Under the Hammer

Ahead of The Male Form on 7 June in New York, art writer and curator Osman Can Yerebakan highlights his favorite lots, each masterfully illustrating the myriad representation of the male form throughout history.

"Desired, wounded, or conquered, the male form has been subject to ample treatments in art history, through the photographers’ lens and behind the painter’s easel. This themed auction meanders through numerous eras and geographies where the male physique has continuously yielded the artists a sense of charm, desire, and curiosity. From tender physiques of young boys to shapely contours of brawny men, the subjects’ carnality envelopes the human soul’s bottomless complexities, oftentimes veiled by the bodies’ sexual allure and intriguing gestures. From a glorious ancient Japan to 1980s’ underground New York, the backdrops change yet the male form remains the subject."

—Osman Can Yerebakan

Lot 10
Jean Cocteau, Autograph sketchbook, Le Mystère et Antigone, containing 25 sketches mainly of his lover Jean Desbordes

A masterful Surrealist twist in Jean Cocteau’s sketch gives the male nude a playful veneer, adorning his lover Jean Desbordes’s architectural silhouette with two powdery touches around his nipples. The subject’s almond-shaped eyes and impossibly contorted neck imbues the typical demureness of a sitter with a performative aloofness, hiding his gaze away from us to lure our attention to nowhere but his robust phallus. The thinness of the artist’s lines create an unexpected eroticism, prompting us to imagine the moment his pen meets the paper in creating the likeness of his lover.

Lot 12
Robert Mapplethorpe, Untitled (Stove)

Domesticity and male nude have traditionally remained at odds, but this Robert Mapplethorpe shot of an unrobed man breaks open the kitchen door. The vivacity of the poser’s gesture is evident through the contrast between the radiant curve of his bulky waist and the stillness of a typical four-burner stove. His beefy buttocks penetrate into the picture frame with a joyful audacity and perhaps a carnal invitation, all captured in the immediacy of a Polaroid shot.

Lot 22
Dora Maar, Male Nude with Orb

Turning the gazed into the agent—Dora Maar sat for Picasso more than once, but in this black and white picture, she is the gazer. An elegant posture, a shyly hidden gaze, and the baroquely draped clothing render Maar’s male subject antiquarian. The modest size orb that he—referred to as Keifer on the image’s right bottom corner—clutches up towards his abdomen does little to conceal his genital, however the strategic placement of the fabric substitutes for covering what Maar leaves for the viewer’s imagination. The poser’s other arm calmly rests on the tip of the pedestal on which his lean body also finds comfort. 

Lot 54
Keith Haring, Untitled, from Bad Boys

As much as a banquet of beauty and desire, the body might as well be a game of geometry and abstraction, a land of myriad possibilities in the artist’s hands. Stripping the body off of flesh however does not mean its sexuality is to be erased either. Keith Haring’s screen print of sinuous lines form a mountainous landscape of male orifice, a homoerotic fantasy of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde. True to a fantasy, Haring’s version leaves less for imagination than the French Realist’s: the figure’s hands not only separates his own rear cheeks but also self-stimulates with his finger. A sign of pleasure is traceable in his perspectively-distant expression while his source of exhilaration, the meeting of his finger and anus claims the focal point.

Lot 84
Ruven Afanador, Eduardo Gallo Espinosa 'El Gallo' Salamanca, Spain, 2001

The scorching Mediterranean sun washes the muscular back of a bull fighter in Ruven Afanador’s visually black and white yet sensually colorful photograph. Facing a cracking wall rather than the viewer, the fighter shies away from a gaze, flirting with us through his fully-spread fan and a coy arm gesture. Far from his usual blood-drenched affair, the young man reveals his rear dressed in nothing but a sweaty sheen. Down below, he hides under a thick cloth which alludes to his traditional fabric shield against an angry bull.

Lot 72
Pierre et Gilles, Vive la France, 2006

Athleticism has flirted with homoeroticism since the ancient Olympic Games—the testosterone-fueled muscles changing shade under the sun while sweat drenching the arduous limbs. The duo Pierre et Gilles’s pigment print shows France’s three renowned soccer players donning nothing but sports socks and cleats on field, each maintaining a ball between their legs. Upwards, their exposed testicles and penises dare the masculine ritual of sports viewership, their amicable expressions inviting the image’s viewers to cheer for them along with the game’s. The confetti surrounding their radiant bodies blend with a similarly colorful frame around the picture.  

Register to bid in The Male Form before 7 June. To read more of Osman Can Yerebakan's work, follow him on Instagram @osmancanyerebakan