For
twenty years, I wrote the art history column in Naturally
magazine. It grew into the longest-running signed column in the history of the
American nudist/naturist press. From the beginning, the plan had been to
republish those columns in book form. My editor, Bern Loibl, laid out chapter 1
before he suddenly died. No major art history publisher would touch this
project.
So after retiring to Cypress
Cove, I laid it out myself. That way, I could have print big enough for me to
read, and I could put pictures and their explanations on the same page (or
facing page). I even thought it important to include a travel guide to the
artworks, so vacationers could seek them out and view them in person.
I like to think this is a
major publishing event—the first major book on nude art written from a naturist
perspective. This is also the first comprehensive survey in full color. The
whole world is included: Egypt, India, China and Japan, Greece and Rome, the
Middle East, American Indians, Africa, the Pacific, plus Europe and America
from medieval times to the present.
This book is expensive; art
books are. But with 572 pages and more than 700 color illustrations, a price
tag of $99.90 is reasonable. Look at it this way: You get seven pictures of
great nude art for a dollar. Where else can you find a bargain like that? Only
500 signed and numbered hardcover copies have been printed in this limited
edition.
For whatever it's worth, I am
not gay. Yet the book does not shy away from mentioning gay issues, or
featuring the work of several gay artists. Here are a few examples of artworks
that may interest you. You can read sample pages (and order books) by going to my web site.
Zerge, Wrestling Boys—Private
collection.
"As a youth I lay prone
on sweet grasses, my nude body pressed tightly against the ground so that all
my sense drew strength and stimulation from Demeter [or Mother Earth]. I swam
and floated in waters that soothingly, sensuously caressed my form, then
roughly, harshly battered me; the better to forge my body, mind and spirit into
one invincible self. On the playing, field, I ran the hard race, hurled the
discus far, spurred by vigor drawn from my gleaming body. I wrestled with
others, forcing muscle against muscle, touching sweating flesh against flesh
that invigorated our contest. I sat unclothed, listening and discoursing with
great teachers as Helios [the sun] warmed my whole self. I was able to dart and
parry, because my mind was as free as my physique. Had I been encumbered by
cloth I would have been bound tightly, restrained and constricted. But nudity
provided me freedom to soar where I would in my quest for understanding my
inner self, and creating my whole being."
So wrote a Greek schoolboy. The
name of Menalkes, a fifth-century pentathlon winner, has been attached to this
fragment—though it was probably written a few centuries later. A clothed
alternative would not even have occurred to an athlete of his time. Athletic
nudity seemed like such common sense to the Greeks, that it took a thousand
years for the question of "Why?" to even come up.
During all that time, the
Olympic committee clung to some old-fashioned ideas. They never, for instance,
adopted the age classifications common for athletic competitions in the rest of
Greece: boys (without pubic hair), beardless youths (with pubic hair but unable
to grow a beard), and men (able to grow a beard). Nevertheless, in 386 BCE,
twelve-year-old Damiscus of Messene beat all of the older boys in the stade
race at Olympia.
For military, rather than
athletic purposes, the first two years of transition into manhood (ages 18 to
20) were called the ephebe stage. Since the late nineteenth century,
artists and writers have often misused that term for youths or boys—probably
because the English language has no single word for the high school athletes so
beloved by the Greeks. A twentieth-century artist, Owe Zerge of Sweden, painted
the timeless "forcing of muscle against muscle" as Menalkes described
it so long ago. Two modern fourteen-year-old boys, newly arrived at the
beardless youth stage, test their growing strength.
Delville, The School of
Plato—Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
The modern Olympics fall far
short of the Greek experience in several ways. One is in nudity. Another is in
honesty. Might a return to simple, honest, athletic nudity lessen some of the
corruption? The link between nudity and honesty is a strong one. As Socrates
put it, "Experience showed that to let all things be uncovered was far
better than to cover them up... then the man was perceived to be a fool who
directs the shafts of his ridicule at any other sight but that of folly and
vice, or seriously inclines to weigh the beautiful by any other standard but
the good."
Socrates lived in Athens,
where nudity also meant the association of a free body with a free mind, as the
Menalkes fragment emphasizes. Like other boys from Athens, Menalkes would have
studied the academics, music, morality, and athletics in the city's gymnasiums—a
word which means "place of nudity." These were park-like areas where,
as part of the boys' well-rounded education, philosophers such as Socrates
wandered in and out. In fact, during the next century, each of Athens' three
main gymnasiums became the home base for a group of philosophers: Plato's
followers at the Academy, Aristotle in the Lyceum. and the Cynics taking their
name from the Cynosarges. (Plato, by the way, had been such an outstanding
student-athlete that he once competed in wrestling in the Isthmian games at
Corinth.)
Yet painters and sculptors
seldom recorded the dullness of the morning lessons. They preferred the greater
challenge of depicting active bodies practicing in the afternoon.
And so to see young men
pausing from their exercise as they listen to a philosopher, we must turn to
the imagination of a Belgian artist, Jean Delville, who in 1898 painted The
School of Plato. The setting is accurate, though a little too spacious. And
yes, homosexual affection was much more accepted in ancient Greece than in our
own society. (In fact, military leaders at Athens' rival city of Sparta
encouraged it, believing the soldiers would fight more fiercely to protect
their companions.)
Many things differed at
Sparta. Spartans took an ornery pride in the fact that they wasted no time on
art, or literature, or philosophy. All they cared about was the military
training of their young men. And the training was tough. From the age of
twelve, boys spent most of their time nude, whatever the weather; one short
cloak had to last all year. Trainers deliberately gave boys too little food,
so that they would learn to steal, in preparation for foraging days in the
army. One boy did wear his cloak when brought before a magistrate on the charge
of stealing a neighbor's fox. He stood there calmly denying the charge until he
fell over dead; the fox under his cloak had clawed out his stomach while the
boy showed no emotion. Instead of seeing this as another example of the evil
that results from covering things up, Spartans retold this story to their sons
as an example of courage. With such tough-mindedness, Sparta dominated the
first century-and-a-half of the Olympics; nearly 60 percent of known winners
came from that one city.
Lidbury, David and
Jonathan.
It's inevitable. Any
discussion of the nude in art must eventually come around to the David statues.
Unfortunately, a great deal of balderdash has been written about them, as
modern critics try to project their own hang-ups about nudity and sexuality
into the minds of Renaissance artists. To get at the truth, we must begin by
slaying a few demons of our own:
No, there is no evidence
strong enough to support a charge of homosexuality in Donatello. On the other
hand, the existing evidence on Michelangelo seems pretty clear, though it
points only to his later life, some twenty years after he finished the David.
How was David really dressed?
The Bible only says that he took off the military helmet and armor offered to
him because they felt too big. It does not say he took off everything, though
it does add that right after the battle, Saul's son Jonathan took off every
stitch of his own clothes and gave them to David. So the new hero could cover
up to greet the admiring crowds? We can't be sure. Nudity is not required in
the David story; rather it comes from the Greek art tradition.
Though critics have sometimes
questioned the sexual orientation of sculptors who carved nude Davids, few have
closely examined the hero's own life. David's lament over the death of his
boyhood friend, Jonathan, contains such memorable lines as "They were swifter
than eagles, they were stronger than lions," and "How the mighty are
fallen!" Yet homosexual men have for centuries also taken comfort from the
line, "Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." Religious
leaders have usually interpreted this as simple male friendship. Then as the
Gay Rights movement gained momentum, Joe Phillips at the beginning of the
twenty-first century chose to paint an erotic parting of the two friends. [The
painting is lost, but the artist provided his preliminary sketch for the book.]
The Bible says they parted at the edge of an archery field, while a servant
searched for stray arrows; any athletic nudity in those pre-Greek years seems
to be yet another of the artistic liberties in the David tradition. Still, it
is rare to find David depicted nude away from the Goliath adventure.
A few years later, Malcolm
Lidbury stood on firmer biblical ground when he showed Jonathan lending his
clothes to David for the victory parade. This is the beginning of their friendship.
Yet, like Phillips, the artist preferred a bearded Jonathan—moving beyond the
teenage David tradition, to young adults capable of making their own life
choices.
Caravaggio, St. John the
Baptist—Capitoline Museum, Rome.
"Scandalous!"
people say, when looking at erotic temple sculptures in India. "Such
goings-on could never happen among devout Christians." Yet there was a
time when the church, indeed, turned to sex as one method of getting its
message across. It was the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the 1600s.
On some points, Catholic
leaders conceded that their Protestant critics were right, and they proceeded
to clean house. Among the abuses thrown out, cardinals had to give up their
mistresses. Just as men do in prison, some turned to homosexuality. Relieved
church officials chose not to look into these matters too closely.
On other points, Catholic
leaders believed they had been right all along, and determined to intensify
their efforts. Protestants had criticized lavish church art; Catholic leaders
determined to make their churches even more ornate. Protestants had attacked
them with logic; the Catholic Church would fight back with even greater
emotional appeal. They sought any emotional hook—even such a powerful emotional
force as sex—if it would bring people back into the arms of the church. Officials called on artists to find bold new
ways of snaring people's emotions in the religious cause.
A curious and not wholly
welcomed result of these two trends was the controversial artwork of
Caravaggio. A disreputable ruffian, he lived with an openly gay cardinal who
bought up pictures of pretty boys as fast as the artist could paint them. But
they did have emotional power. Caravaggio's painting of a nude John the Baptist
is open to widely differing interpretations. The viewer has clearly intruded
into some kind of intense relationship between the boy and the sheep. Is John
really beholding the Lamb of God? Or is this some more earthy youthful
experiment we don't talk about? This painting has bothered the critics. Some
have insisted that it could not be a religious subject—just some anonymous
loutish shepherd boy. But Caravaggio did more than forty paintings of the young
John the Baptist—most of them scantily clad, but much more wistful than this
painting. Their deliberate sex appeal is hard to deny.
Papow, Aphrodite and the
Erotes II.
Cupid began in Greek art as
an adolescent, then after 350 BCE was demoted to a swarm of winged babies. That
remained the case pretty much until the mid-1700s. Then, Neoclassic artists,
reading the ancient texts, restored Cupid to adolescence, and emphasized his
love affair with Psyche. But after a little too much of that, the trend
reversed again, and Cupid shrank back down into safer babyhood.
At the beginning of the
twentieth century, O. Henry wrote "Mammon and the Archer." In his
story, a wealthy businessman argues that money can buy anything. But not love,
his family members insist. He arranges a traffic jam that gives his son time to
propose marriage and be accepted. As he pays off the head of the taxi-drivers'
union, he asks, "You didn't notice, anywhere in that tie-up, a kind of fat
boy without any clothes on shooting arrows around with a bow, did you?"
When told no, he reflects, "I thought the little rascal wouldn't be on
hand." No, we haven't seen Cupid much in the last hundred years, but he
probably hasn't aged during that time. [Written in 1992.]
Postscript: Early in the
twenty-first century, a flock of Cupids were sighted after a hundred-year
absence. They first appeared in Aphrodite and the Erotes, a February
calendar frame by Dustin Papow. Aphrodite remains eternally young, as is
fitting for a goddess of love and beauty. But she has a bunch of teenage boys
hanging around. In a note, the artist carefully identifies each of the erotes
(clockwise from upper left) as blind Himeros, god of sexual desire who has
accompanied Aphrodite since the moment of her birth; Eros (or Cupid),
Aphrodite’s teenage son; Anteros, god of mutual love and avenger of unreturned
love; and Pothos, god of unattainable longing. On close examination, they do
each have wings, and two of them carry a bow and arrows. Yet they are
definitely older than traditional erotes. Does that mean that, in these less
prudish times, Cupid is starting to grow up again? It will be interesting to
watch.
Stradling, Omphalos—private
collection, New York City.
Some of the most interesting
art today is coming from gay men, who have moved beyond lust, beyond anger,
beyond politics, to give us new perspective on universal themes. English
painter Matthew Stradling named his painting Omphalos after the famed
"navel of the world" in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. There, nude
young men competed in athletics and music. But far more is involved. The artist
also works in the tradition of Baroque ceiling paintings that fooled the eye
into seeing a dome with an open skylight above it. And he is aware of the
Buddhist concept of everyone whirling around the calm center of the wheel of
life. We are seeing familiar things in new ways—and that, after all, is one of
any artist's most important jobs.
People sure of themselves can
live comfortably in a world of ambiguities. They don't need to know the answer
to everything. They can stand on their own feet, without the props of
conventional ideologies. Even John Steinbeck, that ultimate realist, saw that
the nuclear age called for a new type of thinking. In his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech, he warned, "Having taken God-like power, we must seek
in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity
might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope."
What we make of our world
depends on our choices and our actions. We must begin by finding peace and
unity within ourselves—with no distinction between mind and body. We have no
dirty parts. We are whole. All of life is sacred. Only when we begin to
understand the oneness within ourselves can we begin to find peace and unity
with the world around us. Our understanding and our choices ripple outward. By
our every act and at every moment, we are creating the Existential age.
