Male trouble
May. 15th, 2007 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beelikejI got you with the subject-title didn't I? That's exactly what happened to me when I noticed this book in the shop: I had to buy it;) I've been reading it the past week(s). I had some trouble getting through the preface, but when the first chapther called Joe Camel "an amalgam of penis and testicles" I knew it would be interesting to go on;)
Author Abigail Solomon-Godeau tries to answer the question: "Why did the male nude dominate French art throughout the French Revolution and then largely disappear?" Ahem. I've always wanted to know that. Luckily she uses a lot of pictures ofnekkid men paintings to illustrate her thesis. And a lot of big words, so it's very educational. *innocent face*
I wanted to properly link to a review I found, but since that page has a lot of annoying pop-ups I'm gonna paste the complete article here. For your convenience I'll post the links to some of the paintings outside the cut, so you don't have to browse through all the text to get to the pretty;)
original review link to article below for Art in America by Sue Taylor
Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, by Abigail Solomon-Godeau hardcover (paper-back)
Why is Joseph Bara, fallen soldier of the Revolution in Jacques-Louis David's painting of 1794, depicted stark naked? And why, with his pale skin, long hair and tiny rosebud mouth, does he look like a girl? The peculiarities of David's unfinished tribute have long been acknowledged but hardly explained. Now, in her fascinating account of French Neo-Classicism, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, Abigail Solomon-Godeau suggests an answer for this oddly feminized image and many others by David and his epigones. Just as women were banished from public life and their revolutionary gains rescinded in an antifeminist backlash under the Jacobin Republic (1792-94), girlish male nudes like Bara proliferated in painting and sculpture. Beautiful male bodies abound in visual art of the period continuing through the Empire (1804-14), in the delicate forms of Ganymede, Eros, Narcissus. Masculinity emerges in two varieties, with virile pugilists like the Horatii swearing their oaths while elsewhere lovely males lie sleeping, dying, or otherwise passively on display. Alert to the contemporaneous suppression of women's political presence on the national stage, Solomon-Godeau proposes that these languishing boy-bodies represent the return of the feminine repressed.
Her thesis, however, is no simple matter of a social cause and its pictorial effect. A professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Solomon-Godeau takes into account many determining aspects of the masculine Neo-Classical beau ideal, including the era's anti-Rococo reaction, artistic training, antique models and pervasive esteem for the esthetician J.J. Winckelmann, with his famous enthusiasm for comely boys in both marble and the flesh. While she avoids both present-day notions of homosexuality and speculations about the proclivities of individual artists, Solomon-Godeau describes a homosocial world of cultural production without women. It is intriguing to learn that winners of the Prix de Rome, who enjoyed five-year residencies at the Mancini palace, were not allowed to bring their wives. They lived and worked side by side with other men, under the direction of male instructors, studying nude male models, producing art works intended for male audiences. Paintings by Louis-Leopold Boilly and Horace Vernet of artists' studios (1798 and 1821, respectively) show all-male gatherings characterized by friendly sport and fraternal discourse. Passionate friendships often developed among these artists and men of letters; given women's unequal access to education, male-female relationships could hardly offer equivalent intellectual satisfactions.
The patriarchal world of la vertu male from which women were all but excluded in French Neo-Classicism both reflects an ideology of gender and reaffirms it, "thereby naturalizing," Solomon-Godeau explains, "male dominance and female subordination." With femininity effectively elided and assimilated, masculinity prevails in the cultural imaginary in both heroic and/or feminized forms. A trenchant example of this dynamic is seen in Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson's Sleep of Endymion (1791). In the myth, Diana, smitten with the handsome shepherd, sends him dreams to keep him asleep--and available for her caresses. Girodet, however, omits the goddess from his composition, substituting a moonbeam that falls on the bare body of Endymion. The dreamer is gazed upon by no woman but by a winged Zephyr, a naked boy who smiles at the vulnerable spectacle before him. Typically, Girodet's contemporary commentators disavowed the erotic charge of this painting, applying formulaic standards of "truthfulness" and "poetic invention" to an image of same-sex desire.
With its dual paradigms of masculinity, the stalwart Brutus and the sweet erotes, Neo-Classical art addressed its male spectators on multiple levels; admiration, delectation and narcissistic identification were possible responses to the excessively sexed bodies on offer. Perhaps insecure viewers could be reassured by one remarkably consistent feature of even the brawniest of these nudes--the diminutive size of their genitals. Solomon-Godeau, like Leo Steinberg before her, dares not only to notice such a phenomenon but to ponder its significance. A small penis was the esthetic ideal in the classical world, where magnitude and rigidity were signs of animality not manliness; the French Academy transmitted the antique canon of proportions, but Solomon-Godeau astutely observes the compensatory props that invariably embellish otherwise daintily endowed heroes in Neo-Classical painting: strategically placed daggers, swords, scabbards and lances serve as supplements, and illustrate for her the Lacanian disparity between the penis and the phallus. "While the authority of the phallus may well be vested in the image of ideal masculinity," she states, "the power of patriarchy is so much in excess of its anatomical representative that the actual organ fails to carry its symbolic weight."
Summary: Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson's Sleep of Endymion and the work of Jacques Louis David are the basis for most of Solomon-Godeau's theory about the abundance of beautiful male bodies on display in this particular period. She explains how the art in this time and place -and other patriarchal societies- is mostly homosocial in origine, if not homoerotic. She shows how the masculine ideal, whether in the guise of virile hero or passive youths (then AND now!) raises important questions about the fashioning of masculinity itself.
I'm on page 145 of 254, my favorite paintings -so far- are by Francois-Xavier Fabre. Check out theguys art!
Author Abigail Solomon-Godeau tries to answer the question: "Why did the male nude dominate French art throughout the French Revolution and then largely disappear?" Ahem. I've always wanted to know that. Luckily she uses a lot of pictures of
I wanted to properly link to a review I found, but since that page has a lot of annoying pop-ups I'm gonna paste the complete article here. For your convenience I'll post the links to some of the paintings outside the cut, so you don't have to browse through all the text to get to the pretty;)
original review link to article below for Art in America by Sue Taylor
Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, by Abigail Solomon-Godeau hardcover (paper-back)
Why is Joseph Bara, fallen soldier of the Revolution in Jacques-Louis David's painting of 1794, depicted stark naked? And why, with his pale skin, long hair and tiny rosebud mouth, does he look like a girl? The peculiarities of David's unfinished tribute have long been acknowledged but hardly explained. Now, in her fascinating account of French Neo-Classicism, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, Abigail Solomon-Godeau suggests an answer for this oddly feminized image and many others by David and his epigones. Just as women were banished from public life and their revolutionary gains rescinded in an antifeminist backlash under the Jacobin Republic (1792-94), girlish male nudes like Bara proliferated in painting and sculpture. Beautiful male bodies abound in visual art of the period continuing through the Empire (1804-14), in the delicate forms of Ganymede, Eros, Narcissus. Masculinity emerges in two varieties, with virile pugilists like the Horatii swearing their oaths while elsewhere lovely males lie sleeping, dying, or otherwise passively on display. Alert to the contemporaneous suppression of women's political presence on the national stage, Solomon-Godeau proposes that these languishing boy-bodies represent the return of the feminine repressed.
Her thesis, however, is no simple matter of a social cause and its pictorial effect. A professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Solomon-Godeau takes into account many determining aspects of the masculine Neo-Classical beau ideal, including the era's anti-Rococo reaction, artistic training, antique models and pervasive esteem for the esthetician J.J. Winckelmann, with his famous enthusiasm for comely boys in both marble and the flesh. While she avoids both present-day notions of homosexuality and speculations about the proclivities of individual artists, Solomon-Godeau describes a homosocial world of cultural production without women. It is intriguing to learn that winners of the Prix de Rome, who enjoyed five-year residencies at the Mancini palace, were not allowed to bring their wives. They lived and worked side by side with other men, under the direction of male instructors, studying nude male models, producing art works intended for male audiences. Paintings by Louis-Leopold Boilly and Horace Vernet of artists' studios (1798 and 1821, respectively) show all-male gatherings characterized by friendly sport and fraternal discourse. Passionate friendships often developed among these artists and men of letters; given women's unequal access to education, male-female relationships could hardly offer equivalent intellectual satisfactions.
The patriarchal world of la vertu male from which women were all but excluded in French Neo-Classicism both reflects an ideology of gender and reaffirms it, "thereby naturalizing," Solomon-Godeau explains, "male dominance and female subordination." With femininity effectively elided and assimilated, masculinity prevails in the cultural imaginary in both heroic and/or feminized forms. A trenchant example of this dynamic is seen in Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson's Sleep of Endymion (1791). In the myth, Diana, smitten with the handsome shepherd, sends him dreams to keep him asleep--and available for her caresses. Girodet, however, omits the goddess from his composition, substituting a moonbeam that falls on the bare body of Endymion. The dreamer is gazed upon by no woman but by a winged Zephyr, a naked boy who smiles at the vulnerable spectacle before him. Typically, Girodet's contemporary commentators disavowed the erotic charge of this painting, applying formulaic standards of "truthfulness" and "poetic invention" to an image of same-sex desire.
With its dual paradigms of masculinity, the stalwart Brutus and the sweet erotes, Neo-Classical art addressed its male spectators on multiple levels; admiration, delectation and narcissistic identification were possible responses to the excessively sexed bodies on offer. Perhaps insecure viewers could be reassured by one remarkably consistent feature of even the brawniest of these nudes--the diminutive size of their genitals. Solomon-Godeau, like Leo Steinberg before her, dares not only to notice such a phenomenon but to ponder its significance. A small penis was the esthetic ideal in the classical world, where magnitude and rigidity were signs of animality not manliness; the French Academy transmitted the antique canon of proportions, but Solomon-Godeau astutely observes the compensatory props that invariably embellish otherwise daintily endowed heroes in Neo-Classical painting: strategically placed daggers, swords, scabbards and lances serve as supplements, and illustrate for her the Lacanian disparity between the penis and the phallus. "While the authority of the phallus may well be vested in the image of ideal masculinity," she states, "the power of patriarchy is so much in excess of its anatomical representative that the actual organ fails to carry its symbolic weight."
Summary: Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson's Sleep of Endymion and the work of Jacques Louis David are the basis for most of Solomon-Godeau's theory about the abundance of beautiful male bodies on display in this particular period. She explains how the art in this time and place -and other patriarchal societies- is mostly homosocial in origine, if not homoerotic. She shows how the masculine ideal, whether in the guise of virile hero or passive youths (then AND now!) raises important questions about the fashioning of masculinity itself.
I'm on page 145 of 254, my favorite paintings -so far- are by Francois-Xavier Fabre. Check out the
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 11:26 pm (UTC)I love Sleep of Endymion! I once did a comparative study on sculptures of the David. Which was, um, awesome. Hee ;)!
no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 09:02 am (UTC)I like the composition of Sleep of Endymion and I can see why it received praise, but his head is freakin' me out. It's so... so... big.
I'm in awe of a lot of the sculptures in the book. Dude, I wish I had as much knowledge as you on the subject, I only had a limited amount of art-history lessons in Graphic School. *bows to you*