An exhibit at CCSU displays homoerotic art
Tuesday, 16 March 2010 17:10
Written by Susan Hood
"Revealed: The Tradition of Male Homoerotic Art"
March 18 - April 22 (closed March 22-26 except by appointment) Central Connecticut State University Art Galleries,
Chen Fine Arts Center, Maloney Hall, 2nd Floor, 1615 Stanley Street, New Britain, (860) 832-2633,
hours: Mon-Fri, 1-4 p.m., and by appointment. Free admission.
In Western art of the past two centuries, the male gaze has frequently fixated on the female form. Two examples that scandalized 1860s France, and are owned by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, are Manet's "Olympia" and Courbet's "The Origin of the World," the latter clinically depicting the model's mound of Venus. Once public outrage dissipated, such frank and eroticized images of women were eventually celebrated. Meanwhile, despite the fact that the male nude had been primary in Western visual history, it became a near-taboo subject outside of life drawing classes. What were homosexual figurative artists to do? Generally speaking, art academies barred women from drawing the male nude until the 20th century. (Thomas Eakins was dismissed from his teaching post in Philadelphia in 1886 for removing a cloth covering the male model's genitals because women students were present.) Imogen Cunningham may have been among the first female photographers to shoot the male nude, but her intent was not to objectify her subject. And it seems that female artists (straight or lesbian) were more interested in reclaiming the female body for themselves, especially in the 20th century.
Revealed: The Tradition of Male Homoerotic Art at Central Connecticut State University Art Galleries demonstrates how the gay gaze at the male body maintained a presence in both the aesthetic and social zeitgeist, even if many of these artists kept their sensual or explicit expressions of same-sex desire closeted from the mainstream marketplace for varying rationales.
With the 1960s sexual revolution, the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City followed by the advent of gay pride, and the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s, male homosexuality was no longer in hiding. The most notorious gay artist of the 1970s and '80s was Robert Mapplethorpe, whose traveling retrospective, "The Perfect Moment," inflamed — but did not ignite — the 1989 firestorm by conservative Christians and Congress against the National Endowment for the Arts. (That honor goes to Andres Serrano for "Piss Christ.") Ironically, by that time erotic and fetish themes, both straight and gay, were evident in photography commissioned by women's fashion magazines in Europe and the U.S.
"Revealed" displays more than 100 homoerotic works spanning the last century into our own, with an emphasis on photography, interspersed with drawings and prints. To the eyes of this middle-aged, heterosexual female, the images evoke all kinds of reactions, from feelings of unabashed tenderness and admiration to a reluctance or inability to embrace particular artistic conceits.
Butts, cocks and balls are abundantly apparent; there are several depictions of masturbation, penetration and oral sex. And some images of "feminized" men strike me as silly or disturbing or both. Mapplethorpe is represented, of course, as are Herb Ritts and David LaChapelle, best known for their fashion photography, and Horst P. Horst, the famous lensman of couture and portraiture.
Among the exhibition's highlights is an extensive sampling of photography by George Platt Lynes. My favorite among them is a moment from Balanchine's ballet "Orpheus," shot in Lynes' studio. The two male dancers are not wearing the costumes designed by Noguchi — they are in the buff — and one holds the sculptor's signature lyre prop.
Other standouts are minor works of stunning beauty, nevertheless, by middling to big name artists: drawings by American Modernist Charles Demuth of men with oversized, pendulous penises; a touching depiction by Paul Cadmus of lovers after sex, relaxed in a horizontal embrace; and a three-way near satiation rendered by Pavel Tchelitchew.
There is an enchanting lithograph by Robert Rauschenberg that serves as a late-in-life valentine to Jasper Johns, recalling their youth as aspiring artists, and also notable for lacking any sexually charged reference. Most startling is the inclusion of a little-known series by Andy Warhol, titled "Sex Parts," the most sexually graphic of his oeuvre, dating from the late 1970s.
CCSU and its art department are to be congratulated for courageously supporting this show which is curated by Robert Diamond, a young, practicing artist and art historian bound for graduate school. Diamond's intent is not to provoke controversy, although he readily admits that Revealed is not for everyone. Instead, he views the show as an opportunity for those who are "interested or open-minded" enough to explore how homosexual identity and eroticism were simultaneously suppressed and tacitly affirmed in art.
A 3 p.m. lecture will be given on Thursday, March 18, followed by an opening reception from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m.