Male Nude

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from each sale of the magazine will go to charities supporting the LGBTQ+ charities and those fighting HIV. A powerful case study here may be found in Paula Winkler’s series Centrefolds, which investigated the art-historical role of the male nude and how the male could be viewed in accordance with the female gaze. As Winkler told the art publication Elephant: “The male nude has been a genre in photography ever since its early invention, but mostly from a gay perspective. I do love those images, I always have, but I felt as if they were not directed at me and this bothered me.”

Fast-forward to 1978, and Margaret Walters observed in her introduction to The Nude Male: A New Perspective that “the male nude is a forgotten subject. For most people the word nude conjures up the image of a naked woman — a pinup in a girlie magazine or a Venus de Milo. Over the last two hundred years or so, most artists interested in the human body have been obsessed by the female nude.” to traditions of male potency. The lower legs possess exaggerated, hardened calves (another symbol of male strength that the Taino produced by binding their lower legs with ligatures), which are here decorated with curvilinear designs. The skull-like head on the upper side of theHer own snaps of the male nude combine conventionally attractive and traditionally masculine bodies with a certain playfulness quite unlike the disengaged poses associated with the subject in classical art.

employ the Egyptian grid of proportions and the canonical frontal pose, with arms at sides and left leg advanced. Indeed, this early

The contemporary male nude — a new kind of performance

statue is the earliest Greek monumental sculpture type of the post-Bronze Age, and this example in New York’s Metropolitan Museum is one of the earliest. The inspiration is Egyptian: these early

Every bid submitted is treated as a maximum bid. You should always bid the maximum you are willing to Armed with a simple Polaroid camera, Lucas Samaras (b.1936) created a series of innovative and grotesque self-portraits in the tiny, confined space of his New York apartment. The emulsion of 1970s Polaroid film, protected under a layer of Mylar, remained wet and malleable for up to 24 hours (a feature Polaroid later corrected). After removing the Mylar, Samaras could manipulate the emulsion with a stylus or his fingers to create fantastic, often gruesome effects. Colored light and double exposures helped to heighten the drama of the distorted bodies he created. A visceral wave seems to ripple through the figure in

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In the case of multiple bidders placing the same maximum bid, the first person to place the maximum The male figure is contorted, his clenched fists pressed to his face and his toes clawed, clearly in the grip of the mind-altering drug. The underside of the stool reveals a skeletal ribcage that reinforces the association with dead ancestors, while the displayed sexual organs relate the It seems, then, that even as we look to the 2020s, engaging new possibilities are continuing to be uncovered for male nudity — in art, as in life. What part does this subject play in your own artistic practice, and are you intrigued by the dynamics of the nude across the gender divide? Feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. including some of the men who had posed for the photographs. In providing a context for Mapplethorpe’s photographs, Ligon’s aim was to "let the viewers sort it out". The viewer may choose just to look at the photos, or to read the texts as well and experience Ligon’s process of thinking about the work.