Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow. Fig Leaves, Pubic Hair, and Male Imagery

• In Event: The Human Stain: Indecency and De-Idealization of the Body II

Abstract

In 1913 young women taking an art class at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln sketched the human form from a plaster cast, one showing an ancient male god, nude, in with an added fig leaf. The practice of covering the male genitals, completely, continued Victorian taste and a long history stretching back to the Renaissance. At the same time as the plaster cast, museums displayed statues of nude men with added fig leaves (the Barberini Faun), often with metal strings holding a fig leaf in place. Such changes are often explained by changing attitudes toward virtue, decency, and modesty. Yet this uncomfortable response to the male form was not the only one in the 20th and 16th centuries. This paper explores a variety of images of the male body (fig leaves, pubic hair, drinking vessels, pilgrimage badges) that point to varying attitudes toward the human body and its intimate parts.

Author

• Alison G. Stewart, University of Nebraska–Lincoln