Masculine/Masculine at the Musée d’Orsay

If you are sceptical of art exhibitions which appear to pander to the zeitgeist then you would be forgiven for hesitating to visit this one, which is subtitled The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day. However, you would then be depriving yourself of the concentrated flavour of this exhibition, which is a blockbuster success. Something happens in the brain when you see these pieces in a single place, a cumulative effect you wouldn’t get if you picked through them piecemeal.

If you are already a Pierre et Gilles fan, there’s plenty to see, including Vive la France, three naked football players of different ethnicities in a stadium – a wink to the multicultural makeup of the nation.

If you are just dipping your toes into contemporary art, Masculine/Masculine provides an accessible bridge, showing giants like De la Tour and Cézanne alongside Ron Mueck and Lucien Freud, and introducing such singular pieces as the impactful Coup de Grisou by Henri Greber, which freezes the fateful moment a miner is hit by a gas blast.

This is a follow-up to a show at the Leopold Museum in Vienna and has a French sensibility. As director and curator Guy Cogeval says, “It is an audacious and joyous project, put together with the help of my accomplices”. The final section, The Male Body as the Object of Desire, is a sort of mirror, one reflecting back the question of how far we have evolved, both as individuals and as a society. People young and old, amused or bemused, are allowed to approach this subject at their own pace or skip it altogether. As the Zen proverb has it, ‘When the disciple is ready, the teacher will appear’.

Tip: The Musée d’Orsay is always popular and this is one of the top exhibitions of the season, so book online to skip the queues at the entrance.