Connections/The Ideal Man

My name is Nadine Orenstein and I'm a curator in the Drawings and Prints department.

When you start studying art history there's a lot of talk about artists looking for an ideal figure type.

So that got me thinking about what is the ideal man in art and how

works of art can show you different aspects of what the ideal man might be in different times.

Albrecht Dürer, he was really trying to find a formula of the ideal proportions of men and women. Even he realized that that was not practical at all and later on when he did his proportion book he actually ended up with ideal figure types for different body shapes.

This great cuirass of an ideal chest, you wonder if the person wearing it actually looked like that, then that brings up the whole idea of people

changing themselves to become the ideal man. A wonderful caricature of a dandy and he's got two people who are pulling at his girdle trying to get him into the ideal figure type

and meanwhile, he looks like he's squeezing out the top of his collar.

To Lucien Freud, Leigh Bowery was his ideal man, and he'd made many paintings of this figure who to some people looks large and you can see like all the layers of flesh and fat.

Rembrandt van Rijn made many self-portraits from early in his career to very late in his career and he also put himself in a lot of paintings, so in a certain way he was his ideal man.

George Washington kind of embodies the ideal politician and this Gilbert Stewart painting became the model for the dollar bill and many other images of George Washington.

It used to be that the ideal man was the strong silent type who would take care of everything outside the home, and then the woman would be the one inside the home taking care of the shopping and all of these things, and now of course the image of the ideal man has changed and there's this great

painting that at the time was meant to make fun of him but in fact now, for many women, this would be the ideal man: the guy who goes shopping and he's there with his big basket of vegetables kind of bumbling around.

When I was in high school here in New York City and I came to the Met, I think this portrait of Anthony van Dyke showed my ideal man. He's like such a dream boat with his cute little eyes and his wonderful haircut and looking soulfully out at us.

I think the ideal man can be anything to anybody, and certainly changes so much over time.

Everybody has their own ideas that they read into these images. He could be a movie star, he could be a statesman

he could be your father. I'm always thinking about who it could be and so it's fascinating to see what other people, other cultures

think about this idea of the ideal man.