Early 19th century were male nude models considered gay

He then traveled back to Germany, where he lived for six months in Leipzig before returning to Italy, where he resided in Florence. Thus a collision was set in motion between those who worked to make homosexuality more tolerable by generalising a gay aesthetic though distinctly not a gay politics across the culture at large and those who named their homosexuality, who specifically sought civil rights under the guise of inborn and natural difference.

Prior to this, however, the female body was regarded less favourably than its more structured, more muscular male counterpart. He was forced to resign from his prestigious post at Weimar University and flee to Italy.

This room shows how artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century challenged gender norms. When he died at age 57 inof complications from diabetes, his star was already dimming.

A brief history of

Nude representations were then presented to the public as being of artistic interest. Sascha Schneider German, Patriarch Oil on canvas Images of rulers, emperors, and patriarchs [are] a reminder that Schneider was born into an imperial political system.

Some, such as Laura Knight, laid claim to traditionally masculine sources of artistic authority by depicting themselves in the act of painting nude female models. Sascha Schneider German, Untitled study of a reclining male nude with tucked up legs Pencil and charcoal with white highlights on grey paper At the beginning of the 20th Century, Schneider was elevated to a prestigious post at a German university and was one of the most well-known and well-respected public artists of his time.

He was buried in Loschwitz Cemetery, Germany. Yet at the same exact moment that Freikörperkultur made the sight of handsome nude young men ubiquitous in public spaces as diverse as stadiums and opera houses, another movement was brewing – the very first modern gay-rights movement.

Adherents of the movement claimed that only through the confident and shameless exposure of strong, beautiful, male bodies, would young German men throw off the enervating effects of modern life and return to their natural vitality.

Only a generation later, he was largely relegated to obscurity. The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art is the first and only dedicated gay and lesbian art museum in the world with a mission to exhibit and preserve gay and lesbian art, and foster the artists who create it.

Afterhe co-founded an institute called Kraft-Kunst for body building. Today, the nude essentially brings to mind a female body, the legacy of a 19th century that established it as an absolute and as the accepted object of male desire. Sascha Schneider was product and beneficiary of this unusual historical moment, one of the most fraught, contradictory and unresolved periods in the modern history of sexual regulation.

Text from Wikipediawhere a good gallery of further work by Schneider can be found. Weber, Leipzig 9. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. This strange historical interval, more developed in Germany in the early 20th century than anywhere else, goes by the English name of the Health and Hygiene Movement.

While the history of art is overwhelmingly a history of imaging the female nude, for a brief moment — and in Germany above all — it is instead a history of the male nude. Led by such pioneering figures as Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the Institute for Sexual Research which was destroyed by the Nazis inthis new political movement sought to make same-sex relationships entirely legal, in part through claiming that gay people were born gay, that same-sex desire was as natural to some as heterosexuality was to others.

In the 19th century, so-called “French postcards” depicted nude men as athletic models, though sometimes posed in implicitly homoerotic ways. Schneider fled to Italy, where homosexuality was not criminalised at that time. During this period Schneider lived together with painter Hellmuth Jahn.

Sascha Schneider German, Mammon and his Slave c. In the midth century, in an attempt to avoid the censorship that prevailed in a prudish society, a handful of magazines had the brilliant idea of overthrowing erotic stereotypes in a batch of artistic photos.

Some of the models for his art works trained here. By the end of World War II, he was largely forgotten.