George Quaintance

Paintings by George Quaintance

Born in 1902 in Stanley Virginia, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, George Quaintance was a gay American artist, famous for his idealized, strongly homoerotic depictions of men in mid-twentieth century magazines. Growing up in a farm family, George Quaintance, showing an artistic potential, was encouraged by his parents to pursue art rather than forcing him into the family business of farming. At the age of eighteen, he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York City, studying painting, drawing, and dance. Quaintance’s first art assignments were producing anonymous graphic work for several advertising firms.

By 1934, Quaintance began to sell freelance cover illustrations to a variety of pulp magazines, such as Movie Humor, Snappy Detective Stories, Gay French Life, Ginger, and Tempting Tales. Using historical settings to justify the nudity or distance the subjects from modern society, his artwork featured idealized muscular, semi-nude or nude male figures; A common motif of his work was the theme of the Wild West, complete with cowboys on the ranch or camping out.

Quaintance later moved to Los Angeles, where his artwork began to gather recognition and establish, in an illustrative form, the stereotype of the gay macho, sexually active man. He used young, attractive athletes as nude models; but he personally often posed nude as a model for his paintings. An influence on many upcoming homoerotic artists, Quaintance was in 1937 the highest-paid illustrator for Gay French Magazine, earning more than fifty thousand dollars for his illustrative work.

In 1938, Quaintance returned to Stanley, Virginia, with his companion Victor Garcia, a handsome, young man from Puerto Rico who became a prominent model for his 1940s photographs, his business associate, and life-long partner until Quaintance’s untimely death. Although Garcia was with Quaintance through the rest of his life, Quaintance also had a series of other lovers, many of whom became models for his paintings.

Quaintance’s paintings and illustrations appeared on the covers and inside most of the seminal physique and body-building magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Physique Pictorial, Body Beautiful and Demi-Gods. In the early 1950s, Quaintance and Garcia moved to Rancho Siesta near Phoenix, Arizona, which became the home of Studio Quaintance, a successful business venture based around Quaintance’s artworks.

In Rancho Siesta, Quaintance articulated a vision that was unique, and that spawned dozens of imitators. He offered idealized male images to a hungry international audience; and he offered them in a context that was rugged, masculine, and romantic, as well as erotic. Quaintance presented Levi jeans as a garment that was sexy and serviceable. He also embraced Mexican, Native American, and Latino cultures and people in a way that avoided caricature and stereotyping. Quaintance realized America’s fascination with the West and gave all those fans a different cowboy role mode. He created a world where queer boys grew up to be queer men without the specter of homophobic intrusion.

George Quaintance died in a Los Angeles hospital of a heart-attack on his 55th birthday. His life-long partner Victor Garcia and long-time friend Tom Syphers inherited his estate. Quaintance’s works can be found in many private collections and museums.

Note: An excellent read on the life of George Quaintance is “Quaintance: The Short Life of an American Pioneer” by Ken Furtado and John Waybright

C. S. Lewis: “What is Blinding is Clarity Itself”

Photographer Unknown, Clarity Itself

“He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered…He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man.”

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Titian

Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), “The Punishment of Tityus”, 1549, Oil on Canvas, 253 x 217 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain

Born in 1488-1490 in Pieve di Cadore, Republic of Venice, Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, was a Renaissance painter, considered the most important member of the sixteenth-century Venetian school. The mythology of Greco-Roman antiquity provided a great body of narrative themes for Titian. Beginning at 1540s, Titian set about visually reconstructing those legends and images. Following his 1546 visit to Rome in his later years, he renewed and deepened his study of the ancient myths.

In 1548 Titian received a commission from Mary of Hungary, sister of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Regent of the Netherlands, for a series of subjects drawn from Ovid’s description of the punishment of four sinners in Hades. He painted four large canvases of the Damned, depicting Tityus, Sisyphus, Tantalus and Ixion, all of whom were condemned to perpetual torture for incurring the displeasure of the gods. Of these four canvases, only the ones of Tityus and Sisyphus have survived.

“The Punishment of Tityus”, commissioned by Mary of Hungary, was done during a time when the imperial power of her brother, the Catholic Emperor Charles V, was in a critical time of confrontation with the Protestant princes, Ultimately after barely escaping capture, Charles V’s political situation compelled him in 1552 to ratify an agreement by which the new Protestant religion was granted equal rights with Roman Catholicism.

Titian’s style in this mid-century was concerned with impressively-scaled figures and dynamic composition of the scene’s structure. The theme in the four paintings, punishment as a determent for wrongs against authority, seems timely for that tumultuous period in history. The drama of Tityus’s punishment was conveyed by Titian’s use of fluid and assertive brushstrokes, the askew figure of Tityus, and its diagonal composition.

Note: Tityus was a Giant, the son of Zeus and the mortal Elara, daughter of King Orchomenus, ruler of Arcadia. Once grown Tityus, at the behest of goddess Hera, attempted to rape Leto, the daughter of Titans Coeus and Phoebe. Slain by Antemis and Apollo, the protective children of Leto, he was sent to Hades for punishment. Tityus was chained, stretched out, reaching forever for food and drink, and tortured by two vultures who eternally fed on his liver, which grew back every night.

Fernando Pessoa: “Life that Wants Nothing Can Have No Weight”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Twelve

“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life that wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”

—Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

Born in June of 1888 in Lisbon, Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent, intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. Each of these heteronyms possessed distinct biographies, temperaments, philosophies, appearances, writing styles, and even signatures.

In 1905, Pessoa attended university in Lisbon, however, after two years he left, educating himself by sequestering in the National Library to read literature, history, philosophy and religion. He began writing short stories, some of them under the name “David Merrick”, as well as poems and essays, most often in English or French and occasionally in Portuguese.

A life-long outsider, Pessoa lived with relatives or in rented rooms, chain-smoking, writing, reading, and working as a translator for firms with overseas connections. Throughout his life, Pessoa grappled with the possibility of insanity, spurred on by his grandmother’s mental illness, but he was never able to draw conclusions about himself either way.

“I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” —Fernando Pessoa, talking about his heteronyms

For a thorough and fascinating article entitled “Fernando Pessoa and His Heteronyms” by Carmela Ciuraru, please visit the Poetry Society of America located at: https://poetrysociety.org/features/tributes/fernando-pessoa-his-heteronyms

Salman Toor

Paintings by Salman Toor

Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1983, Salman Toor studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University, and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, in 2009. His work, usually done with oil paints on canvas or wooden panels, has ranged in style from meticulously executed nineteenth century-styled history painting to loosely painted, abstracted figurative work with design elements from both Eastern and Western pop culture.

Salman Toor straddles two continents with his art, living a dual life in New York City and Lahore. Inspired by pop culture from both the Subcontinent and the Western world, he enjoys painting scenes that represent South Asians who, like him, are living a life that’s in between cultures. Toor hopes to portray both the ordinary and the unusual that’s associated with his homeland in his works.

Toor finds inspiration in the history of European paintings, particularly in the Baroque, Romantic and Impressionist artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez, and Johannes Vermeer. He has also been inspired by the works of Eastern artists such as Nainsukh, an important practitioner of Pahari miniature painting, and Bichitr, Emperor Jahangir’s court painter who combined Indian landscapes with European perspective.

Salman Toor’s paintings tell stories of lives lived between two cultures. Using his own experiences, he paints narratives, often mixtures of coziness, leisure and sensuality, dealing with the issues of his figures’ identity, those of brownness and queerness, and those between Western and Eastern culture. Toor examines the vulnerability within today’s public and private life and the sense of community in the world-wide queer identity.

In Toor’s work, multi-ethnic couples dance, embrace in bars, share wine and cigarettes, and experience both reunions and comforting moments. Through his paintings depicting the everyday and special moments of his characters, Toor presents a relatable experience to the viewer. While his works illustrate the hard-won gains made by queer society in social life, they also reveal the tension and anxiety of crossing national and moral boundaries in a world where religious and ethnic identity supplants diversity

Salman Toor currently lives in the East Village and works out of a studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He has exhibited at several solo exhibitions, including New Delhi’s Nature Morte Gallery in December 2019, New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery in January 2020, and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2020. Toor has also participated in significant group shows such as the Kochi Biennale in 2016, and the inaugural Lahore Biennale in 2018.

“I’ve been exposed to things in Pakistan that don’t allow me to take these liberties (gained) for granted. Being queer—I accepted it for a very long time, but I never really celebrated it. And I want to celebrate it now.” -Salman Toor, January 2020

Middle Inser Ingae: Salman Toor, “Reading”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas

Bohnchang Koo

Photography by Bohnchang Koo

Born into a prominent Korean family in 1953, Bohnchang Koo attended Yonsei University in Seoul, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Business, and began his life working in an office. Dissatisfied with this career, he moved to Hamburg, Germany, in 1980 to study design and photography.

In 1985, Koo returned to Korea, taking up careers as a teacher and photographer with exhibitions in Germany, Iceland, Australia, Japan, Korea, and the United States. He was a professor at the Kaywon School of Art and Design, the Chung Ang University, Institute of the Arts in Seoul, and holds a visiting professorship at London’s Saint Martin School. Koo currently teaches at Kyungil University in Korea.

One of Bohnchang Koo’s latest work series is “The Allure of Blue”, delicate photographs of porcelain pieces from the Joseon dynasty. Captivated by its charm, Koo began studying and photographing these traditional Korean ceramics fourteen years ago. After visiting sixteen museums throughout Korea, he compiled a body of work to highlight the simplistic beauty of Korea’s cultural heritage of that time.

Bohnchang Koo’s work can be found in several published collections which include the 2004 “Vessels for the Heart” and the 2006 “Deep Breath in Silence”, both published by Hangil Art, and “Hysteric Nine”published in 2003 by Nobuhiko Kitamura.

Bohnchang Koo’s works have been exhibited in over thirty solo exhibitions including: Seoul’s Samsung Rodin Gallery in 2001, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts in 2002, Paris’ 2004 Camera Obscura Exhibition, Kukje Gallery, the Goeun Museum of Photography in Busan in 2007, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2010, among others. His work can be seen at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Paris’ Musee Guimet, Hamburg’s Museum of Art and Craft, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Reykjavik Museum of Photography in Iceland.

Note: The gallery images are from the March to April 2020 exhibition at the Choeunsook Gallery, a modern art and contemporary hand crafts exhibition space in Seoul, South Korea. The black and white images are from Bohnchang Koo’s photographic series “In the Beginning”, set in the landscape of modern Korea, which focuses on physical conflict and the frustration of things gained and things postponed.

Tove Jansson: “Moominland Midwinter”

Photographers Unknown, Snapshots

“There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.”

—Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter

Born in August of 1914, Tove Marika Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, novelist, painter, illustrator, and comic strip author. She studied art at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 1930-1933, the Graphic School of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1933-1937, and finally at L’ École d’ Adrein Holy and École des Beau-Arts in Paris in 1938. She exhibited in a number of shows during the 1930s and early 1940s, and had her first solo exhibition in 1943.

Besides producing artwork, Tove Jansson was also writing short stories and articles for publication, as well as creating the graphics for book covers. Starting in 1945, she wrote the “Moomin” book series for children, publishing books in 1945, 1946, and 1948 which were highly successful. For her work as a children’s writer, Jansson received the Hans Christian Anderson Medal in 1968. She later wrote six novels and five books of short stories for adults.

Tove Jansson worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for the Swedish satirical magazine “Garm” from the 1930s to 1953. She produced many political cartoons during that period which achieved international fame. In one of Jansson’s early cartoons, Hitler is seen crying in diapers while European leaders try to calm him down. During the 1930s, Jansson produced illustrations for Christmas magazines and several comic strip series.

Tove Jansson had several male lovers, including political philosopher Atos Wirtanen, a Finnish socialist intellectual and a member of the Finnish Parliament. However, she later met and developed a secret love affair with the married theater director Vivica Bandler, daughter of Helsinki’s mayor Erik von Frenckell.

In 1956, Jansson met her lifelong partner Tuulikki Pietilä, the American-born Finnish graphic artist and professor, who became one of the most influential graphic artists in Finland. In Helsinki, the two women lived separately in neighboring blocks, visiting each other privately through an attic passageway. In the 1960s, they built a house on an island in the Gulf of Finland, where they lived together for the summer months until Jansson’s passing.

Tove Marika Jansson died from cancer in June of 2001 at the age of eighty-six. Tuulikki Pietilä died at her home in February of 2009 at the age of ninety-two.

Constantine Cavafy

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Constantine P Cavafy, “The City”, 1894, Alexandria, Egypt, Published 1910

Born in Alexandria, Egypt in April of 1863, Constantine Petrou Cavafy, upon the death of his father in 1870, moved with his family to Liverpool, England, where the eldest sons assumed control of the family’s import-export business. He spent most of his adolescence in England, developing in those seven years both a command of the language and a preference for the writings of William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde.

After the older brothers mismanaged the family’s business, Cavafy’s mother moved the family back to Alexandria, living there until 1882 when the British bombarded the city. The family moved to safety in Constantinople where Cavafy remained with his mother until 1885. Although living in great poverty and discomfort during this period, he was writing his first poems, and had his first love affairs with other men.

After he reunited with his brothers back in Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy found work initially as a newspaper correspondent. He obtained a position in the late 1880s as an assistant at the Egyptian Stock Exchange, working there for a few years before clerking, at the age of twenty-nine, at the Ministry of Public Works. Cavafy stayed at the ministry for the next thirty years, eventually becoming the ministry’s assistant director. Much of his ambition during those years was devoted to writing poems and prose essays.

Constantine Cavafy lived with his mother until her death in 1899, and then with his unmarried brothers. For most of his mature years, he lived alone. Although his social circle was unusually small, Cavafy did maintain an influential twenty-year literary relationship with English fiction writer and essayist Edward Morgan Forster. Cavafy, himself, identified only two apparently brief love affairs. His one intimate, long-standing friendship was with Alexander Singopoulos, whom Cavafy designated as his heir and literary executor, ten years before his death from cancer in April of 1933.

During his lifetime, Constantine Cavafy was an obscure poet, publishing little of his work and living in seclusion. A short pamphlet collection of fourteen poems was printed in the early 1904, and reprinted a few years later with new verse. Cavafy’s poems were first published in book form ,without dates, before World War II and reprinted in 1949. The only evidence of his public recognition in Greece was his receiving, in 1926, the Order of the Phoenix from the Greek dictator Pangalos.

One third of Constantine Cavafy’s work was never printed in his lifetime. His lack of concern for publication might be due to the highly personal aspect of many of his poems. Cavafy was gay and wrote many sexually explicit poems, making no attempt to conceal anything. The erotic world he depicted was one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs, moments of pleasure not unhappy or spoiled by feelings of guilt.

An avid student of ancient civilizations and history, Cavafy wrote a great many of his poems treating life during the Greek and Roman empires. The style of his poems were not typical of the times; his language was flat and direct, whether he was talking about beauty, despair, eroticism, the past, or present anxieties. Among Cavafy’s most acclaimed poems are “Waiting for the Barbarians, “Ithaca” which stresses the importance of the journey over the destination, and “The Battle of Magnesia, emphasizing that decadence in a civilization leads to destruction.

Cavafy’s erotic poems have similar themes to those in his historical poems. The lovers work in dull offices, or for shopkeepers; they meet “On the Stairs”, “At the Theater”, “At the Cafe Door”, or in front of “The Windows of the Tobacco Shop”. They often are forced to beg and give their bodies for the worldly rewards. Cavafy’s erotic poems are his personal vision, one which explores the gratifications and the ramifications of the pursuit of pleasure.

Notes: “The City” zeroes in on the notion of human error and the places that remind us of the folly of our judgment. The speaker is addressing a friend, reiterating the friend’s declarations in the first stanza, and then offering the hard truths in the second stanza. The city triggers memory, keeps receipts, and preserves the details of personal tragedy and transgression, until the demons are exorcised. There will be no erasure of the past, expect the permanency of scars; but those are indicators of healing.

It is recorded that C. P Cavafy’s last motion before dying was to draw a circle on a sheet of blank paper, and then to place a period in the middle of it.

The video clip is from the Greek television series “Thus Spake the City- Episode Five, Alexandria” directed by Yannis Smaragdis.

Esther Hammerman

Esther Hammerman, Untitled (East River), post 1950, Oil on Canvas, 59.1 x 44 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Esther Hammerman, Untitled (Football), Date Unknown, Mixed Media, Private Collection

Born Esther Wachsmann in Wieliczka, Poland in 1886, Esther Hammerman and her husband Baruch owned a small import business in Vienna, Austria. Along with raising four daughters, Hammerman stitched wall hangings and needlework tapestries. The family fled the Nazis during their takeover of Austria in 1938, first landing in Trinidad, and then the British West Indies where they spent the war years interned in a camp. Upon the end of the war, Esther Hammerman and her family managed to immigrate to New York City.

Encouraged in her artwork by her youngest daughter and son-in-law, Esther Hammerman began painting. She entered two works in a national competition at New York’s Whitney Museum, winning a prize and beginning her career, at the age of sixty, as a serious painter in New York. In 1950, Hammerman joined her youngest daughter’s family in San Francisco, where her exhibited work was again well received.

During her twelve years in the Bay Area, Esther Hammerman had one-woman shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the Oakland Museum of California. In 1963 she returned to New York in failing health, living with her daughter Nadja’s family, but continued painting and showing her work both in New York and California.

Esther Hamerman painted somewhat naturalistically; although. she also abstracted forms and flattened the perspective of her compositions. Her palette was jewel-like and beautifully nuanced. Hammerman devised a personal style by painting in oils on canvas or canvas board, and then outlining the forms in India ink. Occasionally, she used photographs or printed images for reference; but she then transformed the subject in a personal way.

Esther Hammerman died in New York in April of 1977. Completing some seventy-five works that include paintings, drawings, and watercolors, she received recognition and several honors during her lifetime. Fifty pieces of Hammerman’s work remain with her family who withdrew her work from public view in 1993.

There were solo exhibitions of her paintings in the later 1950s and early 1960s at the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of Art. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Rosa Junior College, the Oakland Museum of California, the Judah L. Magnes Museum, and The Ames Gallery are among the places that featured her work in retrospective solo or in group shows in the 1980s.

James Baldwin: “Giovanni’s Room”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Ten

“Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.”

—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Born in New York City in August of 1924, James Arthur Baldwin was an essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, in the United States and through western Europe.

Disillusioned by the racial prejudice in the United States, James Baldwin emigrated in November of 1948, at the age of twenty-four, to Paris where he became involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank, an area of artists, writers, and philosophers. In 1949, he met and fell in love with the young Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, becoming life-long partners.

While staying at the Happersberger family chalet in Switzerland with Lucien during the winter of 1951-1952, James Baldwin completed his first novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain”, which was published in early 1953. Over the next two years, while living mostly in France, he worked on his second novel “Giovanni’s Room”. In 1956 after Knopf Publishers decided not to publish this second book, Baldwin allowed Dial Press to publish the novel, dedicated to Happersberger, in the United States, and publisher Michael Joseph in the United Kingdom.

James Baldwin made his home primarily in the southern section of France, but often returned to the United States to lecture or teach. In 1957, he began to spend half of each year in New York City. Baldwin and Happersberger lived together in their house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Provence, France, for many years until Baldwin’s death, with Happersberger by his side, from cancer in November of 1987. James Baldwin was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

“Giovanni’s Room”, with its complex narrative of love and desire, became James Baldwin’s most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. Due to its explicit homoerotic content, it caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956. The book is noteworthy for bringing complex representations of homosexuality and bisexuality to the reading public with artistry and empathy, lacking in most of the contemporary literary treatments, and thus broadening the public discussion regarding same-sex desire.

“Giovanni’s Room” focuses on events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings, and his frustrations, in the relationships he has with other men in his life, particularly Giovanni, a bar keep at a Parisian gay bar. In this novel, Baldwin explores themes of social alienation, self-identity, masculinity, and manhood, expressed through relationships and learned public behavior. Though it is considered a gay novel, Baldwin has stated on occasion that the novel is not so much about homosexuality, but about what happens if you are so afraid that you finally can not love anybody..

For additional information from the National Museum of African American History and Culture:

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/baldwin-switzerland

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/series/stories-chez-baldwin

Jan Pypers

Jan Pypers, The Hare Series

Antwerp-based Belgium photographer Jan Pypers captures moments in places, sometimes dark and ominous, that form stories in the viewer’s mind. He starts with a memory or experience, often from his youth, gives it a slight twist, and transforms it into an image. To stage these moments, he uses scale models of different sizes, lifelike decors, and cinematic effects, often drawing inspiration for his creation from films by such artists as Christopher Nolan and David Lynch. Making the basic images with a digital camera, Pypers then shoots additional photos in his studio, bringing it all together in post-production.

Pypers initiated the “Hare Series” after experiencing a succession of intense dreams. In this series, an innocent, endearing character, reminiscent of Peter Rabbit from our childhood, is inserted into a dark world, becoming a disturbing, stalking menace. The hare figure is seen hidden on conspicuous corners and casually standing or sitting on a windowsill; but even in these circumstances, a growing sense of unease and paranoia is instilled in the viewer.

“In the morning, I always felt lost, you know the feeling. Hare is actually a tribute to the dream, where nothing is impossible and we can do and feel whatever we want. Hare is about our irrational fear of the unknown but also about our denial for real problems such as climate, individualism, loneliness” — Jan Pypers

Many thanks to a great art, film and music site: https://ohbythewayblog.blogspot.com

Rhye, “Black Rain”

October 2020, From the Album “Home”, Release Date January 22, 2021

The video “Black Rain” by Rhye was directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and stars actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson. It was produced by Loma Vista Recordings and is distributed by Concord Music Group. Inspired by the tremendous 2020 wildfires in California, the spirit of the son is overcoming obstacles and uniting together to produce positive solutions.

Rhye is a contemporary R&B musical project, originally consisting of Canadian singer and electronic musician Mike Milosh and Danish instrumentalist Robin Hannibal, a Grammy Awards nominee known for being half of the musical duo Quadron. The band’s first album was the 2013 “Woman”, which was in the running for the 2013 Polaris Music Prize. In 2017 after Hannibal left the project for Los Angeles, Milosh and the associated live band released the album “Blood” in 2018, which was largely written, produced and performed by Milosh.

English actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, born in High Wycombe in 1990, is best known for his portrayal of the lead character in the 2010 movie “Kick-Ass” and for the role of Quicksilver in the 2015 “Avenger: Age of Ultron”. He has also appeared in the 2006 magic film “The Illusionist”, the 2009 John Lennon biographical film “Nowhere Boy”, and in Oliver Stone’s 2012 action thriller “Savages”.

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “Dancers Back Stage No. 1”, Date Unknown, Pastel and Charcoal on Gray Paper, 61 x 41.3 cm, Private Collection

The son of artists, illustrator Maria Latasa, of Basque and Cuban ancestry, and lithographer Egbert Cadmus, of Dutch ancestry, Paul Cadmus is widely known for his erotic and socially critical egg tempera paintings of social interactions in urban settings. His sister Fidelma Cadmus married Lincoln Kirstein, a New York impresario, philanthropist, and cofounder of the New York City Ballet.

Throughout his career, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, Paul Cadmus produced many works on paper illustrating the subject of the dancer in the mediums of crayon, colored pencils, charcoal, and pastels . Most of these capture the dancer, not in the act of dance, but rather in the moment of rest, either before or after his practice and performance.

In 1965, Paul Cadmus met and began a thirty-five year relationship with former cabaret star Jon Farquhar Anderson, residing in Nantucket, Massachusetts until his death in 1999. Jon Anderson became Cadmus; muse and model for many of his works. Cadmus became close friends with many authors, artists and dancers including: novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood, English-born poet Wystan Hugh Auden, New York City Ballet choreographer George Balanchine, photographer George Platt Lynes, painter George Tooker, and English fiction-writer and novelist Edward Morgan Forster.

Konrad Helbig

Photography by Konrad Helbig

German photographer and archaeologist, Konrad Helbig was born in 1917 in Leipzig, Germany. He was a soldier fighting in the Soviet Union during World War II, was taken in captivity by the Soviet Union, and held until his release in 1947.

Upon his release, Helbig poured himself into the study of art history and archaeology, especially of the Mediterranean region. After graduation, he worked as writer and photographer for the German travel and cultural magazines “Merian” and “Atlantis”, relating in-depth the nuances of the history, geography, people, and culture of the region to his readers.

Best known for his black-and-white images of young Sicilian men. Helbig posed his subjects, photographing both nude and clothed models, in brightly lit, typically Italian landscapes. His profound knowledge of Mediterranean cultures and the tradition of earlier German photographers, such as Baron William von Gioeden and Guglielmo von Plüscho, can be readily seen throughout his body of work.

Helbig saw his subjects as incarnating the myth of pre-industrial and Arcadian culture, with its unspoiled, harmonious atmosphere. The postures and forms of Helbig’s nudes are composed from a formal point of view directly related to the classical artistic perfection of Greek and Roman sculptures. In a trial volume for publication compiled in collaboration with the archaeologist Herbert von Buttlar, Helbig interspersed these portraits with images of ancient bronze sculptures

Konrad Helbig’s first published photo collection was his volume on Sicily in 1956, followed by collaborative collections with Karl Heinz Hoenig in 1959 and photographer Toni Schneiders, entitled “Archipelagus”, in 1962. One of Helbig’s best-known collections is “Homo Sun (I am Human)’, published posthumously in 2003, which surveys his boldest erotic work from the 1950s and 1960s.

Konrad Helbig died in Mainz, West Germany, in February of 1986 at the age of sixty-eight. Notably, the nude photographs for which he is now most famous were discovered posthumously at his home in Mainz.

The photographic works of Konrad Helbig are in the archives of Dresden’s Deutsche Fotothek, which includes 160,000 shots, of which 60,000 are color slides,. Additional works are in the photo archive of Germany’s University of Marsburg, which contains 23,800 shots, of which 11,000 are photographs of Greece and 6,000 of Italy. Helbig’s work can also be found in the State Archive Hamburg, as well as private foundations and museums in Germany.

Top Insert Image: Konrad Helbig, “Young Boy in Water, Sicily”, circa 1950-1959, Gelatin Silver Print, 30.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Konrad Helbig, Untitled, (Young Man with Sculpture, Sicily), circa 1950-1959, Gelatin Silver Print

Mark Helprin: “Winter’s Tale”

Photographer Unknown, Winter’s Tale

“Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare up-reaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them before it until they loved to run..”

—Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale