(Photo of phallic and homoerotic artworks, piled all over an apartment — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Today’s find on Pinterest, from the Coveteur site (in its own words: “a multifaceted lifestyle brand that brings you insider access to the people shaping today’s cultural conversation”), “Inside an NYC apartment with a most unusual art collection” by Leah Faye Cooper on 1/17/19:
(Another warning about male genitals in fine art)
Encountered on Pinterest on 10/29, a poster of a stunning wooden sculpture of Icarus by Ukrainian artist Bogdan Goloyad:
(Warning: some full-frontal male nudity in fine art, not at all raunchy, but nevertheless not to everyone’s taste.)
In my e-mail yesterday, from Rod Williams, about:
an album of male nudes in art, posted by Christa Zaat, a remarkable Dutch woman who has assembled an enormous online archive of art across the centuries, and posts images daily on FB. She posted this link [to her trove of male nudes; there’s another of female nudes] on FB a couple of days ago.
Along with this note from CZ:
It’s all about: Male Nudes!
Conversationally, naked and nude are pretty much interchangeable. However, many people, especially in the artistic community, do say there are differences. The differences can be seen as follows: Nude: To be without clothes, or bare, in a setting that the subject feels safe and comfortable, and they are not being represented in a sexually accessible manner. They are unclothed bodies that are intended to represent natural beauty, not to create impulses. Naked: To be without clothing, or bare, in a setting that the subject would be embarrassed, left feeling exposed and defenseless, or to be presented in a sexual manner.
Several of CZ’s examples have already appeared on this blog (and several more are in the pipeline). Here I’ll supply three early 19th-century examples of oil paintings on canvas from CZ’s trove: two character studies, one meditation on the male body.
Encountered on Pinterest on 10/28, in a collection of mostly homoerotic images — Pinterest strives to cater to your interests, and mine aren’t hard to suss out — this painting, identified as being an early 19th-century work by Russian painter Alexander Ivanov (an artist completely unknown to me):
(#1) My first response was that the painting was truly creepy, looking to modern eyes like high-class kiddie porn: a beautiful young man (wearing a laurel wreath, therefore noble or divine), naked but with drapery over his lower body (his gaze fixed dreamily on something in the middle distance), embracing a totally naked young teenage boy (whose eyes are closed, apparently in enjoyment), while another fully naked boy, considerably younger, plays a wind instrument (apparently an aulos, an ancient Greek double-reed) for his companions’ pleasure; a lyre hangs from a tree in the background
A gauzily Romantic painting, set in a rough scenic wilderness, apparently of some classical or mythological subject in which music plays a significant role. Ok, so the beautiful young man is probably the god Apollo, famously skilled at the lyre (bonus: by far my favorite of the pantheon of ancient Greece and Rome). In this painting as the god of music and also the protector of the young. The boys are naked because they are true pre-pubertal innocents. Or just because the scene is set in the Arcadian wilderness, suffused with divine presence, a territory in which the gods and those within their aura have no need for the garb of ordinary mortals. Well, certainly not in artworks; consider the famous Apollo of the Belvedere statue (my 9/23/24 posting “Godlike beauty” has a section on the Belvedere Apollo and his full-frontal divinity).
So I tracked down #1: it’s Alexander Ivanov’s Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus making music and singing (painted during 1831-34), which I’ll call AH&C for short. At this point, things just got puzzling. The Russian painter Ivanov (1806-58) was new to me; he turns out to have a remarkable life history (summarized below). And then there’s the scene in #1.
The 11/12 Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip takes us to the Merriam-Webster company gym, where the lexicographers get defined:
(#1) It’s pun day at the definition factory, with bodybuilders’ definition punning on lexicographers’ definition
Confronted with a pun strip, I’ll usually go on to cite definitions from NOAD (or similar sources) for the punning expression and its model, and I’ll do a version of that here, getting at the expression well-defined by starting from the verb define, going on to the adjective defined (modified by the degree adverbial well ‘thoroughly’ in well-defined), and then steaming on to the noun definition and the conceptually related verbs cut and shred.
But what I find on this little trip has nothing at all from the vocabulary of bodybuilding. Not in NOAD, where I start (because I can access this dictionary on my computer with a few keystrokes); not in the OED (no surprise; its on-line version for this vocabulary is still antique); not — oh wonderful irony — in the on-line Merriam-Webster; not in AHD5; and not (to my astonishment) in GDoS. So for the bodybuilding vocabulary, I’ve cobbled together definitions from various bodybuilding sources. But apparently bodybuilding is so esoteric a world that its vocabulary has not yet reached mainstream lexicography. (A surprise to me. I’m not part of the bodybuilding world, but I have, yes, bodybuilder friends, also friends who are into bodybuilding competitions, and friends who have a taste for bodybuilders; and meanwhile, the gay male world and the world of physique magazines have long been intertwined, so I’m familiar with the bodybuilding world.)
… and boy-foot bear with teak of Chan … no, no, Kent McCord and the Nelsons’ Rick, that’s the ticket.
(Tales of male-male desire and sexual acts — so this posting will be edgy for some readers — but not particularly vivid tales, and the photos are there for faces and torsos, not genitals)
Rick and Kent, figures of attractive, desirable masculinity — the first from my teenage years (there was a lot I didn’t understand in the Rick, or teenage hard-on, years, during which Ricky got me off, a lot), the second from young adulthood (it was during the Kent years that I gained some self-knowledge and entered into serious, life-long relationships with other men; suddenly it was important that Kent was not only a really hot guy as Officer Jim Reed on Adam-12, but that he also presented himself as a sturdy, dependable and empathetic nice guy, so an eminently satisfactory object of adult lust). Note: I was perfectly aware that Rick and Kent were, by all accounts, uncomplicatedly straight (as it happens, they became buddies when they worked in tv together); what I had in my head were fantasy Rick and Kent, and their kisses were sweeter than wine.
Now I tell you that Rick, Kent, and I were / are all essentially the same age; Rick 4 months older than me, Kent 2 years younger. (Rick died in 1985, but Kent is still alive, and he’s a great-looking 82-year-old.)
And while they’re interesting as objects of desire (on tv and elsewhere, notably from the 1950s through the 1970s), they get a posting here because of a characteristic facial gesture that they share: the spread-lip smile, a feature of Rick and Kent that large numbers of straight women and gay men find powerfully attractive (and that, no doubt, makes many straight men envious).
(Entertaining and enlightening, I hope, but definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday, in my posting “Beau Butler’s shirt” (about shirt-lifting as sexual invitation, and gay porn actor Beau Butler as a practitioner), I ended with a photo of BB engaged instead in shirt-spreading (or -opening), to display his muscular torso (muscular but not ripped like a bodybuilder’s):
(#1) [from the caption there:] … a suave but intense BB
An unusual presentation for BB; he’s characteristically earthy, cheerily (even playfully) crude, brazenly shirtless, bearing with him an aura of powerful male sweat. But the guy in this photo is, as I said, suave — with styled hair (oh! much browner than in other photos, where it’s definitely black), elegant eyebrows, very light facial hair, and (another oh!) piercingly blue eyes. Meanwhile, the handsome light lavender shirt he’s spreading is much more stylish than the t-shirts BB wears when he’s not going shirtless. Even the shirt-spreading gesture is a smoother move, less overtly sexual, than the shirt-lifting of BB’s other photos in yesterday’s posting.
The anomalies pile up. Is this, then, actually BB, or is it a simulacrum of him, presumably AI-generated?
Almost surely a simulacrum, as I’ll argue in a bit. But first, one more (genuine) photo of BB — there are tons of them, mostly with him naked or minimally clothed, available in copies all over the net; most of them are clearly from studios he’s worked for — with him, wearing only boots and socks, doing a crude tush push, jokily advertising his availability as a really fine fuck. Managing to be really goofy and really arousing at the same time. To compare with #1 above.
