On Fifty-seventh Street the male nude may be superseding his female counterpart as an object for casual erotic daydreams in art. Gay culture has its part in this, but the new male eroticism also has a transcultural appeal. Women’s bodies don’t any longer work so very well as decor. The public now spends its days dressed in his-and-her business suits, and is bored by both the pre-feminist view of woman as a tasty morsel in the boudoir and the feminist idea of a woman’s body as a battlefield over which the sexual wars are waged. In the paintings of Rainer Fetting and the photographs of Bruce Weber—which were at the Marlborough and Robert Miller galleries in September—the male nude has the chic of a newly hatched subject.

Rainer Fetting’s Stunde der Rose(“Hour of the Rose”) shows a dark-haired boy lying in the buff on a couch, a glass of red wine in one hand, a red rose at his feet. In another Fetting a black boy, Desmond, stands with nothing on in a pose that reveals all at once his buttocks, his broad back, and a three-quarter view of his face. These boys also appear in groups, sometimes with women, on the New York tenement roofs and New Jersey piers where Fetting’s crowd goes to sunbathe and party; the skyline is always there in the background, an emblem of the city. Fetting handles paint in a rough, casual manner; his abrupt light-into-dark chiaroscuro and straight- from-the-tube colors