Joseph Hirsch, The Naked Man, 1959-1962, oil on canvas

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1966.84.3

Joseph Hirsch was blacklisted, of course.

Hirsch was a popular American military propagandist, and an avid social critic and labor organizer. For most of Hirsch’s artistic career, these were not contradictory traits for Hirsch to have. However, while both of these subjects were important in Hirsch’s art, they rarely intersected thematically in his art. Often, the intersection of themes would be in the framing of Hirsch’s works, such as his anti-lynching work being placed between reviews of anti-Nazi and anti-militaristic literature in Communist mag New Masses, drawing lines between the thoughts.

The Naked Man is more subtle in its commentary than Hirsch’s earlier works; it is not propaganda, for military usage or for agitation. It is glamorous in a lush portrayal of fabrics and lighting, but grim with an austere, shadowy color palette. In the logic of this scene, there is little coyness to the man’s depiction; he is stalwart, and cold.

However, this man is not quite a man; his figure is draped and vulnerable, comparable to a painted naked woman more so than a nude man. Despite the excess of the drapery that clamors to cover him up, a line cuts down the young man’s flesh nearly from his head to the floor. His gaze is tilted downward and away from the viewer: he is passive. From this passivity, the scene is voyeuristic: a tilted shadow implies a door has just been opened to this scene. He is caught in a private moment, but this moment is portrayed with poise, rather than with action. The man is in the literal act of changing clothes, as well as the symbolic act of changing into a soldier. Before he is a soldier, he is not-quite-yet a man. Whether this person should fully become a man and a soldier is a somber subject, and not fully to be seen.

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Bird Nesting, 1837, oil on canvas

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase in memory of Joshua C. Taylor through the Director's Discretionary Fund, 1981.51

A boy is different from a man. The masculine traits of the gender should be fully realized by the time a boy is a man, but before that, in the fleeting time of childhood, a boy could be many things.

In its contemporary context, there would be little doubt that this is a young boy, and that is true now. But, the way a young boy is signaled as a boy is different from current ideas of a boy. This is a boy who looks like he existed before masculinity; his hair is long, and he wears lace and bows, all traits associated more with femininity now much more so than premature masculinity.