Artistic Representation and the Construction of Masculinity

During 1992–1993, the Tate Gallery held the exhibition ‘Visualising Masculinities’ which displayed 14 canvases painted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from works by Sargent, Millais and Hicks to contemporary depictions by Hockney, Kitaj, Spencer and Longo. Andrew Stephenson commented that the purpose of the exhibition was to examine the display and meanings of the male body in art since the mid-nineteenth century. It . . . recognises the important role that visual culture has played in circulating, often in a celebratory way, images of male power and the norms of manliness. . . . The display is based on three interrelated assumptions. Firstly, • that ‘masculinity’ is a historical construct changing from period to period, and as a category is neither ‘natural’ nor culturally innocent. Its meanings and significations are always structured in relation to wider social beliefs, political ideologies and sexual identities. Secondly, that histories of ‘masculinity’ relate in a complex and unequal way with histories of ‘femininity’ as its ‘Other’ and with representations of sexual difference. Thirdly, that ‘masculinity’ interweaves lived experience with imagined fantasies and desires. (‘Visualising Masculinities’, exhibition brochure, n.p.)