Viktoriia Bazyk

Porträt Victoriia Bazyk

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After earning her first degree in International Relations at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Viktoriia Bazyk studied Art History and German Philology at the University of Stuttgart. She later moved to Vienna where she completed her master’s degree in Art History with a thesis on transgressive masculinity in William Bouguereau’s painting “Dante and Virgil in Hell”, which was awarded the Sir-Ernst-Gombrich-Nachwuchspreis in 2024. During her studies she served as an intern at the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History (CReA Lab) and worked as an academic tutor and project assistant at the Vienna Department of Art History. In 2024 she became a fellow of the Vienna Doctoral School of Historical and Cultural Studies and is currently working on her dissertation which examines the academic male nude in 19th century French painting and is supervised by Prof. Marianne Koos (University of Vienna) and Prof. Mechthild Fend (Goethe University Frankfurt). 

Research interests: Academic and salon painting in 19th century France, gender and queer studies in art history, representations and constructions of masculinity in visual arts, the nude as a means of artistic expression

Current research project: Hypermasculine constructions of masculinity. The envois de Rome and the academic male nude in mid-19th century France.
Many feminist art historians agree that the male nude experienced its last heyday in French painting around 1800, only to be slowly but surely replaced by the female nude. Abigail Solomon-Godeau famously argued in her controversial book Male Trouble (1997) that the numerous depictions of passive androgynous youths after the French Revolution testified to a crisis in the representation of masculinity, which led to the disappearance of the male nude from the elite visual culture in the 19th century. However, even a cursory glance at the student works of young artists at the Académie de France à Rome (the so-called envois de Rome) reveals a persistent interest in the subject which, particularly in the late 1840-1860s, developed into a veritable fascination with almost fantastically hypermasculine yet sensual Michelangelesque nudes. Long before the hard body was established as the modern paragon of manhood, art students rebelled both against the contemporary bourgeois concept of masculinity and the Apollonian archetype of the academic tradition by imagining their own muscular, virile, ambiguously seductive masculine ideal that oscillated between the roles of a hegemonic subject and an erotic object. The artists in question include Alexandre Cabanel, William Bouguereau, Henri Regnault and Joseph Blanc – all future stars of the French salon, remembered nowadays primarily for their many voluptuous Venuses, nymphs and odalisques. Although as young men they enthusiastically embraced the male nude as a means of artistic expression, they were later discouraged from doing so by the realities of the art market, the bourgeois morality and the rejection of their ambiguous images of masculinity by their alma mater. This makes their spectacular early works all the more peculiar and exciting. Therefore, this dissertation examines the phenomenon of hypermasculine male nudes at the Académie de France à Rome from a queer-feminist perspective and investigates the role of the academic male nude and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the construction, interpretation and (re-)production of masculinities in 19th century French painting, combining traditional art-historical methods with those of gender studies. 

Presentations & Talks

Awards & Scholarships

  • 2024 Sir Ernst Gombrich Award for the master thesis „Transgressive Männlichkeit. Virilität, Gewalt und Erotik in William Bouguereaus Dante und Vergil in der Hölle“
  • 2022-2023 Ernst Mach Scholarship – Ukraine, financed by the Republic of Austria, Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF), implemented by the OeAD-GmbH – Agency for Education and Internationalization