There’s a controversial new exhibit now on view in Vienna. The museum had to recently censor its ads around the city… just because they feature an artwork by Pierre & Gilles with three fully-frontally nude soccer players encircled by victorious confetti. See, we’re quite accustomed to the female nude in art. But men? Scandal!
Presenting, the Leopold Museum’s Nude Men, an “unprecedented” and “long overdue exhibition on the diverse and changing depictions of naked men from 1800 to the present.” From the Renaissance’s ripped, pants-less, glassy-eyed slabs of masculine perfection to Bruce Nauman’s ’80s frantic drawings of a semi-transparent, erect male silhouettes in a jagged can-can line, from Paul Cézanne to Andy Warhol to Egon Schiele — the museum’s all-star lineup and a varied body of work explores the changes over time in “the concept of beauty, body image and values” of the male nude. And here they are: All the nudes, none of the fig leafs.
Pierre & Gilles, Vive la France, 2006 © Privatsammlung, Courtesy Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont
Andy Warhol, Querelle, 1982 © Privatsammlung/ VBK, Wien 2012
François-Léon Benouville, Achills Zorn, 1847 © Musée Fabre de Montpellier
Gilbert & George, Spit Law, 1997 © Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris • Salzburg
Egon Schiele, Preacher (Self-Portrait), 1913 © Leopold Museum, Wien, Inv. 2365
Thomas Ruff, nudes vg 02, Ed. 3/5, 2000 © Private collection Cofalka, Austria/with the kind support of agpro – austrian gay professionals © VBK, Wien 2012
Elmgreen & Dragset, Shepherd Boy (Tank Top), 2009 © Courtesy Galleri Nocolai Wallner / VBK Wien 2012
Paul Cézanne, Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait), 1910 © Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel
Bruce Nauman, Untitled (Five Marching Men), 1985 © Friedrich Christian Flick Collection / VBK Wien 2012
Louise Bourgeois, Fillette (Sweeter Version), 1968, cast 1999 © Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland © VBK, Wien 2012