USA: A single limb turned to pure form and shadow. Minor White shot this in 1947, decades before his nude studies could safely see daylight. “Nude Foot, San Francisco.” Seattle Art Museum. #MinorWhite 🇺🇸

Switzerland: Der Jungbrunnen VI (Fountain of Youth VI), 1918, by Cuno Amiet. A nude figure leaps in luminous green and yellow against warm pink. 1 of 7 panels commissioned for the Kunsthaus Zürich loggia, 7 years in the making after 2 attempts were rejected. Kunsthaus Zürich. 🇨🇭 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Chile: Alfredo Valenzuela Puelma began studying medicine alongside art in Valparaiso, then won a Chilean state scholarship to Paris. Untitled (Nude No. 2), c.1880-85. A nude academic study, muscle and bone rendered with a doctor's precision and a master's eye. MAC Collection, UoC. 🇱🇾 #MaleNude

Iceland: Before Erró became Iceland's most internationally celebrated artist, flooding canvases with cartoons and mass media collage, he painted this quiet nude male figure. Model, Naked Man with a Pole (1952). Oil on canvas. Reykjavík Art Museum. 🇮🇸 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Ireland: Portrait of the Artist as a Naked Young Man (1953) by Brian O'Doherty. Painted while training as a doctor in Ireland, two years before he left for New York and reinvented himself as conceptual artist named Patrick Ireland. Those hands! 🙌 National Gallery of Ireland. 🇮🇪 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

France: Standing Male Nude, c.1900, pastel on paper. Eugène Emmanuel Lemercier trained as a painter, won government prizes, then vanished in a French trench in April 1915. His art survives in scattered collections. His letters survive in full. National Gallery of Ireland. 🇫🇷 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Switzerland: Der bewunderte Jüngling (The Admired Youth), 1903-05, by Ferdinand Hodler. Also called Youth Admired by Woman. Four women turn to look at one nude man. Hodler called his method Parallelism, rhythm and repetition as sacred order. Kunsthaus Zürich.🇨🇭#ArtHistory #MaleNude #Switzerland #cfnm

Austria: Edvard Munch spent the summer of 1907 recovering at a small Baltic resort. There he painted nude men for the first time, standing frontally on the sand while a third figure dives into the waves behind them. Men on the Seashore (1908). Belvedere, Vienna.🇳🇴 #ArtHistory #MaleNude #Expressionism

USA: Ernest Henry and Neel Bate, July 28, 1953, George Platt Lynes. 2 nudes, 1 facing the light, 1 turned away. A perfect butt! Lynes photographed 100’s of men like this in his NYC studio, negatives he asked friends to destroy after his death. Some survived. Corkin Gallery. 🇺🇸 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Hong Kong: Lin Jinfu, trained in sculpture at Tsinghua University before switching to oil painting with the top marks in his class. He paints male bodies with an old master's precision and a sculptor's understanding of form. SunPride Foundation, Hong Kong. 🇭🇰 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Pakistan: Lavender Boy (2019) by Salman Toor. A nude man coiled amid rumpled sheets, an AC unit humming in the window. Toor paints imagined lives of young queer South Asian men in New York, works he calls journal-like entries of bonding, lust and loneliness. Private Collection. 🇺🇸🇵🇰#MaleNude

USA: Robert Mapplethorpe, from the Bathtub Series (1978) by Don Herron. The photographer who would define the male nude for a generation, photographed nude himself, in San Francisco, by a friend with a camera and an idea about containers. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 🇺🇸 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Australia: ‘Matthew & Ken’ by William Yang. 2 nude men entwined on a bed, the photograph covered entirely in Yang's handwriting, turning the print itself into a diary entry: "I pretended to be shocked but after a while I agreed, of course." Queensland Art Gallery. 🇦🇺 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

USA: Waking up first, hard morning light (2020) by Louis Fratino. Two men entangled in bed, sunlight through a Brooklyn window. Fratino paints gay intimacy the way Matisse painted odalisques, unabashed and tender. He was included in the Venice Biennale in 2024, aged 30. Private Collection🇺🇸 #MaleNude

Germany: Hani Hape spent a year recreating Helmut Newton's most notorious nude photographs, pose for pose, with men instead of women. Critics are split: liberation or just the same power dynamics in different bodies. 4 nude men stand exactly where Newton's women once stood. Berlin. 🇩🇪 #MaleNude

Czechia: Portrait of an Old Dancer by Jan Saudek. Corset, flowers, bare genitalia, all against his trademark cracked plaster wall. Saudek worked in secret under Communist rule to avoid the police who censored anything they deemed pornography. 🇨🇿 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

USA: Nude Under Manhattan Bridge, NY (1980) by Arthur Tress. A man's bare body among the discarded stone of old New York, the bridge looming overhead. Tress built a career photographing dreams, fears and the male form in ruins. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 🇺🇸 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Japan: Une Moderne Olympia (2018) Yasumasa Morimura. The artist plays a naked geisha and her Western manservant simultaneously, 30 years after his first Olympia. Manet exposed the male gaze on women. Morimura exposes the Western gaze on everyone else. Mori Art Museum,Tokyo. 🇯🇵 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

China/UK: Yushi Li, Chinese, London-based, reverses centuries of the female nude in a single photograph. The Feast, Outside (2020). Nude men scattered around a garden pool, two clothed women seated like the subjects of a Renaissance portrait. Fotografiska, Stockholm. 🇬🇧🇨🇳 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

South Africa: Deborah Poynton calls her works "stages" rather than narratives. In The Club (2001), the central male nude creates an unsettling, dreamlike intensity. He disrupts the formal setting, forcing us to confront our own projections. Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Sweden: Ernst Josephson painted Näcken again and again between 1882 and 1884, a nude male figure from Nordic folklore who plays fiddle to lure people into deadly water. Josephson called it his own allegory of isolation. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. 🇸🇪 #ArtHistory #MaleNude #Folklore

USA: Untitled (4 Nudes in Water) by Tom Bianchi. Nude men in water, a city behind them, shot at Fire Island when homosexuality was still illegal across the US. "We carved out the tiniest little place just for ourselves, where we could be safe." Bonhams. 🇺🇸 #ArtHistory #MaleNude #QueerArt

USA: Double Image: Paul Rosano (1974) Sylvia Sleigh. A nude man, front and back rendered in Pre-Raphaelite detail. A NY judge demanded it removed from exhibition. Sleigh:”I paint men in a way I appreciate them, as dignified and intelligent people." Smart Museum, Chicago. 🇺🇸 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Germany: Franz Marc painted Woodcutter in 1911, the year he co-founded Der Blaue Reiter with Kandinsky. A nude male in vivid Expressionist colour carries timber through a forest. 3 years later he volunteered for the front. He died at Verdun in 1916 aged 36. Private Collection.🇩🇪 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

UK: Naked Man with his Friend (c.1978-80) by Lucian Freud. A nude man sits beside his clothed companion on a green sofa, both asleep. Freud painted only people he knew intimately. The nude male body here is neither heroic nor erotic. Private collection. 🇬🇧 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Greece: Kroisos Kouros, c.530 BCE. A nude young man, one foot forward, fists at his sides, archaic smile playing on his lips. Not a portrait. An ideal. Every Greek family who could afford it marked their son's grave with a body like this. National Archaeological Museum, Athens.🇬🇷#ArtHistory #MaleNude

USA: Ryan McGinley spent summers driving across America with friends, photographing them nude in rivers, forests and open roads. A tiny nude male figure on a fallen log above rushing water. McGinley called it "evidence of fun." Whitney Museum. Guggenheim. Team Gallery, NYC. 🇺🇸 #MaleNude #Photography

France: From the Atelier series by François Rousseau. "When desire invades everything, it does not allow you to think. It is only when I put desire at a distance that I made the most beautiful images." Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. 🇫🇷 #MaleNude

Australia: Ian Thorpe (2002) by James Houston. A nude Ian Thorpe, limbs covered in peeling black paint, crouches on a studio floor. The Thorpedo. Thirteen world records. A coming out fourteen years after this photograph was taken. National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. 🇦🇺 #ArtHistory #MaleNude

Australia: Group (1938) Max Dupain. Two figures, one male, one female, created in his Sydney studio. The male back rendered with such anatomical precision it reads as sculpture. Dupain said the camera was a means of glorifying the ordinary. NGA, Canberra. 🇦🇺 #ArtHistory #MaleNude #Photography