As he does with all things "sportrait" related, Andy Towle quickly found the full version of a few of the portraits after a Boston Globe story this morning about a New York exhibition that features paintings of hockey players, a few of them nude.

Bostonist introduced its story on the portaits this way:

One of our favorite little quirks in sports is that, when a hockey player is listed as active or inactive for a given game, the announcers say "so-and-so will [or will not] be dressed for tonight's game". It made us giggle as eighth-graders; it makes us giggle today.

But giggling seems somehow inappropriate at today's Globe story about the New York artist named Kurt Kauper, who's causing a splash in the art and hockey world with his nude paintings of Bobby Orr and Derek Sanderson.

Oh, come on. Go ahead and giggle. But these aren't amateur porn shots of a teenaged player, but rather well-considered artistic portraits, although they're not painted from the live subject.

The Globe explains:

Along with non-nude portraits of several hockey players, Kauper's show features an homage to former Bruins center Derek Sanderson, who is painted standing next to his locker with his hockey stick - and nothing else.

"Hey, you know, he has poetic license, he can pretty much bloody well do what he bloody pleases," said Sanderson, now a 61-year-old investment manager for Boston's Howland Capital Management, who, like Orr, did not pose for his portrait and did not know about it until contacted by a reporter. "I just hope he's a good artist."

Sanderson declined an offer to view the image, but art-world types would tell him not to worry. They say Kauper, whose works have been shown in the Whitney Museum of American Art's prestigious biennial in New York and at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, among other places, is a masterful painter who creates realistic portraits of subjects he has never met. Some pieces in the current show sold for $135,000. (One nude Orr remains available; the other has been sold, as has the Sanderson.)

The Boston paper also provides a slideshow of some images included in the show, but crops the nudes.

Unfortunately, the cropping suggests that there might be more there there in the paintings than there actually is. The full-length image of an Orr nude offered on Towleroad (in a larger image than we're showing here), with its strategically-placed hand, seems almost innocent. (But then, we don't find the SAM Sculpture Garden's male nude all that shocking and find it only vaguely interesting, so what do we know.)

We're just waiting to see these paintings by Kauper on the walls of the Frye, because they seem precisely the kinds of things that should be and would be shown there if the rights could be worked out.