Hominum Corpus.
Questioning and statements about
the representation of Male nudity in Art.

Before subscribing to it, I wondered about the inclusion in this chapter of works representing human nudity in general, and particularly that of males. On this specific topic, a precedent exists in my work of several paintings inspired by Joni Mitchell's music and writings, dating from the years 1970-1980 and which feature men in the nude. But I never had any doubts or hesitations about this series, since I find that the representation of male nakedness is legitimate there in relation to its inspiring source. Indeed, the chronicles of love, desire and the thirst for another mate's soul told by Joni Mitchell with the genius that everyone knows, her reports of resulting intimate wars and of those batches of victories and defeats born from desire (and sometimes from passion), could give birth to this type of interpretation. They could. So they did.
In addition, it has always been out of the question that this body of work could ever negotiate with considerations that were external to it. In my view, it must be taken for what it is -or not at all. The works inspired by Joni Mitchell's musical and literary heritage represent the foundation stone of all that I ever did later in painting, and of all that I became both personally and artistically. As such, I consider that they must be seen without compromise by anyone interested in my work. As for those who have little or no interest at all in the latter, they are not concerned by the current debate, obviously and by definition.

However, in relation to the 1990s works and more recent ones featured in this "Outsiders" chapter, I wondered more : should they be shown, or kept hidden? To keep them in the shade amounts to a painful censorship that no author imposes on himself joyfully. Incidentally, doing so would also amount to some sort of cowardice that denies the confrontation with oneself and how one sees things (nonetheless, any artist’s basic vocation, most undoubtly). A renunciation too, in front of major societal pressures. And finally, a capitulation to the fear one feels in the face of others’ gaze and judgment. But for a male artist, showing bare men in his art is not innocuous, and inevitably leads to a risk of categorization, and therefore of marginalizing his artistic production’s wholeness. To anyone who would doubt that, I strongly advise giving it a try by showing work of this nature to "decision-makers" and other "leaders" in the Art Market world – whether of a Contemporary kind, or not. The comments then uttered would quickly shake any certainties about the harmlessness of showing naked men and male genitals in some artistic work. And at this stage of the observation, it seems useful to me to clarify that the context which invites the male artist to apply self-censorship is neither imaginary nor the fruit of an out-of-control paranoia. Because it is clear that the representation of male anatomy has never ceased to be perceived as intrusive and disturbing by many, and especially when the author is a man. And this for a simple, obvious and clear motive : the representation by a man of the male anatomy and its eroticization, is immediately associated with male homosexuality. This reflex may seem logical, if not systematically accurate (this depending on the complexity of the concerned individuals, and on that of the situations they encounter). But above all why should this be a problem, one could be tempted to wonder? Well, reality shows that it is a problem : objectively, this sort of representation arouses a visceral rejection from an overwhelming majority of men (and also from some women, but to a lesser extent). And the fact that in many cases this majority might express its disavowal and its rejection in an unconscious and oblique way, not necessarily formulated and often only induced, does not make any difference with the result.

Evidence, if it were needed, is that whenever the artistic representation of a male nude figure is cleared of the suspicion of indulgence or interest in homosexuality, because being produced by a female artist, that work is then immediately and only analyzed for what it is : a fair work of art, or a poor one. Without any prejudices then. In this specific case, it is only at a second perception stage that the viewer identifies that representation with a potential evocation of a more or less accepted type of sexuality. So it is at this stage only that the viewer might express a more or less virulent rejection of it -or not. This process is a fact ; not a fantasy ; and it can be documented.
Let’s consider for example the great South African artist Marlène Dumas's work. The latter is sufficiently provocative in its representation of male nudity (and not of that only, the artist being interested in all bodies and all sexualities in her own frontal and unfiltered way), that one could think its author did meet consistent difficulties with Cultural Institutions and the Art World which have the power to promote it. Or with the galleries and dealers whose mission is to market it. But when it comes to Marlène Dumas’s work, the opposite happened. Of course, it should be noted that the artist's technique and her style have certainly contributed to defusing the crudeness and frontality inherent in some of her works, softening their point and giving a "poetic" look -not mentionning an "artistic" one- to their sometimes outrageous content (if not downright obscene, as being perceived by some). Making it thus acceptable to as many people as possible. One thinks here of Dumas' Fingers series (01, 02) or some Male Study variations of hers (01, 02, 03, 04 et 05).

Hence, if it seems difficult to deny that rejection of an art work showing male nudity is a question that definitely arises when its author is a man, the same question vanishes when a representation of akin sort is carried out under a female eye’s artistic auspices. Indeed, as inappropriate and repulsive the male anatomy might remain to some men’s eyes, its representation in this case is perceived through a decodable, and therefore tolerable filter. Primarily and instinctively, the male viewer of the work perceives what he sees as some woman's gaze over a man. This helps putting things in perspective and back in their place, that is within an acceptable and welcome heterosexual norm. A criterion which thus becomes the preamble to the male viewer’s analysis of the work, and ultimately its finality : the artistic representation of male nudity by a woman becomes indisputably the only vector through which this interpretation can be accepted by the male viewer, in the starting assumption of course that the represented subject cannot stir his feelings in any ways because it is understood that the viewer displays no interest in the matter. This postulate favorably clears the male admirer of concerned work from the suspicion that others might then possibly nurture about his sexuality. Because if a favorable opinion of that work is expressed as such by him, it then could make people wonder about his real or imaginary interest in male sex and thus about his possible benevolence towards the homosexual fact. On the other hand, when a work of art's author is a woman, that work makes these questioning and suspicion irrelevant, or at least neutralizes them to a certain extent.

In a nutshell, the reception reserved for above mentioned Marlène Dumas' works teaches that the reception of a work is quite different if the male representation in an artistic process is proposed by a woman, or by a man ; and it matters little whether the latter practices his art in painting, sculpture, photography or any other discipline. Regarding this difference in reception and treatment, the example of the artist Tom of Finland is quite instructive : the Finnish man devoted all of his work to a radiant and uninhibited glorification of male sex both at the level of an hypertrophied physical representation, as of explicit homosexual practices ranging from a vision of joyful eroticism to pornographic renderings as raw as assumed, and everything in between.
Of course, we shall not escape here the eternal idle debates handing out good marks to the art of Marlène Dumas and bad ones to that of Tom of Finland (and vice versa -but much more rarely).
With, as the main argument put forward and justifying the difference in treatment reserved to the two artists’ respective work, the fact that Tom of Finland's art deserves to be judged as being minor compared to that of Marlène Dumas because of its monothematic conceptualism and its formal monolithism, both transversal to the totality of his work. A parameter which objectively spares that of the South African artist.
But the argument does not hold, given that many artists have also devoted themselves within their overall work to resolutely monothematic research.  With a formal production that is objectively linear and globally non-evolving, even repetitive sometimes, and this in a totally assumed way. However, that did not diminish these productions’ merits, and reputedly never prevented the Institution and/or the Market from including these artists in the pantheon of the greatest artists, recognized and celebrated as such.
Because if the criterion of evolution of the work must really constitute the alpha and the omega of the recognition of the quality of an artist’s production (an hypothesis where Picasso should represent -rightly or wrongly- the beacon of eclecticism, exploration and innovation, and therefore a characteristic which did ensure his work the passport to eternal consideration), some masters such as Pollock, Mondrian, Yayoi Kusama, Claude Viallat and Alechinsky (a non exhaustive list here), presumably enjoy an equivalent consideration, but with a production that has never been really renewed or diversified, and in any case no more and no less than that of Tom of Finland, both conceptually and formally.
One is therefore dealing with something other than an objective evaluation from the artistic world based on the qualitative criterion of the renewal of content and form, regarding some artistic output.
And in the case of Marlène Dumas and Tom of Finland, it should be noted that regarding a factual equivalence at some point in the treated subjects between both works but a huge difference of form between them, the most scabrous sexual representations to the credit of one are rightly perceived and sanctified by art critics, cultural institutions, galleries and art dealers as part of an undeniable artistic process.
But the same figurations, interpreted by Tom of Finland (on the whole of his work) or Robert Mapplethorpe (at given times in his career, and concerning some of his works), are assimilated to pure lust and perversion, a gratuitous and unhealthy provocation, a revealer of the abnormality and the transgressive depravity of these authors, in short the panoply of clichés and scarecrows that a vast majority spontaneously persists in attributing to male homosexuality, all cultures and religions combined.

This is how these celebrations of male sex are immediately put away in the drawers which the pressure exerted by the societal majority reserves for them : the drawers of silence and oblivion, in which they are condemned to be locked because of their parentage to a sexual status that society, as a whole, tolerates at best. Sometimes legally protects. But in any case never encourages. At worst, a status that society smears and defames in order to guarantee its marginalization and disqualification, policies leading at the final stage to its outright prohibition and the persecutions and murdering that go with it : 01 / 02 / 03 / 04 / 05 / 06 / 07 / 08 / 09 / 10 / 11 / 12.

As to every rule there are of course exceptions, Tom of Finland’s art nowadays enjoys a visibility that the occult or assumed ostracism which he was the victim of for so many decades did not augur. Tom of Finland’s art now appears in the institutional collections of prestigious North American or Northern European museums, and has been exhibited by a few well established galleries there - but much less elsewhere in the world, as it should be noted. The David Kordansky Contemporary Art Gallery based in Los Angeles must be saluted for the intelligence, courage and talent with which the Tom of Finland: Pen and Ink 1965 - 1989 exhibition was presented within its walls in 2021. Similarly, an event such as the Masculine / Masculine. The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day exhibition organized by Paris' Musée d’Orsay in 2013 / 2014, has found its place and its dimension within the "official" artistic landscape (at least that of France), in particular because of its excellence. But it remains an isolated and ephemeral "UFO", and a priori was not intended to brandish any manifesto, far from it. Its intentions were mainly to show and document the reality and the beauty of the masculinities through their differences - which was much to its credit. But in doing so and within the framework thus established, some limits to the exercise were set in spite of Orsay Institution's good intentions, and through no will of its own. That is, as a result, the assimilation of the operation to a simple cultural alibi the purpose of which was to show naked men to those who like that. Of course, this pessimistic observation does not ignore that Art, through what bequeathed to us by classical, modern and contemporary painting and sculpture or photography, has never ceased to emancipate itself from avowed or subterranean hostility that the representation of the male nudity (and by extension, that of the homosexual fact and its aesthetic codes), has always triggered. Michel-Ange, Caravaggio, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Jean Cocteau, Jacques-Louis David, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Pierre & Gilles, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring (to name only few) were witnesses and actors in this fight, and some of their works its milestones.

Consequently, any artist concerned by that question wonders at a given moment in his path on the relevance of bringing his own stone to that fight -had it only the size and the importance of a grain of sand. Hence risking to expose his whole work to a labeling as restrictive and distorted as "homo" or "gay" art. This grading has the immediate effect of marginalizing his work, with the inconvenience to excluding it from the visibility usually granted to anything that is not stamped and classified in that category. A categorization which obviously reduces and amputates. But more than that, which is so blatantly stupid. Seriously, would anyone sane qualify the Olympia by Manet as being "straight" art, under the pretext that the painting of this splendid and lascivious woman is that of a heterosexual man? Of course not, and Manet was never put in any "straight art" drawer by anyone, for the mere reason that fortunately the lattter never existed. However, everybody knows what symmetrically happens on the opposite side, where drawers do exist for the concerned artist, whose artistic road does not lead there over any mythical rainbow, but directly to a first class funeral. Because it is a fact : to avoid the pitfall of stigma and labeling, the only alternative for the male artist who represents naked men and/or who eroticizes man’s anatomy, is to practice self-censorship, keeping in the shade the works that could cause a restrictive categorization of his art. Then weighs in the balance the thorny decision to show research which certainly will leave many undeterred and unmoved, will perhaps seduce some, but certainly will displease viscerally a vast majority of beings. Concerning the latter, they will reject what they see whatever those works' artistic merits might be. Because these merits must remain invisible due to the viewers' taboos resulting from their sexual orientation, and those potentially inherited from their education. Then the coalition of nature and nurture ultimately conditions the individual’s tolerance threshold. His or her open-mindedness is like a focus lens watching the world, eventually controled by a mental diaphragm which opens and closes according to the perceived theme. Thus modeling in the end a global conception of life, that slaloms during a lifetime between the totems of the standard norm, and the scarecrows of forbidden territories.

At the end of internal debates crossed by above questionning and statements, my own concept of human existence fortunately provided me with its own answers : my catalogue's concerned works did not deserve to be discarded because of any prudish hypocrisies. Anyway, these do not cope easily with the fundamental freedoms that Art in its essence claims, when it intends to protect and promote a free vision. A free vision which seduces or disturbs. And for certain minds more enlightened and curious than others, which seduces precisely because of the challenges it sparks.

I have therefore included in this section a set of works celebrating the male body because I appreciated them of course accordingly to the quality that I attributed them -rightly or wrongly-, but also because I measured their importance in my path and in the evolution of my work.

But out of intellectual honesty, I must add that what motivated also my decision to include these works in this chapter was the consideration of their status as witnesses of an era. That born of the great upheavals of society which sounded the death knell of the "Glorious Thirty". The Seventies' parenthesis was the epiphany of this period, and clearly got to an end if we consider current Puritanism's dictatorship, which progressively made its hideous come back during the decades following the Seventies, until its ultimate triumph of today. This vanished era favored the challenge of codes and prohibitions linked to nudity and sexuality, in the latter's whole spectre of expressions. Shame of body and sex (which resulted from dictates and obscurantist totalitarian dogmas imposed by religions mainly) got prohibited, and temporarily ceased to be the previously imposed rule. This willing libertarian era plagued this shame to the rank of synonymous with the bankruptcy of thought. It ridiculed bigotry, and it exposed ugly archaisms conveniently disguised under the virtuous drags of "Tradition", "Morality and Religion" for what they were : shackles and stifles of the human soul and its creative fruition.

It is obvious to me that my representations of men, male nudity and sensuality pay tribute to this era’s state of mind. They are its legitimate children, and while observing that times have changed, they intend to not take into account the rise of politically-correct thinking and the manifestations of intolerance that characterize our present times. Thus standing for what they believe in and for what they are at heart : some committed and uninhibited "Outsiders".

In conclusion, I would add that these representations bet on the intelligence, the reflection and the quest for Universalism of those who watch them.
Because it seems to me that the vocation of art is to be a link. Art is a bridge. Art is otherness. Art is a hand reaching out to the other, not a clenched fist against the other.
It is for that reason that any form of willingly labeled art, brandished like an identity flag by a community claiming to be impermeable and voluntarily excluding itself from the world by posture or ideology, is more akin to cultural sclerosis than to an art form to me. Of course, I take into account that in our world as it is, the violence of the rejection and the hostility shown by certain human groups towards others, because of what the latter are by nature -and not by choice-, inevitably leads to communitarianism. Then for many, the latter becomes in this case the ultimate bulwark against discrimination, insult and threat. A haven that provides the necessary mutual aid to survive and not sink. But one must try and find the strength and wisdom to overcome these divisions, because they are only the stigmata of absurd ideologies, illegitimate human flaws and meaningless separatist impasses. Art’s vocation is to be exhibited, by everyone and in front of everyone. That creates an obligation for an artist to expose oneself accordingly, thus helping to break down barriers. Not to consolidate existing ones or create new ones.
In art should be able to flourish all the free gazes of men and women opening honestly and without prejudices on life, in other words on the diversity of human Beauty in all its representations.
And none of the gazes whose vocation is to celebrate this Beauty deserves to be disqualified. Trussed up.

Switched off.