The male nude occupied Gaudier-Brzeska throughout this period. His visits to the London Wrestling Club from 1912 prompted a series of studies of wrestlers, a subject to which he returned in drawings, sculpture and printmaking. Writing to Sophie Brzeska after seeing the wrestlers in December 1912, he dwelt on their large shoulders, powerful necks and firm thighs. The physical type clearly interested him, and these features recur throughout his studies of the male body.

Gaudier-Brzeska had received little formal artistic training. Much of his education instead took place in museums, above all through looking and drawing. After settling in London in 1911, he absorbed an unusually wide field of influences, from the sculpture he encountered at the British Museum to Renaissance art and the new languages of Cubism and the European avant-garde. His drawings could change character accordingly. Some are heavily worked and angular; others, including the present sheet, depend upon the speed and economy of an almost calligraphic line.

Drawing and sculpture were closely connected in Gaudier-Brzeska’s practice. On paper, as in stone, he was concerned with mass, balance and the relation of one form to another. A shoulder or thigh is not merely outlined but treated as the edge of a volume. This sculptural understanding of the figure gives even his most economical drawings their sense of solidity.

By 1913 Gaudier-Brzeska was at the centre of the emerging London avant-garde. His friendships with Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis coincided with a period in which his work became increasingly concentrated in form; the following year he would become associated with Vorticism and BLAST. Standing Male Nude, however, remains rooted in observation. Its strength lies in the directness with which Gaudier-Brzeska moves from the body before him to the essential lines of the figure.

This drawing was previous owned by Jim Ede (then a curator at Tate Gallery) who bought a sizeable portion of Gaudier-Brzeska's work from Sophie Brzeska's estate after she died. Her estate included numerous letters sent between Henri and Sophie, which Ede would use as the basis for his book Savage Messiah on the life and work of Gaudier-Brzeska. The majority of Ede’s collection, housed in a series of cottages in Cambridge known as Kettle’s Yard, would be gifted to as a whole to the University on Ede’s death; and remains one of the largest collections of sculptures and drawings by Gaudier.

Examples of Gaudier-Brzeska’s work are held in public collections including Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, London; Tate, London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Ingram Collection, London; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.