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Under the Shower (1964) by Jürgen Wittdorf: Berlin gallery revives men art of communist era

Seven men wash the sweat off their toned bodies in a communal shower. Unless you squint and mistake a tightly gripped bar of soap for something else, their limbs are suspended in tantalizing proximity but never quite touch.

The German artist Jürgen Wittdorf’s 1963 linocut print, from a series titled Youth and Sport, may look like something out of a top-shelf graphic novel or the virile drawings of the gay liberation icon Tom of Finland.

Yet the sensuous shower scene was never meant to scandalize, even while the men’s yearnings were hiding in plain sight: commissioned by the East German state, a framed print hung for years in the staircase of Leipzig’s sports academy and was later reproduced in a newspaper of the regime-run socialist youth movement.