Reimagining The Gay Gaze With Such Figures As These
LAST FALL, IN a tiny apartment in downtown New York, a 30-year-old gay physique model named Matthew Williams stood naked against a white backdrop in front of the gay artist John McConnell. “It’s liberating to be able to be comfortable in your body,” Williams said, barely moving his lips as he concentrated on holding still. The 33-year-old McConnell — boyish, equally fit — wore black jeans and a white T-shirt as he sketched on a letter-size sheet of paper with his blue ballpoint pen. “It’s important for me to capture the likeness and not just a body,” he said.
The male nude is, of course, one of the oldest artistic fixations: The Riace bronzes, Greek sculptures cast around 450 B.C., depict naked, bearded warriors as exemplars of masculine strength and beauty; “Farnese Hercules,” a third-century B.C. marble sculpture of the mythical hero, once stood at Rome’s Baths of Caracalla. Over the next 2,000 years, capturing the naked male form became an essential artistic skill, one that reached its apotheosis in Western culture during the Italian Renaissance, when homosexual desire was subtly expressed in Donatello’s bronze “David” (circa 1440) and Caravaggio’s painting “The Musicians” (1597), wherein the traditional female muse is replaced with a band of boys, partially robed in togas, referencing a Greek and Roman period in which homoerotica was a part of society. The artist was playing “a little erotic game,” says the retired N.Y.U. classics professor Andrew Lear, 59, who now runs Oscar Wilde Tours, a company that offers excursions focused on implicitly gay art and history in major museums.
But while some old masters fetishized the male body in barely coded ways, the idea of an openly queer artist expressing his desires from a queer perspective was only born in the last century. The pioneering Works Progress Administration painter Paul Cadmus was among the first to introduce an explicit male-on-male gaze into contemporary art, often at the expense of his own reputation: A retired admiral wrote a letter to the secretary of the United States Navy claiming Cadmus had a “sordid, depraved imagination,” after seeing an image of his satirical painting “The Fleet’s In!” (1934), in which crew members fraternize while on shore leave. At the insistence of the Navy, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., pulled the painting from a planned 1934 exhibition (it wasn’t shown publicly until 1981). Indeed, criticism of works like Cadmus’s during an era in which homosexuality was still forbidden pushed many of these artists into the underground, from where they’re still being unearthed today. (It’s perhaps not coincidental that Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, “The Sparsholt Affair,” a gay retelling of Britain in the 20th century, includes a 1940s-era artist trying to pursue a classmate at Oxford by drawing his figure.)
Image
Left: Louis Fratino’s “Tangerine” (2016), in colored pencil. Right: Jordan Mejias’s “Dare Me” (2017), in monochromatic watercolorCreditLouis Fratino, “Tangerine” 2016, colored pencil on paper, courtesy of the artist and Antoine Levi, Paris; Jordan Mejias, “Dare Me,” 2017, monochromatic watercolor on paper, from the book “Of Art and Men” (Photograph: Hans-Georg Pospischil) © Jordan Mejias
IN THE YEARS after Cadmus, other gay perspectives on the male body found their way into the visual culture, though they’ve typically been considered taboo or hypersexual. As vaguely pornographic, commercial pinup portraiture of women thrived in the 1950s, beefcake magazines such as Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial offered their own exaggerated celebration of the male body. And despite the “queer enlightenment” of the 1970s and ’80s, when Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode and others brought man-on-man sex into the museum, there remain few celebratory images of openly gay men in Western visual art. “Showing skin was something that was seen as slutty or wrong,” says Williams, the figure model. In turning his body into art, he’s trying to normalize its representation.
Williams’s afternoon session with McConnell, in fact, is part of a recent revival of male figure drawing among contemporary gay artists — including Kou Shou, Martin Bedolla, and Stephen McDermott — whom all specialize in stripped-down representations of largely young white men. They share their portraits primarily on Instagram, and although a few sell through brick-and-mortar galleries, the original drawings and merchandise based on them (prints, chapbooks, enamel pins) are mostly made available to collectors through the artists’ social media channels or websites.
But even five decades after David Hockney first shocked viewers with depictions of his muse and lover, Peter Schlesinger, standing in the buff, the eroticized male nude still occupies a liminal space in art: Is it “real art,” or is it nothing more than a kind of high-minded erotica?
Image
And yet the burgeoning community that has gathered around these illustrators suggests that the distinction no longer has as much meaning as it once did. Like more established queer artists and their muses — Francis Bacon and George Dyer, Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz, Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont — these figure artists tend to sketch people they find attractive, often sharing the same models. McConnell and Williams met in 2016 at the artist Mark Beard’s drawing salon, which now attracts a rotating cast of about 30 gay artists. “I support these younger artists any way I can,” says Beard, 62, who invites private collectors to purchase his protégés’ originals, and whose own works are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Working under his own name — and as his mythic alter ego, Bruce Sargeant — his oil paintings place his subjects, such as those standing heroically in “Group of Men on the Beach,” in a turn-of-the-century setting, before the Stonewall riots, when queer men couldn’t openly be out or portrayed freely in art, clothed or not. These nudes “give gay people their history,” Beard says.
MACCONNELL STARTED SHARING his work online in 2012; soon after, amateur models began reaching out via Instagram to have their portraits made. These pictures — 130 of which are collected in his recently published book “Sketch Book Boys” — are sexy but not erotic, taking a softer stance than, say, Tom of Finland’s unabashedly pornographic midcentury drawings of leathered-out muscle daddies. Instead, McConnell, who wants to subvert the classical paragons of male beauty, draws realistic renderings of men who are fit but not overly buff. “Matthew & Giorgio” (2017), for instance, is a nude sketch of a 30-something couple cuddling in bed, gazing solemnly at each other. Outlined in his signature blue pen, it’s a tribute to the sorts of mundane gay moments that are rarely celebrated in art or popular culture.
Illustrations like this also upend the notion of the muse, that historically passive female figure once subject to the whims of heterosexual white male artists. The Nigerian-Canadian artist Oluseye, 32, likewise challenges this tradition with drawings of black men. “The black body is loaded,” he says, with “myths about the size of black penises.” And so Oluseye’s pastel and charcoal nudes mix Yoruba mythology and geometric abstraction, freeing the black male body from stereotyping: One drawing, “Floating Head” (2015), combines two versions of the same figure engaged in an autoerotic fantasy.
Paul Cadmus’s etching “Y.M.C.A. Locker Room” (1934).CreditPaul Cadmus, “Y.M.C.A. Locker Room,” 1934, etching, a gift of George Platt Lynes, 1940 (40.99.1). Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art © Jon F. Anderson, the estate of Paul Cadmus, licensed by Vaga, New York, N.Y. Digital Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, N.Y.
Other gay figure artists are following in the homoerotic tradition established by Mizer, Finland and the artist Tom Bianchi, whose photographic nudes have seen a renaissance after he published “Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983” in 2013. Bianchi, 73, started capturing his naked, frolicking friends in the mid-70s, while he was still a corporate lawyer. A decade later, he became known for his wildly sexual life-size drawings. If he has a modern-day disciple, it’s Jordan Mejias, whose pastel drawings recall the erotic romanticism of Bianchi’s early work while proving, as the critic Pierre Mouton wrote in the preface to Mejias’s 2017 book, “Of Art and Men,” that “queer is classically beautiful.” In “On Second Thought” (2016), the sitter’s muscular curves suggest early Roman statuary while idealizing gayness in the tradition of Cadmus’s fabulist etching “Y.M.C.A Locker Room” (1934), which depicts a scene of mostly naked men.
Yet in art, as in life, there’s little agreement as to what’s actually sexy. The emerging artist Louis Fratino, 24, believes that these images of beefed-up stallions are imported from straight culture’s idea of masculine beauty. “The really queer thing to do is make work that works against that,” he says, “where bodies are not hypersexualized.” Fratino tries to achieve this by drawing vivid, cartoonlike nudes of himself and his partner, Tristan Scow, sharing privately intimate moments. In “Ensemble” (2017), the couple’s norm-core bodies are shown spooning while they hold their own flaccid penises. In this, Fratino and these other contemporary gay figure artists share a philosophy, despite their different aesthetics: They’re all committed to reflecting the mostly unseen interior lives of the men they admire, and to celebrate a diverse set of subjects who, taken together, stand in opposition to a canonical history of art that has long ignored an openly gay view of the male body.
Comments