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There’s something unusual on display in the lower reaches of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts these days: the male member.

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John Lyman’s male model from the 1930s is one of several in the show wearing G-strings.MMFA

The female nude is standard fare in most art museums, but a fully naked man with genitalia visible is a rare sight. Down in the basement of the MMFA’s Desmarais Pavilion, a show entitled A Model in the Studio: Montreal 1880-1950 includes a few such images – alongside many of naked women. In a red chalk drawing from 1904-05, Clarence Gagnon renders a standing male nude with delicate mastery of the young man’s musculature and quiet realism about his genitals. John Lyman’s drawing of an older, broad-shouldered figure is far quicker, almost cartoonish in effect, but equally willing to dispense with the G-string that covers many of the men in this show.

As curator Jacques Des Rochers explains in this tightly focused exhibition of recent acquisitions, classical art often featured the unclothed male figure. He was a symbol of power, beauty and humanity. It was in the 19th century, as the female nude became increasingly eroticized in art, that men faded into the background.

If art displays naked people far more often than most of us actually wander about unclothed, it is not merely for the viewer’s titillation. Depicting people starts by understanding the form underneath the clothes and the life drawing class with a naked model is a staple of artistic training. But it’s also a practice that historically was fraught with potential misunderstandings and double standards: Part of Des Rochers’s goal is to examine how Montreal’s conservative society dealt with the issue of nudity in art. The show includes a couple of pages from early 20th-century art magazines that simply censored nude images with black bars, and it points out that female artists – there are five among the 30 represented here – were sometimes given limited access to life drawing classes.

For efficiency’s sake, an artist can always turn to an articulated wooden mannequin: This show includes quick sketches of the female figure by Arthur Lismer that were intended to instruct his students in drawing the human form and clearly based on a mannequin. Meanwhile, ones by Ozias Leduc render the little figure right down to the wood grain. Ernest Aubin’s and William Brymer’s sketches of female models are equally scrupulous about realistic detail, rendering heavy hips, thick thighs and pubic hair.

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Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté paints the Sleeping Muse or Kneeling Nude in Profile, 1921.MMFA

What a contrast to one of the few paintings included in the show: in Despondency, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté paints a beautifully youthful and entirely naked women with creamy skin and a mass of black hair collapsed against a background of crumpled white sheets. Clearly, the viewer is more likely to enjoy her nudity than to sympathize with her supposed despair – although the work is also known less provocatively as Sleeping Muse or Kneeling Nude in Profile.

Faced with this kind of prevalent 19th-century hypocrisy in which classical trappings were used to disguise erotica, you might sympathize a bit with Canadian prudery. It was when the academic practice of life drawing moved out of the classroom and into the artist’s private studio that Quebec society became uncomfortable with the results: In that context, the model can quickly become an individual – and a sexy one at that. There’s a strong example here of the transition in Henri Hébert’s Back View of a Standing Female Nude with Shoes, a picture of his friend Coco, naked except for her Mary Janes. A pert flapper titling her head and cocking her hip, she is not merely a model posing but also, even when seen entirely from behind, an assertive personality refusing to disappear behind generic nudity.

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It’s interesting to consider how female artists approach the issue: Prudence Heward’s nude sketches from the 1930s and ’40s are deeply concerned with the weight and the beauty of both female and male bodies, disregarding the head altogether. When Heward personalized and exoticized the figure it was more often in her sketches of black women, whom she liked to place in lush natural settings. Des Rochers suggests we would now consider that approach inappropriate, but makes little of its obvious implications: Artists, male or female, have traditionally enjoyed a certain power over their models and it’s that superiority that leaves them free to objectify.

Of course, that’s not the only attitude of the artist toward the model. One of the most delightful images here is Ernst Neumann’s Rest Period (1931) in which the naked model stands, hands on her hips, critically examining the artist’s work over his shoulder. In a show full of academic exercises in life drawing, the sketch reads as an intimate insight into the sometimes problematic studio relationship.

So, a little politics might greatly enliven the viewer’s experience of this fascinating collection: Just pack your own if you plan to visit.

A Model in the Studio continues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until May 26.

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