Untitled (charcoal on paper, 11 x 14”)
by G.W. Mercure
Larry R. Collins spent 35 years quietly filling sketchbooks with drawings of the nude male form. Most of the sheets feature graphite and charcoal marks made quickly in the presence of live models. The vast majority focus unabashedly on male genitalia. The work sat stacked in his studio while Collins built a multifaceted career as an art historian, curator, and gallerist. But turning 80 altered his sense of creative urgency.
“I’d been making drawings of penises and genitalia, male figures for 35 years,” Collins says. “I always had in the back of my mind an idea to do a book about them, but I just never did. And I finally decided I was going to do the book. As I was sort of getting it together in my head, I figured, well, you’re 81 years old. You might as well do a book.”
Around that same time, Collins stumbled across historical accounts of the Sacred Band of Thebes. Formed in the fourth century B.C., the legendary Greek military unit comprised of 150 pairs of male lovers. The Theban commander believed soldiers bonded by romantic devotion would fight more fiercely to defend one another. For four decades, the unit proved invincible, even toppling the vaunted Spartans. The army stood until 338 B.C. at the Battle of Chaeronea, where Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great slaughtered them after the Sacred Band refused to surrender. Nineteenth-century excavations uncovered 254 skeletons buried in pairs, their skeletal hands still linked.
“I came across some information about the Sacred Band, something I’d never heard of, and it was such a great story,” Collins explains. “In my mind the two things began to sit side by side, and so I’m presenting it that way in the book… I wrote an essay explaining what the Sacred Band was, and I had the drawings. Instead of making it really obvious or solving the problem for everybody, I just decided to let people make the connection themselves. You have the two elements that sort of speak to each other.” The result is The Sacred Band, a newly self-published volume collecting 100 undated sketchbook drawings, paired with an exhibition opening September 18 at the Alden Gallery in Provincetown.
The connection between heavy infantry and intimate figure studies hit Collins on an intensely personal level: He deployed to Vietnam in 1968 and served on the front lines as an infantryman and a combat illustrator.
“I was in an infantry company in Vietnam in 1968, so I identified right away with these men to some degree, and all of the things that this story is about, such as love, loyalty, masculinity, war, violence, death, fear. Those are all things I experienced,” he says.
That battlefield lineage gives Collins’ drawings a distinct weight. Rendered primarily in raw charcoal on letter-sized sheets, the marks do not drift into academic sterility or commercial gloss. They capture genuine vulnerability. For Collins, asking a model to disrobe requires an unspoken contract of mutual reliance.
“Just the very act of drawing a nude person is an intimate act,” Collins explains. “The model agrees to be nude and offer their body, so to speak, for the artist to create something, and the artist, on the other hand, is there to do that, and they have to trust each other.”
Collins is equally firm about the artistic legitimacy of the work. He pushes back against any puritanical impulse that would conflate an unvarnished anatomical study with prurience.
“I see this as an art piece,” Collins insists. “It’s not pornography. Pornography would be simply geared toward titillation, sexual titillation, and art is not that way. Art can have elements of that, but there is a big difference.”
That distinction strikes at Collins’ lifelong fight against censorship. Art history remains littered with systemic efforts to suppress the male phallus, from the post-Council of Trent “fig leaf campaign” that defaced Renaissance frescoes to the sanitized pedestals of neoclassical museums. Collins encountered that squeamishness firsthand as an undergraduate art student.
“When I was young, a college student, I entered a drawing of the Hermes of Praxiteles, which is a very famous statue from ancient Greece, and the penis is missing,” Collins recalls. “I drew it like it was—testicles are there with no penis. Well, the art museum director took my drawing and hid it from the juror in his office so he wouldn’t see it. I was outraged, of course, but I never forgot that, and it still happens. There are galleries in this town that won’t show male nudes, certainly won’t show penises… All you have to do is go to the Vatican museums and walk down the halls of hundreds of marble statues of male nudes, and you see 90 percent of the penises are hacked off. Why? To me, the male genitalia are beautiful, and I tried to make that clear in my drawings.”
Surrounded by canvases and new work, Collins remains focused on the mark right in front of him. By uniting the fallen lovers of Thebes with decades of private sketchbooks, Collins’ Sacred Band projects restore dignity to an army erased by prejudice, celebrating the human form without apology or armor.
The Sacred Band, a show of male nude drawings by Larry R. Collins, will be on view September 18 – November 1, at Alden Gallery, 423 Commercial St., Provincetown. There will be an artist’s reception Friday, September 18, 6 – 8 p.m. For more information call 508.487.4230 or visit aldengallery.com. In addition, Collins will be in conversation with artist Christopher Sousa at East End Books Ptown, 389 Commercial St., on Friday, October 2, 5:30 p.m. The book is also available for sale there. For details on the book event call 508.413.7163 or visit eastendbooksptown.com.
