The German diplomat Harry Graf Kessler’s ideal of beauty was male. It was men bathing naked in rivers. It was working-class boys fighting in a Whitechapel boxing ring (‘East End and Greece in one’, he noted in his diary on 25 April 1903). It was the attraction of two young Belgian sailors on leave, or Nijinsky performing on stage. By 1907 he was in an amorous relationship with a slender racing cyclist named Gaston Colin. Kessler would meet the French sculptor Aristide Maillol for the first time in 1904, with Kessler considering the sculptor’s work the embodiment of excellence. He was attracted to the sensuality of his art. On 10 November 1902 he had noted in his diary that the great loss for art since the Renaissance was the disappearance of warm-blooded lust. To Kessler, the naked body and the beautiful human face were the alpha and omega of great art. However, it took him a great deal of effort encouraging the firmly heterosexual sculptor to chisel a male nude. He finally persuaded him to have Gaston Colin stand as his first adult male model. Maillol executed the sculpture in 1908 in his studio. When the clay version was finished, Kessler ordered a bronze cast to be made. In his diary Kessler documented the progress of the work and took a number of photographs of a nude Colin posing in Maillol’s studio. The statue became known as ‘Le coureur cycliste’ (but no bike!) It is the sculptor’s only major free-standing male nude. With the acquisition of this sculpture in bronze Kessler came to possess a full-length nude portrait of his lover and companion, an image of physical perfection.
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