Centuries of Men Baring It All

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/arts/centuries-of-men-baring-it-all.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — Life-size images of Mercury — nude, muscular, with a wing-tipped helmet, an emerald serpent and a come-hither look — first surfaced on billboards in Paris Métro stations early last month. A portrait of the shepherd Paris, also naked save for an artfully draped gold ribbon, appeared beside him.

Both are poster boys for the Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition of male nudes, “Masculine/Masculine: The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day,” which runs through Jan. 2 and has become one of the season’s most coveted tickets here. Since it opened on Sept. 24 — with giant banners of the pair looming outside the museum on the Left Bank of the Seine — crowds have continued to line up for a glimpse, averaging more than 4,500 people a day. That is triple the amount for a show at the same time last year, according to museum figures.

The exhibition and its provocative marketing have tested the museum, which has received a range of responses inside and outside France. The show has drawn a huge amount of attention from the French press, some of it harsh — “a confused show,” weighed in leading French daily Le Monde, “devoid of any historical reflection.” But the show still was the buzz of Paris Fashion Week, and Marie Claire, a women’s magazine, anointed it the “hottest event” of fall.

Such sizzle is what a number of major European cultural institutions are seeking this fall, hoping that a focus on sex will entice visitors and broaden their appeal to younger generations and a demographic of people who are more likely to read Marie Claire than Le Monde.

The Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris is teasing the public with posters of a dewy female nude and romantic video trailers, which appeared this month in 40 movie theaters, featuring a shower of rose petals and images of voluptuous 19th-century women included in its show “Désirs et Volupté: Victorian Masterpieces,” which ends Jan. 20.

Still another Paris museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, which houses indigenous art from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, was inspired to promote its male nude statuettes with a series of photos posted on its Facebook page in late September.

Across the Channel, the British Museum organized a first-of-its-kind exhibition of once-banned 17th-century Japanese shunga — erotic woodblock prints of men and women coupling, or in one image, an octopus wrapped around a fisherman’s ecstatic wife. The show, “Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art,” warns that for visitors under 16, “parental guidance advised.”

For years, the works had been hidden in a secret cabinet for provocative objects, but now the British Museum considers them so potentially profitable that it has created a new line of shunga merchandise, including Kabuki hand cream, soy candles and green tea lip gloss. The exhibition opened on Oct. 3, the first weekend was sold-out and crowds have continued to swarm to the show, which runs through Jan. 5.

The Musée d’Orsay, like other cultural institutions with shrinking state subsidies, wants to expand its base to include younger people and an audience beyond Paris. It is opting for edgy exhibitions and marketing, like “Masculine/Masculine,” which includes a David LaChapelle photo of the rapper Eminem staring down from the walls naked and brandishing a firecracker in front of his crotch.

The museum hired a director to create video trailers for “Masculine/Masculine.” Instead of the typical voiceover and slow pans of paintings, he filmed a single nude model to recreate the idealized poses of 18th-century painting and a mock-up of Mercury and Paris.

The Orsay, which drew deeply on its own collections and those of other French state museums for the show, developed its marketing campaign with a careful calculation of the public reaction. Although France has a long history of libertinism, museum officials were nonetheless conscious of potential backlash. Earlier this year, protests against the legalization of gay marriage laid bare a simmering social conservatism that startled the French and gave the museum reason for pause.

“This is an exhibition that cannot be separated from the debate in the streets of France right now,” said Amélie Hardivillier, who heads the museum’s communications office and organized marketing for the exhibition. “But it shows a museum that reflects the society of today, and that’s really the concept.”

The museum cooperated with the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which last year offered its own separate exhibition of male nudes, provoking an uproar with a much brasher advertisement at the entrance to the show: a giant photograph of a reclining naked man, known as Mr. Big. 3

The Musée d’Orsay was surprised that its promotional video trailer for “Masculine/Masculine” was considered taboo for some viewers thousands of miles away.

YouTube, the video-sharing Web site based in California, last month slapped the equivalent of an X-rating on the video. Viewers under 18 years old, who signed in with their Google accounts, were locked out and could not access the video, which has attracted almost 107,000 views. Some Facebook users also complained that their postings of an article about the show from the French daily Le Parisien, which featured a photograph with frontal nudity, was removed for “violation of community standards.”

“We have to perform a delicate balancing act so younger viewers are unable to access videos that might be unsuitable,” Gareth Evans, a YouTube spokesman in London, said in an e-mail statement. He declined to identify the forbidden images. YouTube eventually softened its stance, however, making the video accessible to all, with a simple warning about potentially offensive images.

The approach hasn’t deterred sponsors who signed up to support the Orsay show, among them Harley Davidson, Slendertone, Tollens paint and Francesco Smalto, an unlikely patron given that it is a menswear line that keeps France’s soccer team in elegant pants.

The co-curators, Xavier Rey and Ophélie Ferlier, sought to offer a playful exploration of the neglected genre of nude men, which was a popular subject for art training from the 17th through the 19th centuries. The museum included such works as 18th-century religious paintings of St. Sebastian and bathers by Paul Cézanne and Edvard Munch.

The show also features idealized, homoerotic photos by the French team Pierre et Gilles. Their photographs included a scene of Hercules battering a hydra-headed green monster and another of three nude soccer players of different races titled, “Vive la France.” They also created the Mercury photograph.

Despite the whimsical approach, visitors on one afternoon were surprisingly serious as they studied the works, their voices rarely rising above whispers. Museum officials said the crowds were an unusually balanced blend of young, old, French and foreign. The museum received plaudits from most of the visitors, mixed with some complaints that Pierre et Gilles — a favorite of the museum’s president, Guy Cogeval — were too ubiquitous, with seven photographs. But a visitor from Lille, Eric Cremer, responded with “Bravo” on the museum’s Facebook page, one of many fans who lauded the museum’s exhibition on the social network. “Finally a little audacity,” he wrote.

“Our aim is not to provoke, to be militant or to create a scandal,” Ms. Hardivillier said. “We have to look for people in different ways and we started with ‘Masculine/Masculine.’ It’s an exhibition that is risky.”

The show has been so popular that the museum is now negotiating to continue the show at two other museums. Their aim is to dispatch Mercury and Paris on the road.