The Nude Male Body!

[gorgik9]

Academy and Art, part 2.

A neew list of artists! Maybe I should have said that in the posts titled "Academy and Art" I'll post the artists in roughly chronological order, starting in Part 1 with the eldest!

Johan Tobias Sergel (1740-1814, Swedish sculptor)

Pierre Lelu (1741-1810)

Joseph Benoit Suvee (1743-1807)

Francois-Guillaume Ménageot (1744-1816)

Pierre Cacault (1744-1810)

Jean-Joseph Taillason (1745-1809)

Francois-André Vincent (1746-1816)

Jacques Louis David (1748-1825)

David's self portrait

Neo-Classicism and Rococo.

The list above ends with the French painter who became the most influential artist in France in the era of the French revolution and the era of Napoleon Bonapart. It was David who through his many students in the French Academy of Art made sure that Neo-Classicism would become the artistic style of Jacobin political radicalism, so I think the right thing to do now is to try to explain the difference between neo-classicism and the "good old" Classicism of the 17th and early 18th century.

The concept of Neo-classicism can be interpreted in various ways, but in my opinion it's useful to look at it as an artistic movement emerging in the 1770's
from a set of specific pre-suppositions that didn't exist before.

So, first, we have the influential writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) published in the 1750's and 1760's, including his magnum opus Geschichte des Kunst Des Alterthums (History of the art of antiquity), 1764; he quite simply became one of the most influential scholarly writers in the second half of the 18th century.

Winckelmann's writings were characterised by an in many ways amazingly open male homoeroticism.

The second thing to note is the consequential chain of events unfolding out of the archeological excavations in Herculaneum and Pompeji, gaining momentum from about 1750, which in the long run meant an entirely new perspective on ancient art, culture and society. (Later in this thread I'll make a post discussing the connections between the Pompeji excavations and the emerging of the modern concept of pornography.)

The third pre-supposition was the relentlessly masculine homosocial community of European artists living and working in Rome. Neo-Classicism in many ways was an art movement with its origins in Rome, the place and environment where Winckelmann became Winckelmann and David became David.

Thefourth pre-supposition is more negative and oppositional: It's about the neo-classicist artists disdain for Louis XV's official mistress Mme de Pompadour, for effeminacy in art and society, and in particular the disdain for the Rococo style in painting, sculpture and design. The slogan of the Jacobin Davidians was: "-Van Loo, Rococo, Pompadour!" (Carle Van Loo was one of the more influential Rococo painters.)

So I think we must post a couple of examples of Rococo painting vehemently opposed by the neo-classicists!

Francois Boucher (1703-1770)

Carle Van Loo (1705-1765)

 

[W!nston]

The vulnerability of these two poses with the arm over the head and face turned upward always captivates me. I don't know why that is, it just is.

I hope this thread never ends.

Thank you again A,

J

 

[gorgik9]

The vulnerability of these two poses with the arm over the head and face turned upward always captivates me. I don't know why that is, it just is.

I hope this thread never ends.

Thank you again A,

J

From A to J : thanks a lot for the appreciation! I can't guarantee that I'll keep on until the end of time - but at least for quite a while!

Sergel's sculpture I think is his take on the Barberini Faun, and Menageot's painting is his version of the martyredom of Saint Sebastian!

 

[topdog]

The vulnerability of these two poses with the arm over the head and face turned upward always captivates me. I don't know why that is, it just is.

I went looking for erotic photos of men restrained with just one arm or hand bound. I couldn't find any. There must be some, but I think we can conclude that they are rare.

It's not hard to understand why that is - if you want to subdue someone you need to tie both arms. A man with just one arm tied can still punch your lights out, not to mention what he can do with is legs. He is secured in one place and not going anywhere, but not helpless either.

But, in the art as well as in the photo above, you don't see someone dangerous. You see someone who has been made vulnerable as you say, but also is willingly submitting to his fate. He accepts his status as a captive and no longer free - something that has been imposed on him against his will. But in addition to that, he has surrendered to his captor, and exposes his vulnerability by his own choice. He is a willing sacrifice, no longer free, but also offering himself to the viewer for whatever they desire.

That, is a powerfully seductive image intertwining those closely related impulses of sex, power, violence, and surrender. It's no wonder it captivates, especially when it is a potentially powerful male who has chosen to make himself defenseless and at the mercy of the viewer.

 

[mikk33]

excellent posts.
is there not a case for stating that the Rococco was an inherently bourgeoise art as well. It looks like a faux-art, soft focus and twee, pseudo- religious imagery and false to my eye. whereas the sculpture appears more realistic and obviously masculine but from a different class, real people not cherubs floating n the sky as if in a cartoonish fantasy?

 

[gorgik9]

excellent posts.
is there not a case for stating that the Rococco was an inherently bourgeoise art as well. It looks like a faux-art, soft focus and twee, pseudo- religious imagery and false to my eye. whereas the sculpture appears more realistic and obviously masculine but from a different class, real people not cherubs floating n the sky as if in a cartoonish fantasy?

Thanks for the comment, mikk! You make me think once again as so many times before - I like that!

But I don't think that characterising Rococo art and design could be said to be clearly more "bourgeoise" than neo-classicism. I mean David - the great Jacobin and neo-classicist - was a painter and professor in the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which definitely was a Royal institution, not at all a bourgeoise instution.

Maybe it's necessary to talk a bit about the French Revolution, which was - you could say - the bourgeoise revolution opposing King, Court and aristocracy. So Jacobin radicalism was bourgeoise radicalism, when lawyers, teachers and journalists thrived in cutting the throats of Counts and Dukes and executed the king Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette.

So I think that this time I'll have to disagree - but please keep commenting in this thread!

 

[gorgik9]

Academy and Art, part 3.

Yet another list of artists and their work!

Jean-Baptiste Regnault (1754-1829)

I've seen two alternative titles for the painting above: 1) La liberte ou la morte ("Freedom or death"); 2) The Genius of France.

"Cupid and Psyche". Note that as in ordinary classicist fashion we have both male and female figures in the frame, the male figure will be more nude than the female.

John Flaxman (1755-1826)

Flaxman's drawings and engravings to illustrate an early English translation in the 1790s of Homer's epos The Iliad was to become very influential.

Antonio Canova (1757-1822)

Italian sculptor Canova became the most - besides Danish Bertel Thorvaldsen - influential among neo-classicist sculptors.

The sculpture above has a mythological theme: "The Sleeping Endymion". Later in this same post we'll see painted versions of the same theme.

Benigne Gagneraux (1756-1795)

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758-1823)

Etienne Barthelemy Garnier (1759-1849)

Francois-Xavier Fabre (1766-1837)

Jean-Germain Drouais (1763-1788)

Anne-Louis Girodet de Trioson (1767-1824)

Girodet's painting above depicting the mythological theme "The Sleep of Endymion" is a good example of the dichotomy of two types of male bodies - the more buff muscular heroic type and the younger more slim and slender ephebic type (represented in Girodet's picture) - which characterized French neo-classicist painting in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Charles Meynier (1768-1832)

We find another bright example below of the ephebic body in Meynier's "Adolecent Eros Weeping over the portrait of the Lost Psyche."

Next weekend I'll take a pause from the "Academy and Art" series to do something a bit different; I'll post a thematic digression on the work in the Academic artist studio as represented in paintings!

 

[W!nston]

Beautiful post gorgik. Many more "captivating" poses that please my tastes.

Has modern art changed so much that we don't see works such as these great masterpieces being created anymore? Is the culture that created the classics gone forever?

I see the world we live in becoming more and more bereft of the culture that once lifted our sense of beauty and balance.

I hope the pendulum finds it's way back to a more civilized position.

 

[gorgik9]

Digression: In the Artist Studio.

This post is a digression about a specific subgenre of academic painting, the studio painting showing the work of artists and students i academic and private studios.

Let's start with a couple of early studio paintings by the Flemish painter Michael Sweerts (1618-1664), of which the first shows students scrutinizing a plaster cast copy of a piece of ancient sculpture.

The second shows a drawing lesson and please note how very young the students are.

Next is a painting by Johann Zoffany (1733-1810): "The Academicians of the Royal Academy" 1772.

There's an interesting detail in the top right hand corner of the painting: A portrait of an elegant lady, Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), who at the time was the only female member of the academy - but of course it was considered impossible for a female artists to paint or draw a naked male model. Or at least impossible for Johann Zoffany to paint Kauffmann in front of a nude male model.

Two paintings from the studio of David; the first from 1804 by Jean-Henri Cless (1774-1812):

The second from 1814 by Leon-Mathieu Cochereau (1793-1817):

A painting from 1804 by Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845):

A piece from 1821 by Horace Vernet (1789-1863):

The following piece is by Abel de Pujol (1785-1861) showing us a private studio - hence: not a studio connected to the Academy - with female models.

The next piece is from the Meritus Society in 1792 by Dutch painter Adriaan de Lelie (1755-1820):

The following is by Danish painter Lorentzen (sorry I don't have his first name): "Model Class at the Copenhagen Academy":

Then by another Dane, Wilhelm Bendz (1804-1832), "Life Class at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts". (Painting probably from about 1830).

The next gigantic painting (356 x 588 cm) from 1854-55 by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) titled The Studio is in many ways a breaking-up of the tradition we've known so far. This painting isn't just a pretty spectacular painting; at the same time it's kind of a meta-picture, a picture to tell us what kind of a place an artists studio should be thought to be: A place where a necessarily masculine artist oogles a necessarily female model and paints her figure, so you could say that Art is a female figure created by a masculine Artist...

Henri Fantin-Latour's (1836-1904) painting from about 1875 shows us Edouard Manet and his circle of friends in Manet's studio. As before we se a homogenous masculine community but now it's a monogenderized group getting much more heteronormalized than before.

However! If we look outside the quarters of impressionists and other programmatically modernist artist groups, we can see that in the studios of more traditionalist art we'll find still a lot of oogling of male nude models in the late 19th century. This photo is from Atelier Bonnat:

 

[gorgik9]

Academy and Art, part 4.

Pierre Gautherot (1769-1825)

Bertel Thorvaldsen, Danish sculptor (1770-1844)

Francois-Pascal-Simon Gerard (1770-1837)

Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835)

Jean Broc (1771-1850)

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774-1833)

Jean-Pierre Granger (1779-1840)

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)

Without a doubt Ingres was to become one of the most important French painters in the first half of the 19th century. He was a student of David and, hence, an artist with an Academic classicist education who painted a lot of formal male nudes in his early career.

But later in his art tilted to the Romanticist side, and if you only read about Ingres in well known handbooks of art students for university classes, you'll probably see much more - maybe even exclusively - of female nudes than of males. In the following I've posted a few of Ingres most frequently reproduced paintings: female nudes only...

Jean-Louis César Lair (1781-1828)

Méry-Joseph Blondel (1781-1853)

Next weekend I'll make a digression to talk about the fact that when we're heading into the 19th century we're also heading towards the culture of the mass reproduced image and of photography.

 

[W!nston]

Another amazing post my friend!

I've admired the handsome and talented Elijah Wood since he first caught my eye. The young man portraying Galatea in this painting reminds me of Elijah. That naughty look on his face with the tip of his tongue touching his upper lip while he cops a feel of her breast is erotic, don't you agree? It is very much like a look I've seen on Elijah's face before.

I look forward to the next installment.

 

[gorgik9]

Another amazing post my friend!

I've admired the handsome and talented Elijah Wood since he first caught my eye. The young man portraying Galatea in this painting reminds me of Elijah. That naughty look on his face with the tip of his tongue touching his upper lip while he cops a feel of her breast is erotic, don't you agree? It is very much like a look I've seen on Elijah's face before.

I look forward to the next installment.

I didn't think about Elijah, but yes! your right - the young guy in the painting looks very much like Mr. Wood!

Thanks for the appreciation

 

[gorgik9]

Digression:From Academic art to Physique Photography.

Art in the age of the massproduced image.

Moving into the 19th century also means moving into the first age of picture industrialism, by which I mean an industry for mass producing and mass distributing all various kinds of pictures, making them accessible for almost anyone and using pictures for linking together all parts industrial capitalist economy and society.

The central technology for illustrating books, magazines and newspapers was xylography (wood engraving, not to be confused with old fashioned woodcut) invented in 1775; the central technology for picture reproduction not connected with text would become lithography invented in 1796.

But photography was NOT at the center of picture industrialism, not until the 1880's - 1890's when the invention of the halftone plate made possible to reproduce photography in print.

Remember that the first economically viable photographical method, the daguerrotype, presented by LJM Daguerre in 1839, was as much an unique unreproduceable original as an oilpainting; Frederic Scott Archer's wet collodium process - invented in 1851 - was the first negative/positive method of practical and economical importance, meaning that the photographer made a glass plate negative from which could be made any number of positive pictures on albumin paper, but neither the glass negative nor the paper positive were yet reproduceable in print.

But photography changed Western visual culture in many other ways long before the advent of the halftone plate reproduction in the 1880s.


To make photographic académies.

French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) started thinking about if photographers maybe could make pictures in the central academic genre - the formal male nude, the académie - making copies and sell them to the use of artists. To that end Delacroix got in touch with one of the early Parisian photographers in the 1850's, Eugène Durieu (1800-1874) and here's some examples of his work made in 1855!

The photographic académie actually became a special genre cultivated by some commercial photo studios, one example being work from the studio of Louis Jean Baptiste Igout (1837-1881).

Then we have a couple of photos by Guglielmo Marconi who worked in Paris 1855-1870.

And then a number of photos by anonymous photographers, some of them also showing that the camera was beginning to be used in the artist studio with male studio models in front of the lens.

Eugen Sandow: the beginning of Physique Photography.


Born in East Prussia in 1867 as Friedrich Wilhelm Müller (1867-1925) he emigrated as a young man to Great Britain, became a vaudeville strongman, re-baptized himself Eugen Sandow and became the most important pioneer of modern bodybuilding.

He made a two year long tour in the US in connection to the 1893 World Exhibition in Chicago and became something of an expert in self promotion, and in particular promoting his muscular body and its photographic image.

He got in touch with well known society photographers like Napoleon Sarony and Benjamin Falk, making sure that his image was disseminated to the widest possible audience.

Back in London Sandow started his own posh gym "Sandow's Institute of Physical Culture", and his own sports journal, "Sandow's Magazine". But what interests me the most is how his collaboration with many photographers at the turn of the century 1900 kickstarted a subgenre of commercial photography, later to be named physique photography.

The simple point I want to make in this context is, that early physique photography in the age of Sandow in my opinion quite obviously is much influenced by the work of photographers making formal male nudes in the two generations before Sandow, work by photographers like Durieu, Marconi and Igout.

 

[topdog]

Thanks for the tour through early photography. I hope there is some Wilhelm von Gloeden coming up.

Here is an "un-fig-leafed" Sandow.

Also, from your section on anonymous photographers - I don't know the photographer, but the model is Ernest Raynaud: French writer, poet and police commissioner.

 

[gorgik9]

Thanks for the tour through early photography. I hope there is some Wilhelm von Gloeden coming up.

Here is an "un-fig-leafed" Sandow.

Also, from your section on anonymous photographers - I don't know the photographer, but the model is Ernest Raynaud: French writer, poet and police commissioner.

Thanks a big bunch for the info on Ernest Raynaud! I've always thought 1) that the guy is incredibly handsome and sexy; 2) and that it's a pretty nice set of portraits by a good photographer!

Using the info about his name I've found out a bit more today:

1) That the dates of Raynaud are 1864-1936 (strange thing is that this is exactly the dates for my mother's paternal grandfather...)

2) That the pics of Raynaud in my post could possibly be made in the studio of French sculptor and painter Alexandre Falguière (1831-1900). I know that Falguière was one of the painters/sculptors who bought his own camera and used it in the studio as a tool for the artistic work. But the most important reason why Falguière is my guess is, that Raynaud published a collection of poems in 1889 titled "La Tour d'Ivoire" in which there is a set of sonnets titled - "A. Falguière" ! So there's obviously some kind of connection between them...

3) A couple of more pics of Raynaud:

About Sandow I think I've got the "un-fig leafed" pic somewhere on my computer, and I think it's a pic from an occasion when some wax sculptor was going to make a natural sized wax cast of him. Here's the result:

This wax cast is in a pretty sorry condition today:

 

[brmstn69]

Thanks for the tour through early photography. I hope there is some Wilhelm von Gloeden coming up.

Considering that much of his work featured boys of questionable age, with many obviously underage, I doubt it...

 

[Shelter]

Considering that much of his work featured boys of questionable age, with many obviously underage, I doubt it...

The Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory) has one of the greatest collections of photographs from Wilhelm von Gloeden. And it is open to the public. Do you think they will distribute pedophilia? And look at some of the old paintings where you can find totally nude boys (underage? - forbidden?). The photographs of Wilhelm von Gloeden will be assumed today as "ART". Why we cannot look at them the same way we are looking at the old paintings?!

 

[Shelter]

And sorry, a last little remark.

The boys in the age of 18 - 25 from 1900 and earlier are looking much more younger than the boys in the same age from today. So why we think they have been underage?

 

[topdog]

Considering that much of his work featured boys of questionable age, with many obviously underage, I doubt it...

The photos I have seen are a complete range of ages from middle age down to teens. They all have looked legal to me, but then again, people are careful to keep anything questionable off art archives. So maybe my exposure is to edited versions of his collection.

But there is plenty to see and talk about - and I don't know how you can avoid it. His work was head and shoulders above what anyone else was doing in the art world at the time both in quantity and quality - particularly including a sensuality without veering into pornographic. (No that there's anything wrong with that!)

 

[gorgik9]

There's more than one reason why I won't make any special post on Wilhelm von Gloeden's photography, that is: besides a couple of pics being his photographical version of Hippolyte Flandrin's painting "Figure d'Etude" from the 1830s, or to be even more accurate: his photo version of the 1887 engraving of Flandrin's oil painting. But other than that, no.

brmstn69 is correct that there are quite a few boys in von Gloeden's work who obviously are what we today would call "underaged", just as there are in many other photographer's work from the same era. Just as there are in so many painter's and sculptor's work from von Gloeden's or any other age.

OK my reasons for not making any separate post on von Gloeden are mainly two (besides what brmstn says) : 1) I want to stick with my original intentions to mainly post on art in the early modern Academic tradition + photography emerging out of this tradition, and besides von Gloeden's take on the Flandrin painting, he just doesn't belong in this context.

2) There are several vast digital archives on the internet not only on von Gloeden's work but also on his cousin Wilhelm von Plüschow, his assistent Gaetano d'Agata and von Plüschow's favourite model who later on started his own studio, Vincenzo Galdi.

Here are some links to some of these archives open to anybody interested:

- Wikimedia Commons catalogue on von Gloeden :Anon URL

- Wikimedia Commons catalogue on von Plüschow: Anon URL

- Link to the site of Andrej Koymasky: Anon URL