Il nudo maschile

Speranza

Even since Manet's day SEXUAL IMAGERY has been regularly used by avant-garde artists, as means of asserting their simultaneous rejection of social and artistic conventions.

Sometimes this had slightly comict results, since the opponents of advanced art were apt to discover SEXUAL allusions where NONE EXISTED, particularly in non-figurative works.

There was a paralllel tendency to find political, and more particularly left-wing programmes, in abstract paintings and sculpture.

A closer examination of the question, however, soon demonstrates that both EROTIC and political impulses have in the long run been the enemies of abstraction.

An artist possessed by either is trying to convey a specific message and if he wishes that message to be effective is in the end forced to return to the body -- qua recognisable imagery.

Yet artists in the arly years of modernism did seem instinctively to obey certain taboos, even at moments of great sexual candour.

Remarkably little of their imagery is based on the nude MALE rather than the nude FEMALE.

Part of this may have been due to the fact that the great majority were clearly heterosexual in their inclinations, and the shock value of a great deal of mdoern art is also to be found in the circumstances that it is autobiographical -- a rhetorical assertion of the rights of the self impossible in earlier epochs, even in that of Delacroix and Bryon.

But a few barriers remained, and even the most rebellious were held back by them.

The chief acknowledge a paradox -- even those most secure in their own non-homosexual identity from experimenting with images of naked men in the same fashion that Picasso experimented with images of naked women.