The clock is ticking down not only on 2013 but on an exhibit that caused a stir when it bowed in Paris this past fall. Indeed, it was the talk of the fashion shows there.

“Masculin/Masculin: Ouvrage Collectif,” at the Musée d’Orsay through Jan. 2, considers the male nude in various media from 1800 to the present. It was organized in collaboration with the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which presented its show, “Nude Men,” in the fall and winter of 2012-13.

While both exhibits contain overlapping works, they are different in tone as each has played to the strengths of its respective museum and country. The Leopold show, reflecting an institution rich in the works of Egon Schiele, was more expressive, almost neurotically so, in its depiction of male nudity; the Musée d’Orsay show, cooler, more formal in its ravishing neoclassical (turn-of the-19th-century) offerings. (Or so it seems to me after pouring over – no, devouring -- the catalogs only. I purchased “Nude Men,” published by Hirmer, at a Barnes & Noble. I’m grateful to Flammarion, publisher of “Masculin/Masculin,” for providing me with a copy of the catalog for that show.)

But both shows consider the same questions, not the least of which is, Why does the male nude unsettle us so? Indeed, both catalogs open with an amusing anecdote of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London commissioning a fig leaf for its replica of Michelangelo’s “David,” whose full monty apparently had a disturbing effect on Queen Victoria, bless her. Perhaps like Her Majesty, I prefer to keep my gaze above the Mason/Dixon line, so to speak, particularly for realistic, photographic male nudes. Read more