Rob Jacques: “This Rustic Eden”

Photographers Unknown, This Rustic Eden

. . .hills are turning
curved green against the astonished morning
sneeze-weed and ox-eye daisies
not caring I am a stranger
—-Audre Lorde

A pilgrim moving through on my way
to Wherever or Hereafter, I pull off I-90
into a town whose trees are flushed gold
with autumn, whose one white church
is washed honest and pure in stark fall light,
whose main street is paved with nostalgia,
and I park beside a roadside apple stand,
D’Arcy Spice, Irish Peach, and Silken
in bushel baskets above broad wood boxes
of Granny Smith, Gloster, and Ruby Grand.

I’m 17 again and just as innocent and good
as this rural town. A lanky, blond boy
with ice-gray eyes adds spice to this miracle
of a day, his face youthfully beautiful, and
I smile my greeting as I pick several Pippins
from a box in front of him and think I’d be
blessed to live free in this rustic Eden
without a care from urban storm and stress
as this boy turns away spitting, “Faggot!”
into autumn’s sacred, apple-fragrant air.

—-Rob Jacques, Every Traveler Has One Idaho Poem

Currently residing on a rural island in Washington State’s Puget Sound, Rob Jacques was raised in northern New England, after which he graduated from both Salem State University and the University of New Hampshire. He served as an officer in the US Navy during the Vietnam Era and has completed a civilian career as a technical editor and writer for the US Navy and the US Department of Energy.

Jacques has taught literature courses at Northern Virginia Community College, Olympic College, and the United States Naval Academy. Strongly influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and James Merrill, his poetry explores the metaphysical aspects of life and love, which include the paradoxes that develop as flesh and consciousness interact through one’s lifetime.

Jacques’s “War Poet”, published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2017, is a collection of poems related to his experiences while on active duty in the US Navy. Full of erotic and martial intensity, the poems create a lyrical memoir out of the poet’s time serving as a gay man in the military. Exploring the complex intersections between violence and sexuality, Jacques’s poems alternate between wild abandon and formal rigidity. His work recognizes the self as a primary center of conflict, a body which is charged with understanding the conflux of love and war.

Rob Jacques’s second book of poems, “Adagio for Su Tung-p’o: Poems on How Consciousness Uses Flesh to Float Through Space/ Time”, was published by Fernwood Press in December of 2019. Jacques uses Su Tung-p’o’s poetic lines as epigraphs to introduce his own metaphysical work which looks at the human issues, addressed by poet Su Tung-p’o in the eleventh century, with a twenty-first century perspective.

Rob Jacques’s poetry has appeared in regional and national journals, including Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review, American Literary Review, The Healing Muse, Poet Lore, and Assaracus, a quarterly print journal which features the work of a wide representation of gay poets.

Note: For readers who are interested in LGBTQ fiction and poetry, I recommend the publisher Sibling Rivalry Press, the home of the Undocupoet Fellowship and a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit arts service organization: https://www.siblingrivalrypress.com

Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard

Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard, “The Divine Tragedy”, Full Canvas and Detail, 1865-1869, Oil on Canvas, 400 x 550 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris

Painter Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard was born in Lyon on December 9, 1808, to a bourgeois family of comfortable circumstances. After considering all his possible careers, he decided in favor of art, which took him to Paris in 1825 to begin his studies. Chenavard entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1825, and studied, alongside his friend and fellow painter Joseph Guichard, in the studio of neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and later in the studios of painters Louis Hersent and Eugène Delacroix.

On the advice of Ingres, Chenavard traveled to Italy in 1827 to study the works of the master painters in Florence, Milan, Rome and Venice. In addition, he took interest in the work of the German school, even copying the Nazarene movement’s Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s murals at the Villa Massimi. After two years Chenavard returned to Paris, where he executed his first historical painting, “Luther Before the Diet of Worms”, in which Luther refuses to recant his writings before the assembly of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

For the 1831 decorative competition of the Salle des Séances de la Chambre in the Bourbon Palace, Chenavard’s painting, “Marat Apostrophizing the Marquis of Dreaux-Brezé”, received praise from Delacroix and historical painter Antoine-Jean Gros, but it was not acceptable by King Louis Philippe V. In 1841, some time after returning from Rome, Chenavard exhibited his “Martyrdom of St. Polycarpus”, which was followed five years later by the painting “Dante’s Hell”, similar in style to the dynamic composition and illusionistic perspective seen in the work of Antonio da Correggio.

An interest in the story of society rapidly became a dominant force in Chenavard’s life to such an extant that he felt contemporary art failed because it ceased to concern itself with greater concepts. Under the influence of German philosophy and painting, he considered art’s aim had to be humanitarian and civilizing. In 1848, the forthcoming decoration work for the Pantheon gave him the opportunity to fulfill that force in his life. Chenavard gathered several assistants, all former students of the Academy in Rome, each of which assisted individually in the design work, whose ideas he combined and redesigned.

In April of 1848, Paul Chenavard presented his plans for the decoration of the Pantheon with a circle of historical subjects. The sketches were approved by Ledru-Rolliin, the Minister of the Interior in the new French revolutionary government. However, a movement soon developed to return the Pantheon to the Church; the Archbishop of Paris, upon seeing Chenavard’s plans, declared the ideas too anticlerical to be accepted, and discontinued the project. In 1885 when the Saint Genevieve church once more became the Pantheon, Chenavard was both too old and angry to resume the task; French art had also, at that time, moved away from his esoteric historical romanticism.

In 1853, Paul Chenavard was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; and two years later, at the Universal Exposition in Paris, where a large number of his paintings were shown, he received a first class medal. His next, and last, Salon painting was the 1869 “The Divine Tragedy”, which expressed in veiled terms his anti-religious sentiments and his faith in human reason. Originally placed in Paris’s Salon Carrée where it attracted much attention, it was later moved, possibly at the instigation of the clerical authorities, to an obscure gallery in the rear. With this last disappointment, the public career of Chenavard virtually came to an end.

Paul Chenavard retired to a life of a gentleman of leisure in Lyon, traveling occasionally, but painting very little. His sketches of the Pantheon project were shown together in Lyon in 1876 for the last time, accompanied with a brochure by his friend Charles Blanc. To the city of Lyon, Chenavard left his money, his prints, and his own works. He died in Paris in 1895 and was buried in Lyon’s new Loyasse Cemetery, an burial area with elaborate graves in various architectural styles.

Insert Images:

Top: Felix Bracquemond, “Paul Chenavard”, 1860, Etching on Thin Paper, 9.8 x 14.9 cm, British Museum, London

Bottom: Gustave Courbet, “Paul Chenavard, Munich”, 1869, Oil on Canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, France

Grant Wood

Grant Wood, “Spring in Town”, 1941, Oil on Wood Panel, 66 x 60.9 cm, Swope Art Museum, Terra Haute, Indiana

Born in February of 1891 near Anamosa, Iowa, painter Grant Wood was one of the major exponents of Midwestern Regionalism, an art movement that flourished during the 1930s. His adolescent years on the family farm remained an inspiration to him throughout his artistic career. In his early years, Wood studied under tile-craftsman Ernest A. Batchelder and took drawing classes under painter Charles Cumming at the University of Iowa. In 1913, he moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute until the death of his father in 1916; at which time, Wood returned home to Cedar Rapids to support his mother and sister.

Wood traveled to France in 1923, where he studied for two years at the Académie Julian in Paris. He then continued his European travels, staying in Italy for a period to paint. During this period, Wood painted in an Impressionist-inspired style, focusing on landscapes. Though his style changed significantly over time, the decorative patterns of foliage and light seen in his early work remained a feature of his mature style. Encouraged in 1925 by his friend David Turner, Wood gave up teaching to focus full-time on his art, setting up a studio space, furnished by Turner, in Cedar Rapids.

It was in this developmental time, through the support of the Cedar Rapids community and his exposure to its culture, that he became committed to Regionalism, drawing the subjects of his work from the local population and landscapes of the region. Wood’s distinctive style was finalized after a trip to Munich in 1928, where he oversaw the fabrication of his stained glass window design for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. By 1929, after having viewed painter Hans Memling’s canvases and painter-printmaker Albrecht Dürer’s work in Munich’s museums, Wood came to believe the crisp edges and meticulous details of their execution could be used to convey a distinctly American quality.

In Iowa City in the spring of 1941, with war overseas and anxiety growing at home, Grant Wood began his sketch work for “Spring in Town”, which he finished that summer along with its companion piece “Spring in the Country”. He painted the scene with crisp, clear lines and gave the scene a perspective from slightly above: this enabled the viewer to see the whole panorama of small-town life and labor as well as its minute details. Wood drew from his own memories of farm life as a young boy but combined these with aspects of his present life, the houses he noticed, the people he knew, and his feelings about family and friends.

“Spring in Town” was one of Grant Wood’s last midwestern rural scenes before his death in February of 1942. After the United States entered World War II, the Saturday Evening Post magazine printed “Spring in Town” as patriotic propaganda, presenting the idyllic scene as the exemplar of American life. The painting, however, although manifestly tranquil, represented a traumatic personal memory- the death of Wood’s father and, as a result, the loss of the family’s Anamosa farm. Wood’s first conception of the “Spring in Town” image coincided with the fortieth anniversary of his father’s death on March 17, 1901.

Top Insert Image: Grant Wood’s “Self Portrait” was reworked several times by the artist, beginning in 1932, but was never finalized. This last version of the enigmatic artist was uncompleted at his death. It is in the Davenport Collection of the Figge Art Museum located in Davenport, Iowa.

Second Insert Image: Grant Wood’s 1937 “Saturday Night Bath” is a charcoal drawing on wove paper which is in the collection of Houston’s Museum of Fine Art. In 1939, the image, reproduced as a lithograph, was considered by the U. S. Post Office to be pornographic due to the depictions of the two naked men.

Bottom Insert Image: Grant Wood, “Plowing on Sunday”, 1934, Black Conté Crayon, Ink, Colored Pencil and Gouache on Brown Wove Paper, 45.7 x 43.5 cm, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island

Tennessee Williams: “Curiously Stirring”

Photographers Unknown, Curiously Stirring

“So successfully have we disguised from ourselves the intensity of our own feelings, the sensibility of our own hearts, that plays in the tragic tradition have begun to seem untrue. For a couple of hours we may surrender ourselves to a world of fiercely illuminated values in conflict, but when the stage is covered and the auditorium lighted, almost immediately there is a recoil of disbelief. “Well, well!” we say as we shuffle back up the aisle, while the play dwindles behind us with the sudden perspective of an early Chirico painting. By the time we have arrived at Sardi’s, if not as soon as we pass beneath the marquee, we have convinced ourselves once more that life has as little resemblance to the curiously stirring and meaningful occurrences on the stage as a jingle has to an elegy of Rilke.”

—Tennessee Williams, Where I Live: Selected Essays

Widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights in American history, Thomas Lanier Williams, known as Tennessee Williams, was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911. He was the second of three children born to Cornelius Williams, a crude talking manager of a Saint Louis shoe company, and Edwina Dakin Williams, the daughter of a minister and an overbearing mother. The troubled home life of the young Tennessee Williams became a source of many characters and themes of plays in his later life.

Williams started his writing early; at the age of thirteen, his first article “Isolated” was published in 1924 by the Ben Blewett Junior High newspaper and, by high school, he had two articles published in national magazines. In 1929, Williams enrolled in the University of Missouri’s journalism department, but was forced by his father in 1932 to leave and take employment. He continued to write while employed and finished two plays that were staged in 1937 by a Memphis theater group: “Candles to the Sun”, a drama dealing with Alabama coal miners unionizing, and “The Fugitive Kind”. The latter play introduced the character who would inhabit most of Williams’ future plays: the marginal figure who, through no personal fault, is a misfit in society but who demonstrates an admirable will to survive.

Williams enrolled at the University of Iowa and graduated in 1938 with a degree in English. In order to submit plays to a New York competition, he changed both his birthdate and name, which from that time on became “Tennessee Williams”. It was this period of his life that he began a habit of traveling and, also, came to the understanding that he was homosexual. In New York City, Williams joined a gay social circle which included fellow writer and friend Donald Windham. Between 1940 and 1948, a series of relationships, often tempestuous and ultimately failing, developed between Williams and men he met in his travels. After returning to New York from Rome in the spring of 1948, Williams met and fell in love with Sicilian actor Frank Merlo, with whom he had an enduring relationship that lasted for fourteen years until drug abuse and infidelities on both sides ended it.

Tennessee Williams’ first professionally produced play, the 1940 “Battle of Angels”, debuted in Boston: however, it failed at its tryout with the audience. The play was withdrawn after Boston’s Watch and Ward Society banned it on the charge that it dealt with such topics as racism, suppressed sexuality, adultery, corruption and murder. Even though Williams rewrote his play several times and worked on it for 17 years, the 1957 rewrite “Orpheus Descending” was also harshly criticized and widely considered a failure.

Williams’ breakthrough hit “The Glass Menagerie”, filled with characters based on his own troubled family, opened in Chicago in 1944 to great reviews. It moved to Broadway the next year and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1945, becoming the first in a long run of successes for Williams. Two years later in 1947, Williams’ drama play “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened, surpassing his previous success and giving him the status as one of the country’s leading playwrights. This play earned him a second Drama Critics’ Award and his first Pulitzer Prize.

Tennessee Williams wrote three more successive plays which brought him critical acclaim: the Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, a 1955 three act play and Williams’ personal favorite, featuring motifs of social mores, decay, sexual desire and repression; the 1959 “Sweet Bird of Youth”, a play written for Williams’ friend Tallulah Bankhead, telling the story of a gigolo and drifter who returns to his hometown as the companion of a faded movie star; and the 1961 drama play “The Night of the Iguana”, based on a previous short story and centered around misfits dealing with their sexual tensions and personal struggles, the central therm being goodness in which lost souls offer each other solace and understanding,.

After Tennessee Williams’ breakup with Frank Merlo in early 1962, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Williams returned and cared for him until his death in September of 1963. In the years following Merlo’s death, he descended into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use; this resulted in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities. Williams was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely overcome his dependence on prescription drugs.

William’ later plays were unsuccessful and closed to poor reviews. As he grew older, he felt increasingly alone; he feared old age and losing his sexual appeal to younger gay men. In the 1970s, when he was in his 60s, Williams had a lengthy relationship with Robert Carroll, a Vietnam veteran and aspiring writer in his twenties. The two men broke up in 1979, but remained friends, with Carroll receiving one of the only two bequests in Williams’ will.

On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead at age 71 in his suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York from a toxic level of Seconal. Although writing in his will that he wished to be buried at sea near the spot that American poet Hart Crane died by choice, his body was buried, by the arrangement of his brother Dakin Williams, at Calvary Cemetery in Saint Louis.

In his career, Tennessee Williams also wrote two novels, “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Snow” in 1950 and”Moise and the World of Reason” in 1975, poetry, essays, film scripts, short stories, and an 1975 autobiography entitled “Memoirs”. In his will, Williams left his literary rights to the University of the South in Tennessee, the funds of which support a creative writing program.

Bottom Image Insert: Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, Date Unknown, Tennessee Williams Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Michael Stamm

Paintings by Michael Stamm

Michael Stamm’s work, using literature, design, and autobiographical sources, examines the need for human relationships in an increasingly interconnected but alienated world. Raised in Illinois, he received his BA at Wesleyan University in West Virginia and an MA in English Literature from Columbia University; he later earned a MFA from New York University in 2016. Stamm also attended in 2016 the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, an intensive nine-week residency program for emerging visual artists.

Stamm’s work explores the themes of identity, spiritual and physical wellness, the individual’s innate decision capacity, and the issue of self-doubt. While other gay artists often use erotic imagery in their work, he takes everyday, mundane imagery and codes it with queer history, thus transforming it into archetypes. Throughout Stamm’s body of work, text highlights the talkative self-awareness implicit in his paintings. Whether functioning as the headspace of the artist, of the subject, or an omniscient voice, the use of text animates a thought into an object.

During his MFA work at the New York University, Stamm had his first solo exhibition “Just Like This Please” at the Thierry Goldberg Gallery. From this period came his “April 26,, 2016” series, a work consisting of nine small panels depicting the same corner of his studio at different times of the day. Michael Stamm produced the 2017 “Tincture” series of seven larger paintings, a more refined and surreal series incorporating the human figure as a design element in the terrazzo-like textured works. The tightly composed surfaces of his paintings are formed by applying thin glazes in multiple layers; and his portrayal of human bodies are highly stylized and often cropped.

In early 2018, Michael Stamm exhibited a group of eight portraits of his therapist, each painting showing her in a different session, but only depicted as a torso in various modes of dress and decoration. The paintings’ outlandish jewelry, inspired by Stamm’s own therapist, is overlaid by poetry, text from cybernetics textbooks, and lyrics from pop songs. His most recent series at the Shulamit Nazarian gallery in Los Angeles, entitled “So Super Sorry Sir”, is currently running from January 16th to March 6th of 2021.

Michael Stamm’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York at DC Moore Gallery and Thierry Goldberg, and has been included in several group exhibitions, including shows at Deli Gallery, New York; Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Taymour Grahne Projects, London; Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig, and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles.

For more information and exhibitions, the artist’s site is located at: https://michaelstamm.com

T M Davy

The Artwork of T M Davy

Born in New York, New York in 1980, T M Davy is a painter whose body work is characterized by realistic oil portraits. Davy studied at the National Academy of Design in New York in 2001, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York where he currently teaches. In 2012 , he was an artist in residence at BOFFO in Fire Island, New York.

T M Davy’s work relies on scenes that are directly connected to his life and surroundings. Persistent themes in his work are the issues of intimacy, love, and friendship. Past subjects in his work have included candle-lit scenes of domestic life with family, his husband Liam, and his circle of friends. Davy has also painted a series of images centered on horses, inspired by the time he spent on a relative’s farm, and a series of images of candles lit in darkness.

The consistency of Davy’s technical execution and the sophistication of its realism are apparent in his oil on canvas work, whether in a small or a large-scale format. A connecting link in all of his paintings is his use of the chiaroscuro effect, a technique used also by painters Caravaggio and Anthony van Dyck, which emphasizes the interaction of light and shadow.He has also worked in the mediums of pastel and gouache, with which he produced several series of open air spontaneous drawings in a smaller scale format.

In his work produced on Fire Island, New York, Davy portrays many of his beachside figures entering or in the water, exemplifying the union of bodies with nature, a prominent theme of the artist. His portraits celebrate his inseparable communion with his husband, Liam Davy, as well as the intimacy and bond among close friends. His “Fire Island” series are a meditation on the power and freedom born from togetherness—between figure and landscape, mind and body, human and human.

Davy’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the “No Soul for Sale” exhibition at theTate Modern in London; the “B-Out” exhibition at the Andrew Edlin gallery in New York; the 2009 “Nudes” exhibition at Galeria Fortes Vilaca in São Paolo; and the 2019 “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Thomas Fuchs in Stuttgart, Germany in 2018: the Exile gallery in Berlin, Germany, 2012; and gallery 11R in New York in 2014 and 2017.

“We exist in an age of complete transition. The time is now to communicate the beauty of queer love around the world. A paradigm shift in people’s conception of love is happening. If I can, I want to play a small part in that–in revealing how true and how eternal it is. Transcendence is a movement to the broadest spectrum. “ —T M Davy, 2019

Information of T M Davy’s work and exhibitions can be found at the artist’s site: http://www.tmdavy.com

Assotto Saint: “Shadows Also Shrinking Early”

Photographers Unknown, Shadows Shrinking Early

between
solitudes of illness
& beatitudes our lips utter
evening settles in this exile of senses for our surrender
one more friend’s death has clocked the day like a tolling bell
biding time we are shadows also shrinking early into destiny
let us gather our pills & swallow all regrets with a kiss
cover each other then weave
dreams of another day
to come.

—Assotto Saint, Life-Partners

Born in Les Cayes, Haiti, on October 2, 1957, Assotto Saint was an American poet, publisher and performance artist. He was a key figure in the LGBT and African-American art and literary culture of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Saint, whose birth name was Yves François Lubin, moved to New York City in 1970 where he enrolled briefly in the pre-med program at Queens College, after which he pursued an artistic career. He adopted the name Assotto Saint for his career, choosing ‘Saint’ in honor of the revolutionary hero Toussaint L’Ouverture, who fought against France for Haiti’s independence, and ‘Assotto’ which is the name of the ceremonial drum used in Haitian Vodou rituals.

From 1973 to 1980, Assotto Saint performed as a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. In November of 1980, he met the Swedish musician and composer Jan Holmgren, who would become his life partner and a collaborator in his artistic career. Saint, along with Holmgren, founded the Metamorphosis Theater company, and Xotika, an electronic pop music group. His theater performance piece entitled “Risin’ to the Love We Need” won second prize from the Jane Chambers Award for Gay and Lesbian Playwriting in 1980.

Assotto Saint became a United States citizen in 1986, after which time he began publishing poetry in anthologies, including the 1986 “In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology”; “Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time” published in 1988; and the 1987 chapbook “Triple Trouble”. He soon founded his own press, Galiens Press, which worked to publish black gay poets. Included among the many works by Galiens Press are “The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets” in 1991 and two of Saint’s own poetry collections, “Stations” in 1989 and “Wishing for Wings” in 1994.

Assotto Saint won a 1992 Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Poetry category as editor of “The Road Before Us” and, in the following year, was a nominee in the Gay Anthology category for “Here to Dare: A Collection of Ten Gay Black Poets”, al work published by his Galiens Press. In 1994, he was a nominee in the Gay Poetry category for his own collection of poems “Wishing for Wings”. Saint also received a fellowship in poetry from New York’s Foundation of the Arts and the James Baldwin Award.

After both Saint and his partner Jan Holmgren were diagnosed HIV-positive, Saint became an AIDS activist and one of the first African American activists to publicly disclose his HIV status. Before his death, Saint appeared in Marlon Riggs’ 1992 film noir “Non, Je Regrette Rien (No Regrets)”, covering the self-disclosure of five HIV-positive black men coping, through their difficult journeys, with the personal and social destruction of the epidemic. Jan Holmgren died on March 29, 1993, and Saint died on June 29, 1994. The couple are buried alongside each other at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York.

An autobiographical collection of Assotto Saint’s work entitled “Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems Fiction, Essays, and Plays of Assotto Saint” was published by Richard Kasak at Masquerade Books in 1996. This compendium of Saint’s work was collected by Assotto’s friend and literary executor Michele Karlsbert who wrote a brief and heartfelt introduction to the book.

For those interested, the preface written by Assotto Saint to his 1992 anthology “The Road Before Us” can be located at: https://zocalopoets.com/tag/assotto-saint/

Patrick Angus

The Artwork of Patrick Angus

Born in December of 1953 in North Hollywood, California, American painter Patrick Angus studied at the Santa Barbara Art Institute. Inspired by David Hockney’s book “72 Drawings”, he came to New York in 1980 to see the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Angus settled in the city and started illustrating the emerging modern gay culture with visual narratives and humor which had not been visible to the general population at that time.

Patrick Angus depicted not only the pleasant aspects of the scenes he witnessed; but he was also concerned with the unadorned sides of the persons and situations. The central theme that is expressed in many of Angus’s works is the longing for true, not only physical, intimacy. With his distinct observation skills, his compositions, and the use of light and expressive color, he depicted his observation of the scene, but also captured its atmosphere and the vulnerability of its individuals. The loneliness that Angus, as well as other gay men, often felt during this time and the attempts to offset it play an important role in Angus’ body of work.

Angus is known for his depiction of the gay New York scene in the 1980s, particularly its bar scenes, porn theaters, bathhouses, and strip shows. He is especially known for his large paintings of the Gaiety Theater, above the Howard Johnson’s restaurant at the corner of 46th Street and Broadway, with its nightlife of bold colors, flashing lights, and young male erotic dancers. Angus often created a dialogue in his work with references to known artists; such as Picasso and Manet,, by depicting them in his work, a practice common with the notions of post-modern art.

An example of this dialogue is Angus’s 1979 “Los Angeles Drawings”, which capture his experience discovering the city and its inhabitants at the beginning of his career as an openly gay artist. These drawings, which features portraits of men together in everyday life, are a direct conversation with fellow painter David Hockney, who remained a mentor, a collector of Angus’s work, as well as a friend until his death.

Patrick Angus died in 1992 at the age of 38 from the effects of AIDS, without receiving due recognition for his work during his lifetime. In recent years, however, his popularity increased with major retrospective exhibitions being held. An exhibition in early 2015 at Galerie Thomas Fuchs was followed by art fair presentations in Karlsruhe, Berlin, Miami, and other cities. A comprehensive monograph was produced in 2016 by art publisher Hatje Cantz with the participation of Galerie Thomas Fuchs.

This monograph was followed in 2017 by a major exhibition entitled “Patrick Angus” at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany, on the occasion of which a publication was released by Distanz Verlag. In 2019 the Long Beach Museum of Art in California presented a retrospective of his work. The Leslie-Lohmann Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York later showed Angus’s work in the group exhibition “On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work”.

Patrick Angus is represented in the collections of the Fort Smith Regional Art Museum, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Leslie-Lohmann Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and the Schwules Museum Berlin, and in many private collections.