The Nude Male Body!

[gorgik9]

Academy and Art, part 5.

Francois-Edouard Picot (1786-1868)

Claude-Marie Dubufe (1790-1864)

Louis-Edouard Rioult (1790-1855)

Yet another take on the sleep of Endymion.

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824)

In my opinion Géricault was among the most powerful painters of his age, in particular his paintings of more or less nude men and of animals, mostly horses and felines (cats, leopards, tigers).

His great masterpiece has the title The Raft of the Medusa and it's a grizzly painting of an even grizzlier historical event: The Medusa was a French naval ship which sunk and the sailors and soldiers on board managed to get on a big raft. They sailed the open sea for weeks without any food and in the end started cutting into each others with axes and knives - they engaged in cannibalism and literally ate each others flesh. Géricault's large painting is among the darkest and most gruesome artworks in the history of French art. It's difficult not to interpret this painting as a political allegory over the state of French society and it's population in the years after Bonapart's fall.

Joseph-Ferdinand Lancrenon (1794-1874)

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)

Death of Sardanapalus.

Bernard Romain Julien (1802-1871)

Hippolyte Flandrin and his followers in photography.

Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864) painted the picture below in 1835-37 and its an odd mixture of Academic figure study and romantic landscape painting; on the one hand it's as the very formal title says a figure study (Figure d'Etude) with the model putting his young bum on a piece of cloth as a studio model would do if asked to pose sitting on a table or a model stand in the studio. But he doesn't sit in a studio- he sits on a rock at the shore of an intensly blue-greenish sea with a rocky islan in the far background.

The painting was aquired by the French state and in 1887 ordered an engraving to be made and published, so now this painting entered the age of mass reproduction, and not only that: In the early 20th century it would start becoming one of the more influential visual symbols of male homosexual identity.

Many photographers made their own versions inspired by Flandrin's image, and the very first as far as I know is a photo by Guglielmo Marconi made in 1869.

From the 1890's on we have many photographers but also a few painters having their own take inspired by the engraving. One of the first was American photographer Fred Holland Day (1864-1933) who was the first to use a black man as the model for the Flandrin figure.

Another photographer making early photo versions was German baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1831) who made a number of pictures around the turn of the century 1900.

German painter Hans Thoma (1839-1924) made this image titled "Einsamkeit" ("Solitude") about the same time as Holland Day and von Gloeden.

An important event to articulate the Flandrin figure as a symbol of male homosexual identity was when Adolf Brand (1874-1945) in 1906 advertised reproductions of Flandrins painting in his periodical for male homosexual culture "Der Eigene".

The next picture is a photo of bodybuilder Tony Sansone on the cover of his book "Modern Classics" published in the early 1930's. The photographer was Edwin F. Townsend.

I want to end this post with two pics by Robert Mapplethorpe from the early 1980's. The first is "Ajitto" 1981, the second "Phillip Prioleau" 1980.

 

[gorgik9]

Digression: Pompeji and Pornography.

The man who wrote and published the very first modern book about pornography using this word in the title was the French writer Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) and his book had the title "Le Pornograph" ("The Pornographer") published in 1769 with the telling and exhaustive subtitle: "A Gentleman's ideas on a project for the regulation of prostitutes, suited to the prevention of the misfortunes caused by public circulation of women." :whew:

It seems that Restif honestly but mistakenly believed that the word pornographer/pornography was a neologism of his own making, an opinion he reiterated a few years before his death. (We know he was mistaken since the composite expression "Porne Graphia" has a single occurrence in the Ancient Greek language in a 2nd century AD book titled "Learned Banquets" by the Greek writer Athenaios. "Porne" means "whore" and "Graphia" can mean either "writing" or "drawing/painting"; the trickier thing is that the composite expression could mean either "writing/painting about whores" or "writing/painting by whores".)

It's as important that the meaning Restif gave the term was "scholarly scientific writings on prostitution" and that he actually started a tradition of scientific writing on this topic among French and British scholars.

My simple point is that this is quite far from the meaning of the term we're used to take for granted.


Pornography; or: What was dug out in Pompeji.

We find the first occurrence in the English language of the word pornography with the modern meaning we're used to in the English translation 1850 of German archeologist and art historian Karl Otfried Müller's magnum opus "Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst" ("Handbook of the archeology of art") in which Müller briefly alludes to "the great numbers of obscene representations [...] to which mythology gave frequent occasion", and dubbed the producers of these representations "pornographers" ("Pornographen").

Now why did archeologists and art historians have so much to to with the inception of the modern interpretation of the concept of pornography? That's pretty strange, isn't it? It has a lot to do with what was dug out of the ground in the excavations of ancient Pompeji, starting in the mid 18th century. It wouldn't be very far from the truth to say that the concept of pornography we're used to started emerging when the little marbles statue of the god Pan fucking a nanny goat was dug out of the ground in 1758:

A serious moral an aesthetic problem emerged when large quantities of pictures, statues and many kinds of art objects with all kinds of explicit sexual motives were found in almost every room in every house in the city; the ideas of the kind of life lived by peoples in an ancient city believed by European scholars, antiquarians and art lovers before the excavations in Herculaneum and Pompeji were incredibly naïve and pale, as if ancient people didn't do much else than quoting heroic rhetoric, drinking water and shitting marbles.

But when these excavations had started it became obvious that ancient people had been at least as much into fucking and sucking as modern Europeans; oh dear, how awful X_X What should we do?

The portable obscene pieces were transported to a big cupboard in a special room under lock and key in the "Museo Borbonico" in Naples given the name "The Secret Museum". This collection got it's first systematic catalogue in 1866 with the title Pornographic Collection.

You could say that a two-floor structure of exclusion was erected: first the literal exclusionary ground floor structure in the museum room under lock and key; second the conceptual and metaphorical top floor structure, which is: the very concept of pornography with its modern meaning.

So what is pornography, really? First of all it's something utterly modern; secondly, it's all the representations that must be excluded from the general culture and be put under lock and key under some actual or metaphorical Secret Museum.


Porno-Archeology !

So let's take a look at the historical origins of the concept of pornography!

There were many statues and fresco paintings of the very popular god Priapus with his gigantic constant hard-on:

There were also very large numbers of fresco paintings with explicit sexual motives on the walls in many houses in Pompeji:

 

[gorgik9]

Spring break!

I will take a spring break in this thread for a few weeks, so I wont post the up coming weekend.

But maybe some of you would be interested in a link to the complete Carmina Priapeia, the Priapic Songs, with English translation? Here it is - the poems to the god with the constant gigantic hard-on, Priapus! Anon URL

 

[hhindd]

Digression: Pompeji and Pornography.
Wow it was a life style.

 

[gorgik9]

Digression: Pompeji and Pornography.
Wow it was a life style.

Glad you liked the post!!!

 

[hhindd]

You are broadening our knowledge no end xxxx I just wondered where that forn/animal duo would have been placed, publicly or privately?

 

[gorgik9]

You are broadening our knowledge no end xxxx I just wondered where that forn/animal duo would have been placed, publicly or privately?

I think there's at least two different questions wrapped up in one:

1) In ancient Pompeji: I guess you're talking about the small marbles statue of the Goat-God Pan duly fucking a nanny goat. Well this beautiful little piece of sculpture would most probably have been placed somewhere in the house of the wealthy Pompejian citizen who had commissioned it.

The really tricky thing is that we presuppose the distiction between two concepts - private and public - that actually didn't exist in ancient Roman society. Life was lived "in public" even when it was lived in your own house, in your family. Sex and art objects with sexual pictures was a "public" as anything else.

2) In 18th century Europe: But the little statue of Pan and the nanny goat was dug up from the ground in a society where the dichotomy of public and private was getting more and more important, and anything pertaining to nudity and sexuality must be "enclosed" in pure privacy. Hence, the little figure and hundreds of other erotic art object got shut away into the big cupboard in the special room in the Museo Borbonico in Naples.

Once again thanks for your appreciation and for the question!

 

[puckinla]

Who knew you could get a real education on this site! Thanks

 

[gorgik9]

Who knew you could get a real education on this site! Thanks

Thanks to yourself! I appreciate all kinds of comments very much!

 

[mikk33]

great thread. very interested in the 'public-private' dichotomy. Open house in the roman period with an outward looking view of the world and the 18thC 'hidden' life and public shame of eroticism.
Presumably religion is to blame for a false stricture placed on people's life?
Although art has always been a means of challenging the artificial controls of bourgeois religions. Presumably something to do with the 'enlightenment' too?
It's fascinating to see how viewing the same image changed over periods of time, when the image does not, or is replicated.
So the image is constant, but our views, morality and opinions, our 'ways of seeing' the image changes.

 

[gorgik9]

great thread. very interested in the 'public-private' dichotomy. Open house in the roman period with an outward looking view of the world and the 18thC 'hidden' life and public shame of eroticism.
Presumably religion is to blame for a false stricture placed on people's life?
Although art has always been a means of challenging the artificial controls of bourgeois religions. Presumably something to do with the 'enlightenment' too?
It's fascinating to see how viewing the same image changed over periods of time, when the image does not, or is replicated.
So the image is constant, but our views, morality and opinions, our 'ways of seeing' the image changes.

Hello mikk! Thanks for the comments!

I wanted to tell you and everybody else about what I've been doing the last few days: I've been collecting new material for a few new posts in this thread!

I'm not going to post in the upcoming weekend (Sunday 2 April), but probably next weekend (Sunday 9 April).

 

[gorgik9]

Art and Photography: Indoors,Outdoors.

Before I start writing in this post I want to give a direct link to a lecture on Queering Classical Art I posted a couple of days ago:
http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=551208

* * * *

In this and the following posts I'll continue in an earlier track : Photography used as an aid for artists. I'll start with an artist who - so to speak - kept his work mainly indoors and then continue with two painters who became members of the expanding cohort of outdoor painters in the wake of French Impressionism!

Jacques de Lalaing (1858-1917)

To be honest I don't know much about the Belgian-British sculptor and painter Lalaing, but I managed to find a nice collection of photos of nude models working in his studio in the 1880's-1890's.

Painting and photography en plein air:Two cases.

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)

There are many reasons why realist painter Thomas Eakins should be considered one of the most interesting American artists in the 2nd half of the 19th century, and one of these reasons would be that in the case of Eakins we get a very precise approximation of the distance between Paris, France, and US Philadelphia: the distance was a loincloth on a nude male art model!

As a young art student Eakins studied in the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris and, hence, was fundamentally trained in an artistic tradition where the study of the nude male body still was thought to be fundamental for all visual art; so Eakins as a student lived and breathed where it was taken for granted that a nude model just had to be NUDE! NOT with some kind of trousers on!

When Eakins came back to Philadelphia and later became a professor of painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in this city, these attitudes and ideas clashed with dominant mores in American Victorianism when he as an Academy professor removed a loincloth of one of the male models in his class. Scandal occurred.

In the following I want to basically show two kinds of things. First I'll show a small number of oil paintings by Eakins, and then a set of photos made by Eakins.

Let's start with one of his most famous paintings: Swimming (1885) (I'll soon get back to this picture!)

It's quite obvious that male nudity was one of Eakins more important motives. Here's a small set of painting beginning with Arcadia and followed by Wrestlers and Salutat!.

Eakins the outdoors artist and photographer.

Eakins became one of all artists in the wake of French impressionism who became inspired to take their art in the outdoors. Since he at the same time was bent on using photography as an aid in the creative process this meant he had to take his camera outdoors.

The first photos in the following set are from the swimhole where the action in my first Eakins painting happened!

Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929)

After finishing his education in the Slade Art School, London, and a long journey to Italy, Henry Scott Tuke came to live and work in Cornwall for the rest of his life, first in Newlyn, then moving to Falmouth a couple of years later.

I must confess there are few European painters working at the turn of the century 1900 I'm so genuinely fond of as Tuke; his pictures are so warm, so full of boyish joy!

It's easy to describe what the central motives in Tuke's art were: Boys and young men bathing, swimming, fishing and rowing on the shores nearby Falmouth; boys light clad, or almost nekkid. In Tuke's art there's such intense sunshine you wouldn't believe we're actually in England!

Tuke as photographer.

Tuke was -just like his elder contemporary Thomas Eakins - one of the painters interested in using photography as an aid for his creative processes.

Here's a set of Tuke photos!

 

[gorgik9]

Photography and Art / Photography as Art.

Earlier I've been talking about artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries using photography to aid and doent their creative processes, but at the same time (let's say about 1880-1920) there was another kind of discourse emerging: About photography as an art in its own right.

Illustrating anything printed and the rise of the "Kodaker".

In the early 1890s the world of photography and photographers was changing at a fast pace and the changes were multidimensional and multidirectional.

The first thing to fundamentally change the social, cultural and economic position of photography was the invention of the halftone plate in 1880, making it possible to reproduce photography in any kind of print medium. Suddenly we got photoillustrated books, journals, magazines, newspapers and posters. The newspapers illustrated with xylographies (wood engravings) would soon be a closed chapter of western history.

Also in the 1880s US inventor and entrepreneur George Eastman started in 1884 by inventing the first fully useable roll film, making it possible to get rid of the heavy, clumsy and fragile glass plates and - in just a few years - paving the way for film cameras, film projectors and cinema! (Think about that all my film buff friends on GH!)

In 1888 Eastman presented the first Kodak camera, or, if you like, the photography for you to press the button and for the Kodak company to do the rest - this is the start of popular amateur photography!

Pictorialists, the Linked Ring and Photo-Secessionists: The discourse on photography as an art.

But all photographers weren't comfortable with a future as either "Kodakers" or newspaper illustrators, and neither did they like the prospect of continuing as traditional studio photographers taking peoples portraits, so - then what?

The suggestion from a number of groups and movements would be: Photography should become a full blown visual art that can stand up to established genres of art like painting and engraving. This became the slogan of the Pictorialist movement, the Linked Ring Brotherhood and the Photo-Secession. But what did they really mean?

The various groups arguing for photography as a fine art positioned themselves on a bipolar scale:

To the left (so to speak) we find groups arguing that for photography to become an art this must mean that photography should closely mimick painting or engraving, but yet againg, this could mean pretty different things depending on what painterly style you would like to imitate.

In early British Pictorialism of the 1880s-1890s this tended to mean folksy genre painting in realist style; thus we have the pictorialism of Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) and Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (1853-1941):

But at the very turn of the century 1900 the popularity of Impressionist style painting was definitely ascending, in particular among photographers eager to engage in the many different complicated and time consuming print methods like gum bichromate print, cabro print, bromoil print, oil pigment print and platinum print.

Alfred Stieglitz.

Edward Steichen.

Alvin Langdon Coburn.

Frank Eugene.

While Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) as the founder of the Photo-Secessionist group in 1902, editor of the art journal "Camera Works" and the owner of "291 Gallery" in New York could be named as one of the most influential artists all categories in the first half of the 20th century in the US, it actually was Fred Holland Day (1864-1933) - Stieglitz only serious competitor to the position as the leader og US art photography - who was the first in the US to start talking about photography as a fine art. Here's his portrait!

Holland Day is of particular interest to us for two reasons - first beacuse his obviously eroticist interest in the nude male body; and second, because of his for its time very unusual interest for the nude male black body.

* * * * * * * * * * *

To the right on the bipolar scale I talked about above we find people insisting that to develop photography as an art you must strive to cultivate the properties UNIQUE for photography; hence, a position arguing for the opposite of pictorialists wanting to mimick painting.

When photographers arguing for the uniquely photographical "married" their position to a full blown formalist modernist aesthetics, this sounded the death knell of pictorialism; instead we got the Straight Photography Movement from about 1920 with photographers like Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams.

Paul Strand.

Edward Weston.

Imogen Cunningham.

Ansel Adams.

 

[Shelter]

Wonderful photos - I like most of all the photos from Ansel Adams. For me he is one of the world's best photographers of landscapes.

 

[gorgik9]

Wonderful photos - I like most of all the photos from Ansel Adams. For me he is one of the world's best photographers of landscapes.

I fully agree with you on Adams - fantastic landscape photographer!

 

[gorgik9]

Most probably I won't have the time to make my ordinary weekend posts in this thread in the followings weekends.

I've just got too much other business to care about this time of the year. One big thing is the annual income tax declaration...

 

[haiducii]

I've just got too much other business to care about this time of the year. One big thing is the annual income tax declaration...

Good luck and happy tax season!

 

[Shelter]

Most probably I won't have the time to make my ordinary weekend posts in this thread in the followings weekends.

I've just got too much other business to care about this time of the year. One big thing is the annual income tax declaration...

I know how you are feeling! :angry:

 

[gorgik9]

@haiducii & Shelter

Thanks for understanding what kind of pain I'm in during the following weekends :rofl::rofl::rofl:

 

[gorgik9]

Good luck and happy tax season!

Hrmmm...I think this is an image that almost could be out of Franz Kafka's novel "Der Prozess" / "The Process" :thinking: