First I blushed, but then was I transfixed – how gloriously they were illuminated! The next time art and naked men intersected for me was during a brief spell of Life Drawing classes – these did not last long because my charcoal versions of the models’ bodies were so bad, they were no more than an insult to the men and women in question. There was tiger balm and spray-mist aplenty, but no fig leaves, drapery, shielding hands or loin-clothing for Mappelthorpe’s fellows, all in their physical prime. So Mappelthorpe’s phallic orchids and exquisitely exposed Ochinchins (Japanese for that most distinguishing feature of masculine toolery) seemed profoundly cool, very continental. At that time in South Africa, topless sunbathing and other ‘evils’ like Playboy were illegal the latter immediately confiscated at the airport if discovered hidden in one’s luggage. Perhaps the most surprising (for me) encounter with male nudes in art was during my Christian National Education teens, when roaming through Hundertwasser House – a splendid Viennese apartment of uneven floors (because the earth has hills and flat floors are thus unnatural) – I happened upon an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mappelthorpe. This though was a book of delicate, lines etched in negative which together conspired to make women, all beautifully naked. Upon a shelf of dusty, but expertly selected, art books I came across a small, possibly out-of-print one called ‘25 Nudes’ by Eric Gill, who according to the back-flap is most famous for creating type-faces, including one called Joanna.
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