the Contemporary Male Nude in Art

I think I came in too fast with the idea for this blog. I wanted to promote awareness for the male nude but I didn’t have a strong plan to do so. Though I see/discover more contemporary artists who acknowledge drawing as a Serious Art on its own, the male nude doesn’t move away from the pinup/porn visual department. The Cock is mostly viewed as the male sex organ, porn symbol, PG rated. The Ancients regarded it with different eyes and I was trying to bring that idea forth. I confess, my own drawings were not sufficiently creative in this respect.

The male nude pose that I mostly encounter in contemporary visuals is the superhero pose or the city-office metrosexual, skinny, frustrated. I’ll continue to watch this.

The rest, as I said, is “here I am, hunky, beefy and here’d my dick!”.  My sense of Art refuses to be uplifted by such representations of the male nudity.

And then came Lucian Freud, which is an Artist I still have to digest, as he brought to the table a view which is larger than what I can take in such a short time. The immediate “diagnostic” is that his Art manages to void me of anything I already have in myself, transport me to his world and therefore fills me with new sensations and emotional “understanding”. And this is what I want Art to do for me.

As the Alchemists used to say, a Painting must look at you, to make you look at her.