Customer Reviews

The Nude Male: 21st Century Visions

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I purchased this book after seeing David Leddick's "The Male Nude". The Male Nude portrayed male nude photography throughout the history of photography. This new book "The Nude Male: 21st Century Visions" observes artists who are working with the Nude Male in this contemporary world of art. The photographs are all at a high quality, many large prints.

The descriptions of the artists who are working with the nude male are very brief. I would like to have seen more information on the artists to do further research. After seeing this book I don't know if I would consider David Leddick a critic or simply a collector of these photographic compositions. There is a small mix of paintings and drawings of the nude male, but mostly these images are photographs. The majority is of white nude males, a small amount of African Americans, one elderly, one overweight, and one handicap nude male.

I think that the interesting aspect of this book compared to some of Leddick's other works is the increase in homo-eroticism and how fashion has influenced the way the male nude is portrayed. (Just some of my own observations).

I gave it 4 starts for its high quality and the large amount of artists that were included in this book, but I would have liked to have more information to accompany the artist's work and/or intentions of their art.

The Nude Male: 21st Century Visions by David Leddick is a disappointing art book (or book on art?). It features over 140 artists spread out within its 250 pages. Do the math: the book basically showcases those 140+ artists with tiny one paragraph descriptions about the artists often with just one accompanying artwork in a book that's 250 pages big. This means it mostly showcases one artist with one piece of artwork on one page! The effect is needlessly cluttered, claustrophobic and in the end meaningless vis a vis who the artist is and what encompasses their work because a single photo can hardly do justice to an artist's entire work or vision. In some cases there are two artists per page, with artwork spread over on two pages. This aspect is very disappointing. Had I had the choice in peaking into the book before purchasing it I wouldn't have bought it.

What's also disappointing is that it says "21st Century Visions" but most of the art (if I can call it art) looks positively passé. This book would have probably been avant garde in the 1970s but today most of it looks quaint and dated, or just standard "titillating" stuff you see everywhere on the internet. The photo on page 183 sums up the quality of the "art" found in this book: model staring boringly at photographer in a contrived pose. Only a few artists works live up to the word art or to the title "21st Century Visions". One of the artist is Andreas Bitesnich who's work is, unsurprisingly, featured on the cover, which made me purchase this book. We get to see three photos by Bitesnich, and two of them transcend the standard male nude to become art. Another interesting work is on page 230-31 by Henning Von Berg who the author describes as "handsome and strong himself." Seriously. There are a few other interesting photos here and there but the majority of the art is uninspired, boring or just plain insipid.

As a professional artist and occasional photographer of male nudes, I had hoped for a much more in-depth and useful book examining what it means to explore the male nude in art. This is, for all intents and purposes, a series of ads for the various artists in the book, with hyperbolic text and email contact information.

While there is an interesting mix of emerging and super-famous, male and female, and straight and Gay artists, there is a remarkable lack of ethnic diversity, sticking mostly (though not exclusively) with people of European descent as creators and subjects.

I am further disappointed that there a misspellings and typographic errors throughout. Combined with the heavy self-promotional quality of the writing and this ends up feeling like a vanity publication, not a serious text.

Few writers have so consistently illuminated the history of the controversy of the male nude in art as David Leddick. For more than ten years Leddick has not only written excellent novels and biographies and monographs of fascinating individual artists, but he has also educated the public with his very fine art books combining photography with all forms of visual art dealing with the changing appreciation and acceptance of the male nude. In 1997 he introduced NAKED MEN: PIONEERING MALE NUDES 1935 - 1955, in 2000 he published NAKED MEN TOO: LIBERATING THE MALE NUDE 1950 - 2000, in 2001 he released MALE NUDE NOW: NEW VISIONS FOR THE 21st CENTURY, and now in 2008 he culminates his work with this excellent book THE NUDE MALE: 21st CENTURY VISIONS.

After an apt and brief introduction in which he suggests that both the rise of photography as an art form and the rise of Feminism allowed the male nude to gain popularity and acceptance in art, Leddick presents 140 established and emerging artists, in alphabetical order, with ample examples of each artist's contribution to the theme of the book. His panorama of artists is global and includes such luminaries as Duane Michaels, Don Bachardy, Chuck Close, David Hockney, John Currin, Reed Massengill, Kobi Israel, Wes Hempel, Jack Balas, Lucian Freud, Dimitris Yeros, Nan Golden, Arthur Tress, Wolfgan Tillmans, Alexis Rodriguez-Duarte, Joe Oppedisano, Michael Leonard, Matthias Herrmann, and Greg Gorman - to name but a few. The images are accompanied by a brief but informative biographical statement about the artist displayed, and the design of the book by Jennifer Laino is a work of art in itself.

Viewing this book is informative to both the art student and the art public in general, entertaining for the amount of humor it contains, and provocative. It is certainly well within the high standard of Leddick's previous books - a handsome volume of artistic significance. Grady Harp, January 09

Great variety of male nudes by painters as well as photographers. There are a ton of books of male nudes in photographs but too few of painters who work with the male body.

David Bolger, for example, is a very interesting painter and his beautiful painting "The Bath" is here.

David Leddick is an amazingly versatile and interesting creator in many, many media.

NOT AN ART BOOK - BUT JUST PLAIN FILTH. DON'T GET MISINFORMED AS I WAS!!!

THIS WAS A GIFT FOR A YOUNG ARTIST, AND I COULDN'T EVEN BEAR TO LOOK AT IT AS IT IS CLEARLY PORN.

THANK YOU.

This large book covers a broad range of photographers and artists who use the male nude as subject matter. There is at least one example of each artist's work and sometimes two images are provided. Whereas this does not give a full report of the breadth of some of these artist's work, it offers a glimpse, a sample, and thus the main strength of the book in not in-depth analysis of a body of work by a single artist but rather offers a vast range of ways that the nude male may be interpreted. The work of painter Brian Biedul is highlighted with two beautiful paintings. His craftsmanship is superb as he renders the nude male in photographic hyper-reality. He uses sharp extreme contrasts between light and shadow, with a third of the figure in darkness, evoking a modern Caravaggio. Tony Butcher has taken the black nude male as his subject and there is a superb photograph of a black man in his 60's laying asleep across a bed. This intimate narrative photograph is in contrast to the photographs of perfectly proportioned muscular young black men that is often his subject. Joe Fanelli's two paintings of male nudes evoke Alice Neel's portraiture whereby the personality of the subject is not lost as the painting is constructed but seems to arise from the pose and gaze of the model. Lucien Freud's master work is represented with a middle-age nude male and dog. The photo that accompanies Freud's short bio-sketch is actually the young Francis Bacon and not Lucien Freud. Greg Gorman's attention to anatomy pays off in his excellent photographs which are mannerist in their depiction of the muscular and sinew structure of his models. The formal, highly structured and composed, allegorical paintings of Wes Hempel need mention. They are beautifully rendered, composed with a serene sense of balance and proportion, and evoke a sense of narration. Matthias Herrmann uses himself as the subject of his work and like Cindy Sherman, he is able to evoke sensations of disquiet in his viewers with his ambiguous disturbing images. The photographs convey that much is hidden even though much is shown or revealed. Sexuality is a theme, but it is uncertain where Herrmann is headed with his thought provoking images. Kobi Israel's work is out of this world beautiful. His nude men from developing countries are placed in context full of details and textures. The models appear to be real people in real places in real points in time. They are beautiful but not in the abstract classical fashion model sense. Anthony Larrissey's photographs of nude men who have been painted by him are very nice, very clever. Michael Leonard's drawings and paintings of the nude male, usually in the act of undressing or dressing, are natural but superbly rendered. He is one of the finest artists living today. Duane Michaels is appropriately represented by a series of 9 photographs taken in sequence with a straight forward attempt to convey narrative with images. He is a master of sensitivity and understatement. Pierre et Gilles are presented with a surreal photograph of two nude Arabian men in desert oasis at night and is certainly pure dream fancy. Michel Sltuetz's intimate photographs of male couples in their homes are quiet like a Sunday afternoon, mysterious but not weird. David Vance's work is represented and convinces me that Vance looks for absolute perfection in his models and then renders the photograph with absolute clarity. Steven Underhill on the other hand has models that are 95% perfect and the photographs are not quiet so polished as Vance, but there is a warmth in Underhill's work whereas there is a cold precision in Vance's work. Nebojsa Zdravkovic is an absolute master with one painting rendered as beautifully as John Singer Sargent's watercolors of black nude men in Florida. This book, like Vance's Male Nude Now, is a valuable survey of the broad range of interpretations that both photographers and painters have adopted in rendering the nude male.

I specifically wanted a book with ideas since this is one of my professional passions. The book does contain some beautiful photos and some great poses. I think it was worth the money

This is too classy a book to not be considered art. The photos are, well, if not inspiring, at the very least inspired. The artwork other than photos makes me wish I had the eye the artists possess. If your interested in the male form, I would highly recommend this book.

This book is very nicely designed and has many photographers featured. It also contains paintings from very important artists. It's great to see the way every artist interprets the male nude.