“The First Unclothed”
Men arrived at my studio in every variety of readiness. Some undressed quickly, without ceremony, folding their clothes or dropping them as their character inclined.
Others took longer—unhooking, hesitating, turning slightly away, as if the room needed to earn the sight of them. But almost all of them, in those first unclothed moments, did something with their hands. They covered themselves, or clasped their hands in front of themselves, or crossed their arms. Briefly, usually. A few seconds, sometimes less. And then they stopped, adjusted, let the posture go. It was rarely a considered gesture. It looked more like something that arrived before the decision not to do it.
When I read about the earliest human images of the male body, those images seem to enact something similar: a reaching for what to do with the fact of the body’s presence, a negotiation between exposure and cover that has never, as far as I can tell, been resolved.
The oldest mark we might call a male human figure sits at the bottom of the Shaft of the Dead Man in the Lascaux caves in the Dordogne, surrounded by a disembowelled bison, a walking rhinoceros and a bird on a pole. He is a sketch, barely—an arrangement of lines that suggests a man falling or lying prone. Researchers note that he appears ithyphallic. He has a bird’s head. He was placed in the deepest, most secluded section of a cave that otherwise carries almost no human figures at all. Seventeen thousand years ago, when someone put him there, the walls above in Lascaux’s great halls held hundreds of animals: horses, bulls, deer, ibex, bears. The animals are drawn with remarkable confidence and observational care. The man is a stick.
The animals occupy the walls in their hundreds. The man appears once, deep underground, with a bird’s head.
The archaeology of the Upper Palaeolithic period is, in practice, the archaeology of Ice Age Europe. Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet, Font-de-Gaume, Les Trois-Frères—all of them in France and Spain, all of them in the Franco-Cantabrian corridor that runs along the northern edge of the Pyrenees. The people who painted those walls lived in cold that required layered clothing for survival. The male body, for them, would have been something seen only under specific conditions: bathing, ceremony, wounding, birth, death. It was not a body that moved through daily life exposed to light. I wonder whether the rarity of the male body in their art has something to do with that—with a body so routinely covered that representing it felt transgressive, or dangerous, or simply strange. Or whether the rarity tells us something else entirely: that the male body was not the body that carried meaning for those painters, and they placed their meaning instead in the animals they lived alongside and hunted and perhaps feared.
I hold that question without settling it, because I am aware that reading Ice Age European cave art as the origin story of human visual culture is itself a problem. It is a story told from the cold.
Cross into Africa and continue to the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. Here the San people—whose ancestors archaeology identifies as among the first anatomically modern humans in southern Africa—painted thousands of human figures on rock faces across hundreds of sites. The figures are active: hunting, dancing, transforming, crossing the boundary between the human world and something beyond it. The figures are overwhelmingly male, routinely depicted without any clothing, and the detail of their bodies includes, with apparent directness, the state of their arousal. The therianthropes—the figures that combine human and animal form, understood through ethnographic research as shamans in trance—appear in this state with a consistency that suggests it carried specific meaning: potency, transition, the body operating at its outer reach. The erection in these images does not read as obscene. It reads as significant.
The San paintings that survive range widely in date, with some as recent as the nineteenth century, and the tradition continued long enough for partial interpretation to come from people within it. In 1873, a Bushman named Qing guided a Cape Colony magistrate, Joseph Millerd Orpen, through the Drakensberg, describing the paintings as they went. That conversation, fragmentary and filtered through translation, still provides more context than anything we have for the Lascaux figure in his shaft. What comes through is that the imagery belonged to a coherent symbolic language, not to the desire to document the body for its own sake.
But what I notice, reading about the Drakensberg images alongside the Ice Age European ones, is that the male body in the south was a body that could be fully present in the image—erect, active, spiritually charged, shown without cover—while the male body in the north was a body that required transformation before it could appear at all. It needed antlers. It needed a bird’s head. It needed to be hybrid and strange before it earned a place on the wall.
Does this difference belong to the cultures, or to the climate, or to the century of scholarship that decided which images were foundational and which were regional footnotes?
Travel to the Kimberley in Western Australia, where rock paintings date back perhaps forty thousand years, making them among the oldest figurative art in the world. The Gwion Gwion figures—elongated, elegant, in motion—depict human forms adorned with ceremonial headdresses and body decoration but frequently without what we would call clothing. The Mimi spirits of Arnhem Land are thin, dynamic, painted in red ochre by people for whom the human figure, male and in motion, was a primary visual subject rather than an awkward exception requiring disguise. These are traditions with their own logic, their own symbolic weight, developed across timescales that dwarf the Franco-Cantabrian record. They belong to cultures where exposure to heat and light made covering the body a partial, occasional and contextual matter rather than a default. I begin to wonder what human visual culture would have concluded about the first depictions of the male body if the founding scholarship had begun here rather than in the limestone caves of France.
In Samoa, the pe’a—a traditional tattoo covering the male body from mid-torso to below the knee—was a rite of passage marking courage, maturity and social standing. Men who had not received their pe’a were called telefua or telenoa: the Samoan words for naked. Not unclothed. Not undressed. Naked—the word carrying shame. But the nakedness here was not the absence of fabric. A man wearing only the pe’a was not naked in the Samoan sense. The tattoo was the clothing. The first Europeans to observe this, members of a French expedition in 1787, reported that the men’s thighs appeared “tattooed in such a way that one would think them clothed, although they are almost naked.” Almost naked. The Europeans could not quite locate the nakedness they expected to find.
The body is never simply exposed or covered. There are always conditions: what counts as cover, what counts as exposure, what kind of visibility is shaming and what kind carries dignity. The northern European framework—fabric as clothing, its absence as nakedness—is not a universal. It is one arrangement among many. And the arrangements in the south, across Polynesia, across Aboriginal Australia, across the Drakensberg, suggest that the male body in warm climates found entirely different solutions to the question of what exposure means.
What those prehistoric painters in the Franco-Cantabrian corridor knew about the male body without its wrapping I cannot say. But I notice they put the one male figure they drew into the deepest possible dark, gave him a bird’s head, surrounded him with crisis. I notice the San painters covered their walls with male bodies shown whole, active, potent, in daylight. I notice the Samoan tradition named the untouched male body as the naked one and the marked one as clothed.
And I notice—slowly, over years of watching men take their clothes off and put them back on again—that what any given man does with his body in that uncovered moment tells you something precise about what he believes the body means, and what he believes other people will do with the sight of it.
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