Born On This Day- August 23rd... Louise Nevelson

Nevelson by Avedon

Louise Nevelson is known for her abstract expressionist “crates” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her assemblages, one of which was 3 stories high. Nevelson: "When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."

She was born Leah Berliawsky in Kiev in 1899, & was raised in Rockland, Maine From early childhood Nevelson wanted to be a sculptor, with wood as her medium. It took her more than 6+ decades to make her mark in the art world. Nevelson had one unhappy marriage when she was 18 years old. The union with business man-Charles Nevelson lasted for a decade, & produced one child, a son-Myron. Nevelson left her marriage in 1931 & devoted herself to her art.

She would go an entire decade before her 1st exhibit, which was failure. Nevelson had a 2nd show in 1943 & sold nothing. She took the entire show back to her studio & destroyed every piece. After changing direction, & after years of creating small scale pieces, Nevelson's breakthrough large works in wood were critically hailed in the late 1950s.

She infused abstract art with her personal story: the epic Jewish migration to the United States between the 1880s & the 1920s, her life as a woman artist, & her involvement in American modernism functioned as the source for her vast body of work.

I have a keen interest in American 20th century art, but I know more than even a dilettante like me should about Louise Nevelson. I had a friend in the 1980s, who wrote a one-woman show about Louise Nevelson, & I was present for most of her research & preparation.

Nevelson was the entrée for the USA at the Venice Biennale in 1963, but was still not able to make a living from the sale of her work Around this time she met the young artist-Diana MacKown. They soon moved in together. A new period of success & a more concentrated, engaged work followed. Most biographies & Nevelson’s NY Times obituary fail to mention their 26 year relationship. Nevelson’s son & heir had a metal door installed at the apartment the women shared above their studios. He had been estranged from his mother most of his life, but Nevelson had made no provisions for MacKown in her will. MacKown was supported by Jasper Johns, Edward Ablee, John Cage, & Merce Cunningham when she filed a lawsuit.

I met Nevelson once, at an opening of an exhibit at the Pace Gallery in the mid-1970s. She was there in her trademark scarf & gypsy garb. I was there with a contingency of friends of the actor- Michael Higgins, with whom I was acquainted & with whom Nevelson was acquainted. She sat in the back room, & received selected visitors who came to pay her homage. Tammy Grimes was part of our group & next in line to pay her respects. Nevelson looked at her blankly. Grimes seemed to have blushed: “I’m Tammy Grimes, I am an actress.” Nevelson still looked puzzled, but polite & rather regal: “How nice to see you”.

“You see, I think that we have measurements in our bodies. Measurements in our eyes. Look, dear, we walk on 2 feet. So we're vertical. That doesn't mean the work has to be vertical, but it means there is a weight within ourselves, or this flight. All these things are within the being: weight, measure & color. If the work is good work, it is built on these laws & principles that we have within ourselves. So when you use a vertical line or a horizontal line, or a texture or the way the shadow falls or a thinner piece or a heavier piece, it all kind of satisfies something in the soul - or, I don't like the word soul, satisfies something within the deed.You add or subtract until you feel. . . the form, the principle, that something that makes the house stand, that makes you stand."

Born On This Day- August 6th... Andy Warhol

I remember quite well, my parents shaking their heads & saying- " that is not art... it is a painting of a soup can!", when I expressed my appreciation for the work of Andy Warhol at a very young age. The point of the matter was, I really "got him", even at age 8... or especially at age 8. Andy Warhol was the subject of much scorn & derision from the critics, the public & my parents, but he was arguably the most important artist of the 20th century.

Andrew Warhol, sometimes referred to as the "Pope of Pop," embraced pop art, fascinated with the commercialism of popular icons in media & in everyday life. Warhol helped to shape pop culture & foresaw our fascination with the media to the extreme extent to which it is now accessible. Claiming that each individual would have his or her "15 minutes of fame," Warhol would certainly not be surprised by the popularity of such venues as YouTube, MP3 music downloads, American Idol, The Facebook, Reality TV, or blogs.

A master & practitioner of multiple creative forms of expression, Warhol was a painter, writer, music producer, avant-garde filmmaker, magazine creator, sculptor, & photographer. Focusing on diverse & contrasting interests at once, he was fascinated with all forms of media, a blurring of gender identities, & the contrast between a sense of celebrity & privacy.

He was a ground breaker in the idea of self as product. He even set up his studio as "The Factory", overseeing a staff that turned out prints, silkscreens & products of his work. He was still a remarkable & transcendent artist & a commanding craftsman.

The Husband & I once saw an enchanting exhibit of his commercial drawings from the early 1950s, mostly of ladies shoes, produced for advertising. These works predated his huge fame, but the essence of what he was to bring was already there. I have allot of material by & about him, including the very readable Andy Warhol's Diaries where he writes about his relationships with several men. His long time lover was interior designer Jed Johnson.

Warhol died after successful gall bladder surgery from a heart arrythmia in 1987. Johnson died in the TWA flight 800 explosion off the coast of Long Island in 1996. Warhol remains my favorite artist.

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have."

Born On This Day- July 25th... American Artist Thomas Eakins

self portrait by the artist 1902

I am quite enamored of late the 19th & 20th century American painters & Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins epitomizes everything I love about the American Realist Movement. Eakins was unsuccessful as an artist in his lifetime, but he is thought to be one of the most influential & important figures in American painting. His work is significant for its homoeroticism, & he is noted for his teaching methods, & for his insistence on teaching men & women together, which was ground breaking & controversial at the time.


Eakins was raised & educated in Philadelphia. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, & he spent several years studying in Paris & Spain. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876, & became the director in 1882. His teaching methods were controversial at the time, especially his interest in instructing his students in all aspects of the human figure, including the nude. There were tensions between him & the Academy's board of directors throughout his teaching career, he was ultimately fired in 1886 for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present.

Deeply influenced by his dismissal, his later painting concentrated on portraiture, usually of friends & family. This work was realistic but with approach that went beyond just pure representation. He was influenced by early photographers & did many photographs as studies, including many nudes. I find this photographic work to exceptional also.

I have a large "coffee table" book of his work that has given me much pleasure. Along with John Singer Sargent & James Whistler his work has been very influential in defining my taste in painting & my passion for art.

photographic study for The Wrestlers

the painting

Born On This Day- May 15th... American Artist Jasper Johns

I have a passion for 20th century American art, & I have always been fascinated with the 1950s, when these geniuses produced their astonishing works while closeted, but whose gayness was really an open secret: Montgomery Clift & James Dean, Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Lincoln Kirstein, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, Langston Hughes, Philip Johnson.

Jasper Johns was a Southern Gentleman from South Carolina. In 1953, after a stint in the army, he moved to NYC with the notion of becoming of an artist or writer. Within just a few years he had created the iconic- Flag, & White Flag & within a half a decade he would have 4 paintings in the permanent collection of MOMA. Within a decade, he would be considered the greatest living American artist.


Jasper Johns fell in love with fellow artist-Robert Rauschenberg, who became an inspiration to the younger man. Rauschenberg: “We gave each other permission.” Spurring each other on creatively, Johns painted many works of familiar objects: numerals, letters, maps, flags, letters, that captivated the art world, when NYC was the center of all things art. Johns & Robert Rauschenberg were lovers from 1955-1961, the era of their best & most important work. They had living/working lofts on the same building & went freely between their spaces. Although the  men lived & worked together, it was Johns who received the most acclaim.

Jasper Johns: “I don’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings,” He painted conventional subjects, which left the critics to ponder the explanation of his rough brushstrokes & saturnine surfaces. Johns’s work is about tension between knowing & not knowing, the explained & the unexplained. His paintings carry a secret.

His 1955 work-Target With Plaster Casts consisted of 9 wooden boxes with hinged doors, each box held of a body part. One of them was a detailed penis. A representative of the Museum of Modern Art, asked I if it would be acceptable if that particular box stayed closed? Johns: “It would be all right to keep the lid closed some of the time but not all of the time.”

In NYC, Johns met musical composer John Cage & his partner choreographer Merce Cunningham,a significant contributor to the modern dance world concert stages. Johns collaborated with Cunnigham’s work by designing sets & costumes, & became an artistic advisor to his company. Johns, Cage & Cunningham collaborated in 1973 on Cunningham’s piece- Un Jour ou Deux. These 4 gay men, never displayed explicit homosexual content in any of their works.


Johns & Rauschenberg split up because of the discomfort of being recognized as a couple outside of their circle. Rauscheberg: “What had been sensitive & tender became gossip” . Johns recalled the time he was reading Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,& Rauschenberg stated: “One day they’ll be writing about us like that.” Johns was not pleased by Rauschenberg’s comparison to the lesbian couple.


Their breakup was so bitter that they both left NYC, & they both returned to the south for an extended period. They didn't speak for more than a decade. In 1961, as the relationship was ending, Johns produced a painting- In Memory of My Feelings, Frank O’Hara, taking the name from a poem by O’Hara about gay love & the price paid for suppressing it. The poem's first line: “My quietness has a man in it.”. Johns became reclusive, & moved to an estate in  Connecticut. He almost never gives interviews. Johns’ & Rauschenberg’s relationship was the deepest & most important of their entire lives. Rauschenberg died 2 years ago this week

Robert Rauschenberg: “Jasper was soft, beautiful, lean, & poetic. I have photos of him then that would break your heart.”

Born On This Day- February 24th... Winslow Homer

One of the most prolific & important American painters & printmakers of the second half of the 19^th century & a favorite of the Husband & mine, Winslow Homer created an American, modern classical style, the visual equivalent of Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, or Walt Whitman.

He steadfastly refused to answer personal questions from critics & potential biographers, he left no revealing diaries or other personal papers, & he produced no self-portraits. Homer was a lifelong bachelor & extraordinarily shy.

One of his most beloved friends was Albert Kelsey, a fellow artist that he met in 1858 in Massachusetts. In 1867, Kelsey traveled with Homer to Paris, where they lived together for several years.

Homer's closest companion of his life was an African-American man- Lewis Wright, who lived at Homer's Maine estate from 1885 to 1910. It is known that Homer's neighbors were made uncomfortable by the closeness of his relationship with Wright, especially when leaving the gym together after core class & sharing an IPod, sweetly, taking an earbud each. They both loved early R&B & soaking in natural hot springs.

A photograph, made while they lived in Paris, apes the conventions of marriage portraits, as do so many photographic portraits of male friends of this period. I am smart enough to know that many of the vintage photos in my collection represent male romantic fellowship & not sex partners, but we can never be really sure. As old as I am, I missed this epoch. But the title of the photograph is Damon & Pythias, famous ancient Greek heroes & lovers.

Born On This Day- February 13th... American Artist Grant Wood

If you have been following this little blog thing, you will know that I have a passion for 20th century American Art. Grant Wood's work is quintessential 20th century American Art, I now we know there has always been a gay twist.

Grant Wood’s American Gothic is one of the most parodied & iconic American images. The work was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago after it was unveiled there to the public in 1930 to much scrutiny. Ever since, the painting has captured a certain resonance with the American public, but its historical reception has had somewhat of a turbulent ride. The painting is admonished & celebrated, dismissed & parodied. The work is a dour portrait of a farmer & a woman in front of a neo-gothic farmhouse in Iowa. The woman’s sullen look is echoed in the farmer’s direct but blank gaze, pitchfork in hand looking not the least bit amused. The Models were the artist's sister & dentist.

Self Portrait by the Artist

There are some delicious ironies to the acknowledgement of Grant Wood being gay. For decades, Wood has been celebrated as a spokesman for the conservative values of the close-minded set. To me, the essence of our country's Constitution is a willingness to allow diversity, change & the supposed narrow mindedness of the Midwest is a bit of myth: Iowa, after all, was the 3rd state in the country to legalize gay marriage. Wood survived happily in small town Cedar Rapids, where local businessmen protected him from the consequences of his gayness.


Wood is often described as a sort of homespun American farmer who celebrated traditional American values. But in fact, his life as a farm boy ended at the age of 10, when his father died suddenly of a heart attack & Wood, his mother & his sister moved to Cedar Rapids. His values & choice of professions were not ones that were often endorsed in early 20th century Iowa. Wood’s father was a severe Quaker, who once insisted that he return a book of fairy tales: “We Quakers only read about true things.” He would surely have never approved of his son’s career as an artist, & he would have approved of the nagging secret of Wood’s life- he was a homosexual.


Evidence of Grant’s gayness has been hidden in plain sight for years. Grant’s mentor-Thomas Hart Benton, confided to many of his friends & students that he believed that Wood was gay, & it’s even part of Wood’s files at the University of Iowa, where 5 of Wood’s colleagues made the accusation during a nasty dispute pitting Wood, who had never been to college, against his better educated faculty colleagues. Indeed, the artist was fired from his position on the faculty when it was discovered that he was having an affair with his male private secretary. Evans is the first author of a bio of Wood to take this important fact into account. During Grant’s time homosexuality was a crime that could be punished by imprisonment or castration, & even rumors could end a career or make an artist a social outcast. Wood’s art is a strange mix of revelation & concealment.

Daughters Of Revolution

In Appraisal

Everything about Wood’s art carries some sort of double meaning & complexity. He was fascinated by changes of gender. In his Daughters of Revolution he pictures 3 founding fathers in drag, as members of the D.A.R. For In Appraisal, he transformed his friend Edward Rowan into a farm woman. Wood was fascinated by masks. Wood’s art has an element of “let’s pretend.” Wood's Gothic folk-art style is a way of suggesting that the work has some sort of double layer, a representation of something real & something else,with a big dash of wit. Wood was always vague & inconsistent when asked what his paintings represented, apparently because he sought to avoid criticism when his subjects or his neighbors were offended. On different occasions, he described the figures in American Gothic as city or country people, & as a man with his daughter or as a man with his wife.


Is America finally ready to embrace a gay Grant Wood? Or will Conservative Christian Art Hating Right Wingers rise up to deny his gayness, or to denounce him as wicked? Since American Art History 101, American Gothic has always struck me as high camp & a little queer. I always saw the piece as satire rather than a celebration of The American Spirit. For many art lovers in the heartland, this new book & it’s well documented discovery of Wood's gayness will not be a terrible shock. Just possibly, America is finally ready for Grant Wood to come out of the closet.


Grant died of liver cancer in Iowa City, one day before his 51st birthday. In the end, Wood’s American Gothic stands next to masterpieces like Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa & Edvard Munch's Scream as truly recognizable & iconic across the world.

Born On This Day- January 4th... American Painter Mardsen Hartley

He is one of my favorite artists from one of my favorite periods. Mardsen Hartley is one of the great artists & most intriguing figures in the art world. Tall, awkward, driven, he arrived in New York in 1899 at age 22. He was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877. Hartley later settled in Cleveland to study art, already seasoned by solitude & a sense that he was gay. He survived a childhood of Dickensian proportions: the early death of his mother, abandonded by his father & a life of poverty that forced him to leave school at 15 & go to work in a shoe factory. Hartley: ''My childhood was vast with terror and surprise.”



In true Dickensian style, he would be rescued as a young adult by sponsors & patrons attracted to his obvious talent & charisma. He enjoyed summer retreats in Maine, where he started a lifelong interest in literature & religious thought: Emerson, Thoreau, Henry James & Walt Whitman. They paid for him to study at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan. For several years he studied in New York & painted in Maine, where landscape was his first & last great subject. In 1909 he met Alfred Stieglitz, who immediately gave him an exhibition and made him a prominent member of the select circle of American Modern Artists.


Most of his life he never lived anywhere for more than 2 years, his restlessness taking him to most cultural capitals nearly every Modernist circle or salon, including those centered on Gertrude Stein. He had little critical recognition & never made money from his work; he never had a longtime partner, & never really had a family. The young German soldier that he loved was killed in WW I; the virile, attractive & masculine sons of the fishing family he stayed with 2 summers in Nova Scotia were tragically drowned.

Hartley was an artist with a great love of great paintings who wanted to make his own & have them be viewed as great. He succeeded because he embraced life, painful as it was.


The seminude portraits of swimmers & wrestlers that he made in Maine in the late 1930's are among the most powerfully sexual images of men ever painted. Hartley was also an accomplished poet & essayist. It could not have been easy to face the difficulties of being a gay artist in an era when public admission was taboo & costly. His work is featured in the Hide/Seek exhibit at the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, as is his portrait by his friend George Platt Lynes.

Photograph by George Platt Lynes

''I want to paint the livingness of appearances.”

Born On This Day... Paul Cadmus

My favorite book of 2010 was not a novel, a collection of essays, or a memoir, but rather the catalogue for unprecidented exhibit at The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, now showing through Februaury 12 2012. Hide/Seek: Difference & Desire in American Portraiture, surveys the presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture through a seductive selection of more than 140 full-color illustrations, drawings, & portraits from leading American artists. Starting at the end of the turn of 19th century, to Stonewall & the gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, & on to to the new century, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed & ignored, even by the most progressive members of our society: the influence of gay & lesbian artists in creating important American modern art.

Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists  Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe,  Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, & many of my other favorites & introductions to artists unfamiliar to me. Gay artists were frequently not fully a part of the society they portrayed, often occupying a place on the outskirts, & from that vantage point they crafted innovative & revolutionary ways of doing portraits.

One of the artists featured is Paul Cadmus, a long time favorite artist of the Husband & mine. We have a “coffee table” book of his work that has had a great deal of attention & perusing. We have been thrilled at seeing many of his works in museums. I am hard pressed to choose a favorite.

Paul Cadmus' life spanned the 20th century, beginning with his birth on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1904, & ending, after taking his daily walk down his country road, & getting into bed with his partner of 35 years- singer Jon Anderson, where he died peacefully in his sleep, with no apparent illness, on December 12, 1999, 5 days before his 95th birthday & 11 days after 300 friends had gathered to celebrate. In between, his combination of meticulousness, classicism, & exuberance made him one of America's greatest artists, a "magic realist" in more ways than one.

In the 1920s, he traveled through Europe with his lover- painter Jared Smith. When they returned to Manhattan, they formed an informal group of gay artists including photographer George Platt Lynnes, for whom Camus was a frequent model, & Lincoln Kirstein, who founded New York City Ballet.

He became an unlikely cause celebre in 1934, when the U.S. Navy went berserk over The Fleet's In! a truly glorious epic scene of uniformed sailors that included prostitutes & a homosexual pickup, & led Secretary of the Navy-Henry Latrobe Roosevelt to remove it from a WPA showing. Because of that controversy, his first show, at Corcoran Galleries in Manhattan, attracted more than 7,000 visitors. "I owe that admiral a very large sum," Cadmus remarked 6 decades later. 
 
 

The Fleet's In! (1934)

 
With a beautiful posture, a life long lovely full head of hair & piercing blue eyes, Camus was as luminous as his paintings. From everything I have read about Camus, he sincerely cared about other people, which may sound like a small thing, but is actually quite rare among artists of his caliber. "He had a remarkable memory," says openly gay Josef Asteinza, an architect who lived down the road from Cadmus in Connecticut. "We brought scores of people there & he always enjoyed meeting them & he never forgot a name. Edith Sitwell said, `A gentleman is never unintentionally rude,' but Paul said, `I don't think a gentleman should ever be rude under any circumstances.” I can’t help but wonder how amazing it would have been to have been a member of his circle.
 
 

Jon Anderson, his last partner

 

The handsome artist in the late 1990s

 
Some things never change. A full month into the exhibition of Hide/Seek opened at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC last year, one video, by the late David Wojnarowicz, was removed from the exhibit. Crazy Conservative Christians called the video, with ants crawling over a crucified, bleeding man, sacrilegious. It’s meant to symbolize the suffering of AIDS, the disease that eventually claimed the artist. I could not be more excited. Hide/Seek open at the Tacoma Art Museum in March 2012, & The Husband & I will be able to see the exhibit!

Born On This Day- December 11th... Artisit Mark Tobey

The Husband & your host lived in Seattle for 20 years (1981-2001), where Mark Tobey was rather the patron saint of Pacific Northwest painting. The Seattle Art Museum has a large selection of his work & his paintings are ubiquitous in important Seattle Microsoft executives’ collections.

Self Portrait 1920

A painter of small abstract works with underlying religious themes as well as illustrator & muralist, Mark Tobey remains known primarily for his "white writing" paintings that give the impression of being expansive and much larger than they actually are.

Finding the Bahai World faith in 1918 & later Zen Buddhism was essential to Tobey's life & work, with themes of oneness & progression. His commitment to spiritual expression in painting, gave Tobey a renowned reputation as a modernist but h moree appreciated in Europe & Asia than in the USA.

Tobey:"There have been 32 isms since the advent of cubism, we have just been confused by the storm. . . we forget that there are today great men in the religious field with as much to offer. . . religion like science must be balanced to bring men to a state of equilibrium & that and that only will bring peace."

Tobey was mid-west born & raised. In Chicago he briefly attended the Art Institute School. He worked as a commercial illustrator, & from 1911 to 1922, he lived & worked in NYC where he did fashion illustration for McCalls magazine & other publications.

Between 1923 & 1960, he lived in Seattle & Paris. In Seattle, where he worked closely with artists in the city’s large Asian community, he studied Chinese brush-work.

Living in Seattle, he developed his signature technique of "white writing", linked to Asian calligraphy. His paintings reflect substance but not solidity, suggesting space with non-space & strokes of spirituality of the cosmos.

He was the first painter of the Pacific Northwest School to achieve international fame. Personally, he was an irritable, irascible man with many difficult relationships & only a few close friends.

A man of his time, he was not fully out of the closet, but his homosexuality was an open secret. In 1960 Tobey moved to Basel, Switzerland with his partner of 20 years, artist- Pehr Hallsten & his secretary- Mark Ritter. Tobey continued to live with Ritter, after Hallsten's death in 1966, He served as Chairman of the Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Basel for 16 years until his death in 1976. Tobey would have been 121 years old today.

Canticle 1960

Born On This Day- October 28th... Francis Bacon

"I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence." Francis Bacon

Thinking about him this morning, trying to wrap my head around doing this post, I had remembered that The Husband was not a fan of his paintings. I texted him to receive a quote as a jumping off spot for the post: “Francis Bacon… what are your thoughts?” The vegetarian Husband’s text in return: “I haven’t had Bacon in decades.”  Me either.

Francis Bacon: "We are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal." To Bacon, the world was a slaughterhouse on the verge of annihilation at any moment.

Bacon was an enigma. He was fiercely atheistic, believing life was delusive & meaningless. Yet he stated: "You can be optimistic & totally without hope." Bacon was acerbic & boorish but gentle & generous to friends & relatives. A gay man into S&M. but right-wing politically.

Bacon possessed a despairing & sarcastic sense of humor, with a disdain for convention. He once booed a member of the British royal family who had decided to sing before a crowd at an event. Publicly dissing Princess Margaret may have seemed cruel & shocking, but it also demonstrated his honesty & sense of criticism. When a member of the royal family asked him what he did for a living, Bacon stated: "I'm an old queen.”

Bacon's honesty & enigmatic personality is on display in his paintings. He is considered by many art historians & critics to be the greatest post-WW2 painter. He has inspired awe with his paintings of twisted body parts & distorted animalistic human faces, intensely concerned with the torn & lonely human condition.

Bacon's paintings portray profound aloneness, pain & inner turmoil. He saw violence, hatred & human degradation as essential elements of life.

Bacon expected his paintings to assault the viewer's nervous system. Bacon: "I wish to unlock the valves of feeling & therefore return the onlooker to life more violently." Toward the end of his life, he was delighted to hear that a woman viewing one of his paintings in Paris had closed her eyes & crossed herself.

Bacon's art was profoundly impacted by his homosexuality. At some point in his adolescence, Bacon had sexual encounters with the Irish grooms at his family home, possibly the same grooms who carried out horse whippings ordered by his father. The hurt & humiliation of the whippings, combined with the sexual attraction for the grooms are revealed in some of the violent sexual imagery in his paintings. Bacon felt that the expressions of human sexuality were limitless: Bacon: "You need never have any other subject, really, it's a very haunting subject."

Bacon was banished from the family home when he turned 16. Having surmised that cleverness & chance were his driving forces, Bacon went to London to see what waited for him. He took a series of odd jobs & entered the gay underworld where earned extra money being picked up by wealthy gay men.

 In London Bacon would read Nietzsche, & tossed off what ever was left of any religious belief & came to the conclusion that life was futile unless he could somehow do something extraordinary with it.

After some time, his father made an attempt to straighten him out, entrusting him to the care of a family relative traveling to Berlin. Things did not go the way his father planned. Bacon & the relative became lovers.

In Berlin, Bacon immersed himself in the decadent & disturbing world of gay cabarets, transvestite clubs & sex parties that offered a menu any experiences he could desire. As a pretty young man, he had no trouble getting picked up & making money.

In Berlin, Bacon also discovered the functional art of the Bauhaus movement which influenced the design of the furniture he began to build a few years later.

Bacon escaped the gay circles in Paris when he turned 17 years old. In Paris he attended exhibitions of the work of Picasso, his first big influence. Other influences at this time included artists Soutine, de Chirico, Arp, & Dali, the art magazine Cahiers d'Art, & Luis Buñuel's film Un Chien Andalou. Bacon was also influenced by the exhibit- Documents which contained photographs of a screaming mouth & pictures of bloodied animal carcasses & Positioning in Radiography, a reference book which had photographs showing the position of the body for X-rays to be taken & the X-rays themselves.

4 years later, unable to make a living in Paris, Bacon returned to London, with him images of violence, carcasses & screams that would impact his art for the rest of his life. In London, he took up with Roy de Maistre, a father figure & lover. De Maistre had wealth, which enabled Bacon to spend time designing & manufacturing furniture. De Maistre was also a painter, & the couple held a joint art exhibit in their garage.

 Bacon met the inspiration for some of his greatest paintings when a young man burgled his home in 1963. Bacon’s relationship with George Dyer was stormy, sad & shocking. They were a couple for 8 years. 2 days before the opening of the Francis Bacon Retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Dyer was found dead from a drink & drugs overdose in the bathroom of a hotel in Paris. Bacon painted portraits of Dyer obsessively, both during his life & after Dyer’s death.

George Dyer on film & in paint

 In 1974, Bacon met John Edwards, not the douchy politician from North Carolina, but a young man from the East End, with whom Bacon formed his most enduring friendship. While on vacation in Madrid in 1992, Bacon was admitted to a private clinic. His chronic asthma, which had plagued him all his life, had developed into a respiratory disease& he could not talk or breathe very well. He died of cardiac arrest in April 1992. He bequeathed his entire estate, valued at £11 million, to John Edwards, not adultery prone senator who thought he might be president, the British one. Edwards donated the contents of Francis Bacon's chaotic studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. Bacon's studio was carefully reconstructed in the gallery.

I am not huge fan of Bacon’s work. I can barely bring my self to study his paintings, I find it too difficult to spend a lot of time with, but I understand the skill & the talent. I believe that his paintings represent places that I can skirt around & not linger.

If you want to know more watch openly gay Derek Jacobi as Bacon & my ocassional lover Daniel Craig as George Dyer in the film Love Is the Devil (1998).

Edwards with Bacon

Self Portrait

Born On This Day- August 16th... Photographer Wolfgang Tillsman

Wolfgang Tillmans has a special feeling for males. In his portrait photographs, he examines them from every angle, indoors & out, in groups & alone, clothed & naked. Sometimes he treats them as objects of desire & other times as objects of curiosity. Despite his camera’s studied distance from its subjects, his photographs read as very personal statements: "Here are the people & the things I like & this is the way I like to see them". This is why I feel so seduced by them." Tillmans brings eroticism to his photographs of fashion, the natural world, city skylines & club culture.

Tillmans moved to NYC in 1994, where he met & fell in love with the German painter Jochen Klein. After moving to England, Tillmans lived with Klein until he died of AIDS-related complications in 1997. When the German born artist was awarded the Turner prize in 2000, the feedback was quite pointed. Tillmans, a mere 32 years old, was the first photographer & the first non-British person to be given the prize. He was known for shooting London's street culture, the rise of Gay Pride, the nightlife of the clubbing generation. He worked for The Face Magazine. The studied authenticity of his photographs was thought of as an exercise in style, slight & understated. Some critics considered Tillmans to not even be an artist.

In 2001, Tillmans was awarded first prize in the competition for the design of the AIDS-Memorial for the City of Munich. In 2002, he filmed the video for Pet Shop Boys’ Home & Dry, composed almost entirely of shots documenting the mice living in the London Underground System.

A decade later, Tillmans is intensely fashionable & internationally acclaimed. He has had museum retrospectives all over the world.