The Grand Affair is not reductive; it’s a full-scale, fascinating story of an exceptional artist, informed by the new freedom to discuss homosexuality in a way that was not possible before. And it makes a persuasive case that Sargent, whether or not he acted on his feelings, was drawn to other men.
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Ned would undoubtedly have preferred Pollini’s interpretation. He wrote a book titled A Defence of Uranian Love that was published under a pseudonym after his death. In it, he makes an argument for same-sex relationships based on those prevalent in Ancient Greece, in which an older male mentors a younger one and may or may not have sexual relations with him. It is easy to understand how the Warren Cup was his “Holy Grail,” as he called it.
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Bonheur painted herself into The Horse Fair as a participant, dressed in the standard attire of the other (all male) riders.
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Writing a Chrysanthemum teems with intense, mysterious feeling. There’s something unhinged about the work (one of Barton’s benefactors called him “crazy as a bedbug and impossible to cope with”) that is both bizarre and intriguing. It defies the norms we know, as does Barton, who considered himself not an artist but a writer
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CHICAGO’S WRIGHTWOOD 659, a private institution focused on socially engaged art, mounted a landmark exhibition, The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930, last fall. A team of international scholars, led by art historian Jonathan D. Katz, assembled a groundbreaking show with over 100 paintings, prints, photographs, and film clips that reveal how, as Katz notes, “while language narrowed into a simplistic binary of homosexual / heterosexual, art gave form to a nuanced range of sexualities and genders that can best be described as queer.”
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Lucioni enjoys a reputation as the “painter Laureate” of Vermont, and on the face of it, he looks like many American scene painters of the 1920s and ’30s. Picture a very different world from the one we find ourselves in now, a rural America before the Civil War. Imagine pristine mountains, upland pastures, aging barns, silos, and an occasional church spire. Communities are tidy, neat, predictable, and secure in their routines.
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I know a good deal more about Stettheimer now thanks to Barbara Bloemink’s new biography of the artist. Bloemink revises the previous profile of Stettheimer as a “cloistered spinster” or an “eccentric maiden aunt.”
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WHEN PAUL CADMUS died … there was barely a ripple in the art world. It’s hard to recall that 65 years earlier he had been the enfant terribleof the art world when his painting of frolicking sailors, The Fleet’s In!, caused an epic scandal.
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A new monograph, David Hockney—Moving Focus, memorializes not only the illustrious career of one of the world’s most famous artists but also the Tate Museum’s supporting role in it.
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Gregorio Prieto brought an emerging homoerotic presence to the movement that was also present in some of his contemporaries, notably two poets: Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda.
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