollo di Belvedere.
The importance of Ancient sculpture for Renaissance art.
The Apollo statue above was discovered in 1489 in the present Italian territory of Anzio or possibly at Grottaferrata, and became the property of cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who in 1503 was elected pope Julius II and became the most influential artist patron of his time. He was the patron of - among others - Bramante, Rafael amd Michelangelo and commissioned a number of their most important work.
One of pope Julius large scale commissions for Bramante was to design and build the Statue Court of the Belvedere Palace in the Vatican city. The purpose of this statue court was to publicly display in the most elegant way all the finest examples of sculpture in the papal collections, and all the show off pieces were of Ancient origin, Greek or Roman. Several were recently discovered, the Belvedere Apollo being one example, the Laocoon Group being another and even more recent, discovered in Rome in 1506.
But why on earth did CONTEMPORARY artists and art patrons think that these very old statues should be considered and function as the model and prototype of contemporary art? Why did sculptors like Benvenuto Cellini, Giovanni da Bologna, Jacopo Sansovino, Michelangeo and others?
A good answer to these complex questions would at least entail a lengthy lecture on the intellectual tradition and educationalist movement of Renaissance Humanism, kickstarted in the 14th century by Francesco Petrarca (1300-1374), but let's leave this for another time!
If you sincerely believed in the Humanist ideology you would take for granted that any Ancient Greco-Roman piece of art must be so much better than contemporary shit, and, hence, should absolutely function as a normative model.
* * * * * *
I'll start my next post by talking about an institution with the grandiose, systematic and long term ambition to make sure that contemporary art would come as close as possible to the ancient sources: the Academy of visual art.
Oh my dear God what a great work Gorgik9. Soo interesting to read and as well the magnificent selection of pics. And as ever it is a great pleasure to read your wonderful written posts.
Only a little question: why don't you write non-fiction books by yourself???
Oh my dear God what a great work Gorgik9. Soo interesting to read and as well the magnificent selection of pics. And as ever it is a great pleasure to read your wonderful written posts.
Only a little question: why don't you write non-fiction books by yourself???
The basic reason why I write this and other long complex threads is pretty simple at rock bottom: It gives me so much positive energy; writing for you guys on GH is pure fun and pleasure to me. OK it's a bit of work and takes some time, but hey - good fucking also makes you sweat :thumbs up::rofl:
The basic reason why I write this and other long complex threads is pretty simple at rock bottom: It gives me so much positive energy; writing for you guys on GH is pure fun and pleasure to me. OK it's a bit of work and takes some time, but hey - good fucking also makes you sweat :thumbs up::rofl:
The visual style of the statues of young men changed a lot in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. We saw that in archaic statues the figures were totally static and frontal, but in the later classical statues we start getting dynamics in the figures. They started in a way looking as if the figure moved his body and was about to start walking. The best way to explain what I mean is to look at one of the most influential works of art ever made: Polykleitos's Doryphoros (The Spearcarrier) from about 450 B.C.
Plato, Florence and the collaps of the Byzantine Empire.
The first "Academy" ever was the site in Akademos's olive grove to the northwest of the city walls of ancient Athens where Plato lectured and discussed with his friends.
The reason to start what was to be called "the Platonic Academy" in mid 15th century Florence was closely connected to the Church Council in Florence and Ferrara 1438-1445 and it's failed attempt to reconcile the Western and Eastern churches, to reunite Rome and Constantinopel - remember that in just a few years ahead Mehmet II, Sultan of the Osman Turks, would invade Constantinopel and definitely end the Byzantine Empire in 1453...
So in this period groups of Byzantine scholars stayed in Florence for years and got aquainted with Florentine and other Italian intellectuals; among the central figures were Platonist philosopher Giorgios Gemisthos Plethon, who was instrumental in introducing systematic Platonist thinking in the West 1438-39, and grammarian Johannes Argyropoulos who started giving classes in Greek language and literature in Florence from 1459 on, when Constantinopel had already been invaded by Mehmet II's army and its walls had been quashed by the Sultans heavy artillery, and, hence, Byzantine scholars had to go elsewhere to get a good job.
Cosimo de' Medici of the immensely wealthy and powerful banking family was also the leading figure in Florentine politics at the time. He decided to sponsor an informal philosophical discussion community under the inspiration of Plethon, gave it the name Platonic Academy and choose a young scholar named Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) as its leader. Ficino also became the student of Argyropoulos, learned Greek and made the first latin translation of the entire Corpus Platoni which was published in 1484.
Let's make Fine Art out of mere crafts!
To trace the trajectory from the introduction of the Platonic notion of the Academy to the first Academies of visual art is a too complex and thorny story. Suffice it to state that the two first were founded in the second half of the 16th century in Florence and Rome:
Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, founded in Florence by Duke Cosimo I de' Medici of Tuscany in 1563 under the influence of Giorgio Vasari;
Accademia di San Luca, founded in Rome in 1577.
I want to stress a basic reason why academies of painting and sculpture were started at all in the 16th century! The visual arts must be distinguished socioculturally from poetry and music in the sense that these latter arts had since Antiquity been parts of various prestigious discourses and institutions of higher education and learning:
So poetry had - on the one side - been a part of rhetoric which in its turn was a part of trivium, the first section of the Artes Liberales, containing grammar, rhetoric and dialectics (which is an old fashioned name for logic).
If you were a student in any of the medieval universities you always started in the Artes faculty and your first exam would invariably be a Baccalaureus Artium, which in the modern Anglophone world still is named - Bachelor of Art.
On the other side: Plato didn't like rhetoric, but he gave an alternative legitimation of poetry as - divine madness!
Music was the topic of a very influential tractate by the Christian Neoplatonist philosopher Boëthius in the early 6th century AD, and it was also part of the second section of the Artes Liberales, the quadrivium, including arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.
But painting and sculpture had never really been institutionally embedded in this kind of prestigious discourse, until the early academies of art. In medieval society painting and sculpture had been considered crafts and socio-economically organized in guilds in the towns and cities.
Painters could for example be organized in the Pharmacist Guild, while sculptors could dwell among Goldsmiths.
One of the central projects of the early academies of visual arts was to increase its socio-cultural prestige as something above and beyond mere crafts and to not be subjected under the system of guild rules and regulations.
A four year old boy founds an Academy of Art in Paris, France.
Let's move on to the academy of art that would become the most influential for more than two centuries: Académie Royal de Painture et de Sculpture, founded in Paris, France, in 1648, nominally by the king Louis XIV, but since he t the time was a four year old boy, the actual founders were his mom, widower queen Anne d'Autriche and prime minister Cardinal Mazarin.
Let's get on with some art and why not start with paintings and drawings from one of the central figures in the Academy under Louis XIV, Charles Le Brun (1619-1690):
Then a couple of French artists having their prime in the mid 18th century:
Edmé Bouchardon (1698-1762)
Joseph-Marie Vien (1716-1809)
Some French artists from the following generation, and then a few Brits and a German Bohemian!
Louis Lagrenee (1724-1805)
Nicolas-René Jollain (1734-1804)
Jacques Gamelin (1738-1803)
Gavin Hamilton (1723-1798)
Benjamin West (1738-1820)
Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779)
* * * * * * * *
I want to end this post with some simple terminological clarifications!
While the Academy names the institution for higher education in the visual arts, anacademie was the conventional expression for what could otherwise be called a formal male nude, either drawn or painted.
Making academies was a central part of the teaching in the Academy and students had to start by studying and trying to copy academies by old masters, moviong on to studying old sculptural masterpieces, to finally graduate to study live male models.
At the absolute center of classicist academic art was always men oogling other nude men!
entary with the same title, in many ways close to Mulvey, but focusing not on cinema but on western art and commercial visual culture, and publised a few years before her essays.
