I hesitate to post these images because of the "questionable" subject matter. The question, of course, is what was the artist's intent in these images of young boys, often nude? And in art, generally, when does the depiction of youthful beauty cross the line and become something else? At what point does the non-graphic nude depiction of a child become exploitive? How old does a young person have to be before they are "safe" to portray naked: physically mature or emotionally mature or statutorily mature? Is the nude figure in contemporary art inherently a sexual object, or does the
relative age of the sitter influence that perception? In an era that is over-sexualized, in general - in both the Arts and in our culture - how do we make these sometimes subtle distinctions?
Owe Zerge (1894, Oppmanna - 1983, Kristianstad), Swedish painter. Between 1914 and 1915 he studied at the
Althin Målarskola in Stockholm, and then enrolled at the Royal Swedish Academy of Art, where he remained until 1919. The following year he traveled in France and Italy, and he won an honorable mention at the Paris
Salon of 1921. By the late Twenties he had settled near his birthplace, building a studio in the village of Arkelstorp, near Kristianstad. He painted a wide variety of subject matter - it appears he made the majority of his livelihood with portraiture - but his paintings and drawings of boys are a large part of his oeuvre.
