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The Italian painter Filippo de Pisis (1896-1956) often used references to Dionysians and Arcadian subjects to emphasize the homoerotic connotations associated with the representation of the male body. Sometimes, de Pisis represents a Dionysian male nude immersed in nature, as in Bacchino (1928) or the striking lithographs illustrating Catullo’s Carmi. At other times, the animalistic dimension of the Dionysian world is transposed into the intimacy of the artist’s studio, as in Nudino sulla pelle di tigre (1931). This paper aims to shed new light on the homoerotic and self-reflexive dimension of these Arcadian fantasies the artist elaborated during a lifetime. I will investigate their connection with a well-established homoerotic visual culture that has been widespread since the late 19th century and the way they offered the painter a prolific and safe outlet for representing the eroticized male body in the Italian context of the early 20th century. It will thus be possible to address through an original perspective the queer dimension of de Pisis’ work, still too often overlooked by the artist’s historiography.

The pioneering depiction of male nudes by the Cypriot painter Andreas Karayan (b. 1943) caused quite a stir in the Cypriot art scene, when exhibited from the late 1970s onwards. Using Constantine Cavafy’s poetry as a starting point and recurring reference, Karayan portrays the male nudes as both sexual(ized) subjectivities, as well as, and because of their eroticism, embodiments of social protest and queer subversion. Even more subversive, however, are some other works, from the late 1970s and through the 1980s: images of (fully dressed) young men in public spaces – bus stops, streets, coffee shops – and of sailors and soldiers in seemingly banal conditions (for instance, resting before or after an official parade). Such works, for the first time in Cypriot art, not only brought, literally, into the open, (homo)erotic desire (gazes are exchanged, seeking response, or are directed toward the viewer), but they are also imbued with political irony and critique that interrogate issues, and queerly subvert discourses, of power, desire, and national and other ‘sacred’ symbols of collective identity.

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This paper explores how Imogen Cunningham boldly envisioned woman-made, white masculinity and parodic subversions of the normative gender roles in her pioneering photographs of male nudes, which have received little attention in gender studies. Of special interest to me will be investigating the collusion and collision of Cunningham's gaze with the New Woman's gaze toward the woman-made men in the early-twentieth-century dance culture in theater and dance hall. My argument is that the New Woman's emergence as the primary figure in the consumption of the ethnically-other type of androgynous masculinity, gradually established in dance culture, inspired Cunningham to articulate her own fascinations and desire for the male nude through her photographs. However, her most innovative performative intervention, I believe, lies in directly offering a startling transformation of gender norms through shooting the sexually desirable white, male body without dissimulating her fantasy around the liminal Oriental scenarios. I would also like to apply Judith Butler's gender theory to further interpret how Cunningham created a radical New Woman's alternative visual practices for female desire and pleasure, which enacted a feminist deconstruction of the normative gender roles of the white man and woman in her day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Singer Sargent’s studies of the male nude remain one of the least explored aspects of the artist’s production. Taking into account his passion for textiles, which he collected and used repeatedly in his work, this article analyses a group of charcoal drawings, watercolours, lithographs and oil paintings of semi-draped male models from the period between 1890 and 1915, some of which have never received scholarly attention. Examining them as an independent project unified by the presence of fabrics - rather than as preparatory works or isolated formal exercises - exposes the ambiguities of Sargent’s approach to the male form, which cannot be limited to clean-cut categories such as ‘academic’ or ‘homoerotic’. A closer exploration of the treatment of the relationship between body and cloth reveals the significance of the use of textiles as a means of expanding the possibilities of interpretation of these works. This might have enabled a queer reading of them within the realm of the artist’s home and studio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists have been wary of tradition, employing the term in either an empty or an abusive sense. When they do use it they tend to align it to habitus, on the one hand, or to ritual, on the other. This paper makes the case for distinguishing tradition to describe agents' conscious engagement of current actions with past actions, and for the importance of understanding such engagement in order to understand agents and agency. It exemplifies the value of tradition by discussion of two ancient Greek statues of naked men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]