Male Nudity Show Opens In Paris
A new exhibition in Paris explores the role of the male nude in art over several hundred years—from Jacques-Louis David to Robert Mapplethorpe. Sarah Moroz comments: ‘Female nudity is so omnipresent in art…that, as a society, we’re inured to a woman showing off her body. But the male nude, by contrast, has a tendency to go raunchy fast. The Musée d’Orsay seemed to sense this, and thus was swift to state, as a counter-offensive, that: “We must distinguish above all between nudity and the nude: a body simply without clothes, that causes embarrassment with its lack of modesty, is different from the radiant vision of a body restructured and idealized by the artist.”‘ That sounds like Artspeak: As Patty Duke once said about revealing French pics: “Nudies!”
