A new exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery makes us ask questions we might find uncomfortable, writes Greg Bruce
The exhibition Manpower: Myths of Masculinity, which opened at the Auckland Art Gallery this week, asks us to consider the male body as a source of hotness. Yes, there are other things it asks us to consider, but none of them are as exciting as hotness because they are things we know we're supposed to think about in art galleries. Hotness not so much, which is strange because humans have long found each other hot, and there's no reason artists shouldn't have noticed that.
This is an exhibition with a not insignificant quotient of sexy art - art that might make you cough modestly or mumble, "mmhmm", when you sense that someone has moved into the room and noticed your gaze lingering too long on, for example, a penis.
Let's not beat around the bush: Nudes are sexy. We are turned on by nudes. Don't deny it. You have been to an art gallery at least once and looked at a sexy nude, your head on a slight lean, to indicate contemplation, as cover for the fact you're thinking about how much you'd like to take it home for a private viewing in your bathroom.
Nudes may also be edifying, instructional and elevating, but that doesn't diminish their hotness. Nudes are hot, sometimes very hot. Semi-nudes, with their billowy clothing, sometimes coming undone, sometimes shirtless, pantless, breathless: also quite hot. Even non-nudes can be hot, full of suggestive power in, for example, the cant of their bodies, their gaze upon the viewer, the artist's use of sexy symbols. Not as hot as nudes though. The nude is not just art object but also sex object and Manpower is an exhibition at which you don't need to be ashamed of however that makes you feel. This is an exhibition at which you can enjoy art for the stimulation it gives you in areas below your intellect, without in any way diminishing your intellect. If you need more justification, consider this response from noted New Zealand novelist and Oxford graduate James Courage, after looking at Greek statues in the British Museum: "...the physical side of it wakes up a state of sensual libido that tortures me."
This is an exhibition that allows us to think about art in ways we traditionally haven't because we've considered them rude or naughty or lacking in depth. The reality is that the deeper you get into this exhibition the more ridiculous it becomes to believe that many of these works were not conceived, produced and received as erotic.
We're all regularly repressing our sexual sides, especially in settings in which we understand the expectation is for a non-sexual experience. This might be the right thing to do socially, but it's probably time we were at least honest with ourselves about it.
Manpower provides an interesting counterpoint to the Auckland Art Gallery's most recent big deal nudie exhibition, from 2017, The Body Laid Bare, which featured Rodin's The Kiss among other big ticket items, but which was dominated by the female nude.
The differing public perceptions of the female and male nude have long been rife with contradictions and double standards and these are issues that feature prominently in Manpower. As co-curator Sophie Matthiesson writes in the catalogue: "Whereas the unclothed female figure was widely feared as a corrupting force, the male nude has stood for its opposite: strength and moral virtue."
In early 20th century New Zealand, people were prosecuted for displaying reproductions of famous paintings featuring nude women, while nude images of men caused no issue. Exhibition co-curator Emma Jameson writes in the catalogue: "The definitions of a 'nude that is elevating' and a 'nude that is indecent' were by no means certain and at times were contradictory." Specifically, it appears that "indecent" meant female and "elevating" male.
Apart from the obvious double standard, the idea that the male nude might be only "elevating" is ridiculous to anyone who has ever been sexually interested in men.
When I asked Sophie Matthiesson where the idea for the exhibition came from, she said. "Oh, I don't know. My dirty mind."
In this country's early colonial history, women were scarce. Otago University Professor Chris Brickell, who wrote the seminal history of gay New Zealand, Mates and Lovers, says there was not a sharp distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality here prior to 1893, when all sexual activity between men was outlawed.
Two years later, in London, Oscar Wilde was arrested, put on trial and imprisoned for homosexual acts. He was an enormous celebrity and the case was major news around the world, including here, where it was reported breathlessly and in gory detail and where it changed the way we looked at and thought about sex and sexuality. As Jameson writes: "The scandal plunged the English speaking world into a crisis of masculinity and turned a homophobic glare upon the Aesthetic movement and artists everywhere."
Far from getting rid of the hot male bodies that had been ever-present in their collections, Matthiesson says art galleries reacted by acquiring "depictions of hypermasculine males engaged in vigorous physical activity safely removed from the corruptions of city life", which, presumably, made them gay.
One such depiction of vigorous physical activity is one of the most striking works in the new exhibition, and the one that appears on most of the marketing materials: William Calderon's 1905 painting, titled On the Sea-beat Coast, where Hardy Thracians Tame the Savage Horse, which is both a line from Homer's The Iliad and the most unintentionally homoerotic title in art history. Four metres long and nearly two metres high, the painting shows a series of near-life size men, completely nude, thundering through the raging surf on horseback while being closely watched by a fully armoured soldier leaning back on his own, stationary horse, one hand on its flank, eyes closed and mouth open. I guess an argument could be made that he is not in the throes of ecstasy, but no serious viewer would suggest he is there on business.
"It's gratuitous nudity," Matthiesson says. Who really - I mean who really? - rides bareback like that?
"We see it all through a camp filter now don't we? We see this as very camp. It's extraordinary that they didn't. It is[italics] extraordinary."
I asked her whether the art public of the time gave any consideration to the painting's obvious homoeroticism.
"No," she said, "The opposite. This is exactly what would stop you becoming gay."
Jameson writes of an Auckland commentator who viewed On the Sea-beat Coast in the 1920s and described it not just as an aesthetic experience, but "a philosophical and trans-temporal exercise that would transport the viewer back to Antiquity, because 'Greece was the home of the gods and of beauty . . . [and] undoubtedly life gains spirituality and beauty from a contemplation of Beauty'."
Matthiesson says gay artists discovered this strangely sexually ignorant set of beliefs to be perfectly suited to their interests. In this period of sexual regression, for instance, she says everyone in New Zealand wanted a painting by famed English master of painting men frolicking in the nude by the water, Henry Scott Tuke.
She says: "He was a gay man who spent his entire time down in Cornwall, where he couldn't really be watched, because he chose quiet coves. He had a boat and he paid the local working-class boys, who he loved. It appears to have been all above board, but he created a little homosocial utopia for himself down there."
Tuke - whose 1924 painting Companions features in Manpower - was part of a group known as the Uranians, a well-known collection of gay men and artists, and his work features enormous quantities of attractive young men lolling around in the nude, but Matthiesson says people chose not to see the obvious homoerotic overtones in his work.
"People thought, 'This is the most wholesome picture. This is pure love, pure friendship'."
She says: "Public convention has required us to play dumb and not look at things. Why are there so many pictures of the circumcision in Christian, Western art up until the 1700s? And they're in every altar piece. Why is there always a beautiful St John with golden curly hair opposite Mary at the bottom of the cross? He's the grieving other, but we choose not to look at it. It's always been there. So this is kind of interesting to me."
She says: "If it makes people uncomfortable, probably good. I do think people are going to read every label.
"The hilarious thing is there will be people who will want to possibly shut the show down or say that there's paedophilia in there because there's naked boys, but I'll be saying this stuff was bought in 1895 and it's been on view continuously for four decades. What makes it dirtier now? This is the question. This is why we're talking about this."
Michelangelo was probably queer, so were Leonardo, a bunch of Dutch masters, the great German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer and probably plenty of others who weren't so open about it.
Matthieson says: "I'm saying actually that homoeroticism is at the very, very centre of the classical tradition. That's old hat in academic terms; it's new hat here for our gallery.
"There's been an explosion of queer readings of Edwardian culture and late Victorian culture. because all of the evidence is there that culture was operating at two levels. There was the public face of it and then there were the private queer interests and investments and needs that were gratified and explored at the same time - in plain view actually - but no one ever went there in terms of their thinking, unless you were a part of these.
"This is the subculture and I'm saying that we have - through Mackelvie and Grey and the elders of Auckland - we have acquired a nice cross-section of all of those things, and we're just reintroducing it to the conversation."
Chris Brickell says we have come a long way in the last decade or so, from not acknowledging gay people in art galleries to exhibitions like this one, which are starting to look at things through a queer lens. "I think this is really, really exciting."
One of the central questions raised by the exhibition is how turned on by their collections of nude and semi-nude art were the rich colonists, Governor George Grey and James Tannock Mackelvie, who laid the foundations for the art gallery's collections.
Of Mackelvie, Matthiesson says: "He collects at least nine bronzes of the naked Hercules. He's obsessed with the male body as far as I can see. There's no female nudes that he collects. It's at least worth asking the question. I'm not sure what's the problem. What's so unspeakable about that possibility that we're not allowed to talk about it?"
Mackelvie never married. Grey married but sent his wife away for more than three decades because he believed she was cheating on him.
Whether or not these men were gay, gay-adjacent, gay-curious or straight, they collected large amounts of art featuring very hot naked men. What they did with that and how it made them feel was their own business. Same goes for the rest of us.
Manpower: Myths of Masculinity is on at Auckland Art Gallery until November 2022. Free admission