Germaine Greer, The Boy
Germaine Greer has published a book on male beauty in art and popular culture, entitled The Boy. (To be published in the US next month as The Beautiful Boy.) She also collaborated on a TV documentary which airs this weekend. The South Bank Show website summarizes the book and show's thesis.
Germaine Greer argues against the conventional notion that the female body has always been used to represent the primary object of visual pleasure in Western art. In Greer's view, it is traditionally the figure of the young male, or 'The Boy' who represents the ultimate in human beauty. Greer traces the origins of art's obsession with the boy from Ancient Greece to the present day.
Greer opposes the common assumption that male artists painted boys to express their own sexual preferences and to appeal to the homo-eroticism of other men. She argues that women too have always looked at boys for pleasure and should be encouraged to do so.
The Guardian ran a lengthy excerpt from Greer's book over the weekend. Most models for nude boy paintings throughout art history were anonymous.
It was startling, then, in the course of my research for a book about male beauty, to come across a boy fully identified as Prince Henryk Lubomirski, stripped to the buff and posing full frontal for Canova in 1786. Even more startling is the fact that he posed for Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, Maria Cosway and Anne Seymour Damer as well. Engravings of one of Lebrun's images were sold by dealers all over Europe. By what strange concatenation of circumstances could a prince of the stiff-necked Polish familia have become the first ever mass-marketed poptastic boy babe?
Greer eventually travelled to Poland to research Lubomirski's life and modelling career.
