Human Bodies: the Male Nude

I was recently asked why artists, and some art historians, spent so much time focused on the female body in art.

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No doubt there are some fairly prosaic answers. My own considered response would be that so many important discourses pivot around the female form. Whatever the truth is - in any art gallery, in any web search, you will find more female nudes than male nudes.

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Why should this be? I was part of a life drawing class for a short time. Some of the women students shared with me that they preferred drawing from female models because there were more curves. I’m not saying they're right; I’m just recounting what they said. And there is little doubt that the lines of the female figure (in French silhouette) have long been associated with ideas of Beauty. It is for Freudians and others to consider how far this is conditioned by male projections on to those very lines. As for my fellow students, they told me: “Men are more chunky”.

 

Female nudes in art have also been used to convey idealised values of beauty, virtue and motherhood. Occasionally they have also been used to image figures of fear or condemnation: the hag, the whore, the witch. Do male nudes attempt the same? Female nudes have unquestionably been presented as ‘the erotic’. What about male nudes? And erotic for whom?

 

This is a vast subject.

 

Let’s look at a few male bodies in art.