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Previous (post-Renaissance)
A Gallery of Intact Penises in Art
5. Modern (post-photography)
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Henry Holiday's working drawing for "The Landing"
from "The Hunting of the Snark" by Lewis Carroll
(1876) was presumably intended for his eyes only...
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...but the Bellman's penis is finely detailed.
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"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
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Thomas
Eakins'
photograph of
his close friend
Samuel Murray,
ostensibly for
artistic study. |
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Picasso submitted this pencil drawing of a
heavy-thighed man to enter the Barcelona School of
Fine Arts in 1895 when he was 14.
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A jovial minotaur and man in Picasso's 1933
"Bacchanale" share a post-coital drink.
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The penis is drawn very simply.
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Museum
of Modern Art, New York
John
Singer
Sargent
"Nude Study of Thomas E. McKeller" (1917-1920)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Henry H. and Zoe Oliver Sherman Fund
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Despite the roughness
of the stone, Adam's
foreskin and
acroposthion are
clearly visible.
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"Adam and Eve" by Eric Gill
(1882-1940)
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Although Gill's dancers are
stylised and attenuated, the
man's penis and foreskin
are realistic and detailed.
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"Dancers" by Eric Gill
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Dali often used
sexual themes
and phallic images,
but seldom showed
an actual penis.
This one clearly details
a prominent
acroposthion.
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Salvador Dali (1904-1989), Enfant Sauterelle
(Grasshopper Child), 1933
Etching and drypoint, Wadsworth Athenaeum
Gift of David Austin
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While Dali was not much interested in the details of
male anatomy (compared to, say, finger and toe joints),
Newton's cursory penis is nonetheless complete.
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"Hommage a Newton" 1969, Espace Dali,
Montmartre
"Oedipus" (1933)
by Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)
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Keith
thought
that the omens at his birth were auspicious: "Apart
from being a healthy baby it was observed that my
penis possessed a loose and easily retractable
foreskin which was not considered necessary to
circumcise according to the custom of my class. For
this piece of good fortune I have had many occasions
to be grateful."
- "Keith Vaughan: his life
and work" (1990)
by Malcolm Yorke
London: Constable, p24
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Click on the images for larger
Illustration to Genet's 'Querelle de
Brest''
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"Jeune Homme Nu"
(He is clearly retracting his foreskin to wash
it, and he isn't complaining about the tedium of
that.)
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Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
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M. C. Escher's intiguing etchings routinely show
any nude males as intact, such as this Buddha-like
figure (in Mosaic II, 1957) ...
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... and not only the optimists emerging from this
frieze (Encounter, 1944)
but also, as Escher's working drawings show, ...
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... the pessimists.
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Paul
Cadmus (1904-1999) finely details his model's
penises
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"Victory of St Michael" (1958)
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| The postcards don't show you
this: |
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| Cathedral of St Michael,
Coventry, UK |
| Epstein, being Jewish, would
have little experience of foreskins and this (with
its folds and lack of a "spout" c.f. the
fountain in the house of the Vetii), is not
typical. He frequently attracted controversy for
his nude male sculptures. One, "Day", was allowed
to remain on the St James Street Station,
London, only after he took 1.5" (4 cm) off its penis.
This may explain a report that one of his statues was
"circumcised". His other work shows males as
intact. |
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"Rush of Green" (1959) ,
South Carriage Drive, Kensington, London |
Sir Jacob Epstein ( 1880-1959)
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"The New Adam" by Harold Stevenson is huge
(8' x 39', 2.44 m x 11.89 m)
wrapping around the viewer on nine panels.
The reference to Michaelangelo's
is clear,
but this is no boy.
The model was Sal
Mineo
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the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York
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David Hockney's 1967 illustration to C P Cavafy's
poems stresses line, rather than shading, giving a
flat look to the model's penis, though the sulcus
and acroposthion
are indicated.
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Conversely Francisco Lòpez's 1973 nude torso is
finely shaded, emphasising the penis' dorsal vein.
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"Archilochos Alone"
by Michael Ayrton
(1921-1975)
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"Actor (Richard)", painted in 1979
by R. B. Kitaj, has a "peeper",
a shorter than average foreskin.
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Josep Maria
Subirachs, 1987
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The crucified Jesus on the "Passion" façade of
Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, is intact,
probably not to deny his Jewishness, but because the
sculptor and the audience could not
imagine him being different from themselves.
(Another famous nude Jesus,
by Michelangelo, is in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva,
Rome, but his penis has been vandalised
and is now covered. It was almost certainly
portrayed as intact.)
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While the character of Gollum
in the film of The Lord of the Rings is
almost entirely computer-generated and wears a
tiny loincloth that doesn't seem to hide much,
oversized models were used by Weta Workshops to
help make him so lifelike, and a picture of one in
Cinefex magazine shows the artists
conceived him as intact, as is a maquette of the
Cave Troll in the Lord of the Rings exhibition -
as of course they should be (but it wouldn't be so
certain if they were made in the US).
Picture to
come.
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Mural in the Kaiserbruendl sauna, Vienna,
by Stefan Riedl (Genannt Triebl), one of several
that all (of course) portray intact men.
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English artist John Carter
(1927-2004) takes
intactness for granted
in his Big Catch
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This "Reclining Middle-Aged Man"
by John Willcocks (1934-2021)
has a clearly delineated peeper.
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Australian James Gleeson painted both intact and cut men in
surrealistic settings ("Psychoscapes"),
apparently based on the models' own anatomy, even in
mythological subjects.
Male genital cutting was in decline in Australia during this
period, the 1950s-60s
- James Gleeson (1915-2008)
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Pierre
(Commoy, 1950- ,
photographer) et Gilles
(Blanchard, 1953-, painter)
create highly processed
images, mainly of erotic male
and/or religious subjects.
Their "Matador (Fernando Leonne)"
(1999) sold at Christie's
to a private collector in 2011
for €37,000
(€41,136 in 2021 or $US46,554)
but in 2015 it sold again for only
£18,750 (£20,539 in 2021 or $US27,248) |
Angela's
Men is a gallery
of treated photographs
of intact men, many closeups.
Treatment is commonly a metallic finish,
such as copper.
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Paul Davis Jones of Phildelphia has painted a series
of extreme closeups of foreskins,
"the
Intact
Project", coloured to give an abstract,
rose-like effect.
He writes,
"AS EACH FORM EMERGED ON THE CANVAS,
THE JOY OF CREATION BECAME ANGER
AS I ASKED MYSELF WHY ANYONE
WOULD CHOOSE TO DESTROY THIS UNIQUE
AND BEAUTIFUL PART OF A MALE'S BODY."
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Jonathan Yeo
painted two portraits of entrepreneur Ivan
Massow three months apart, during which Massow lost
three stone (19 kg) and grew a beard.
In his book "Uncut: the
natural history of the foreskin", Sherwin Carlquist
includes a sequence of Annie Liebowitz-like portraits of
intact penises in natural settings.
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Photographer Dylan
Ricci
likes to partially
conceal his models'
faces and genitals.
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Max Patte's oxidised steel
"Solace in the Wind" stands
on the Wellington, NZ, waterfront.
Though undetailed, his penis shows
a corona covered by a foreskin
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"Redemption Song" by Laura Lacey
stands 3.3m (11 feet) tall in Emancipation Park,
Kingston, Jamaica.
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"Event Horizon" by British artist Antony Gormley
consists of four cast-iron and 27 fibreglass
casts
of his own nude body, placed at ground level and
poised on the edges of buildings.
It was exhibited in London in 2007 and in New York
in 2010.
It may have taught the young man in the green
sweater something he won't learn
at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine.
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| Lost Horizon I in the Royal
Academy of Arts, London, features 24 cast iron
images (possibly from the same mould as ''Event
Horizon'') of Gormley's own body. The London audience
finds nothing exceptional about their intactness. |
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"Fallen Angel", Temple of Concordia,
Sicily |
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| "Blindfolded Icarus" |
Polish-German artist Igor Mitoraj
creates oversized mutilated
torsoes in classical style, but the males are in
modern proportions. |
Maryland artist Michael
Dulin uses terra cotta to illustrate the beauty of the
intact penis.
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"Lightning Strike"
2015 |
Untitled
(reclining male nude)
2015 |
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"The Lesson (How To Be
A Man)"
2017
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Philip Gladstone of Maine (1963- ) paints and draws largely
allegories and self-portraits,
frequently nude and always intact.
Back to 1.
Classical Antiquity 2. Pompeii
3. Renaissance 4.
Post-Renaissance
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