There is a moment in “Casablanca” in which Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) – having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp – confronts a group of German officers in Rick’s Café Américain through music. The Germans are loudly, arrogantly singing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” an anthem that has its roots in French-German antagonism, when Victor orders the house band to strike up “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, to which club owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) acquiesces. One by one the club patrons rise and join in, all but Victor’s wife – and Rick’s former lover – Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman). As the others sing lustily, she sits thinking and marveling at all that has been lost and yet still remains.

It is one of the most moving moments in the history of cinema, one I couldn’t help but flashing on as the City of Light was plunged into the heart of darkness. The fans leaving the Stade de France – where one in a series of coordinated ISIS attacks took place on Friday the 13th – burst into “La Marseillaise.” The exchange students in Manhattan’s Union Square held hands as they sang it that night. And Placido Domingo led The Metropolitan Opera Chorus in it at Lincoln Center Saturday afternoon. It, too, is a symbol of all that has been lost and yet still remains. ...

The clock is ticking down not only on 2013 but on an exhibit that caused a stir when it bowed in Paris this past fall. Indeed, it was the talk of the fashion shows there.

“Masculin/Masculin: Ouvrage Collectif,” at the Musée d’Orsay through Jan. 2, considers the male nude in various media from 1800 to the present. It was organized in collaboration with the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which presented its show, “Nude Men,” in the fall and winter of 2012-13.

While both exhibits contain overlapping works, they are different in tone as each has played to the strengths of its respective museum and country. The Leopold show, reflecting an institution rich in the works of Egon Schiele, was more expressive, almost neurotically so, in its depiction of male nudity; the Musée d’Orsay show, cooler, more formal in its ravishing neoclassical (turn-of the-19th-century) offerings. (Or so it seems to me after pouring over – no, devouring -- the catalogs only. I purchased “Nude Men,” published by Hirmer, at a Barnes & Noble. I’m grateful to Flammarion, publisher of “Masculin/Masculin,” for providing me with a copy of the catalog for that show.)

But both shows consider the same questions, not the least of which is, Why does the male nude unsettle us so? Indeed, both catalogs open with an amusing anecdote of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London commissioning a fig leaf for its replica of Michelangelo’s “David,” whose full monty apparently had a disturbing effect on Queen Victoria, bless her. Perhaps like Her Majesty, I prefer to keep my gaze above the Mason/Dixon line, so to speak, particularly for realistic, photographic male nudes. Read more

Paris burning

The wayward gaze