Category: gay illustration

Jacques Sultana

The Artwork of Jacques Sultana

Born to a judge and his wife at a Breton village in 1938, Jacques Sultana was a French contemporary, post-war painter, graphic artist and designer who worked during his career in a combination of Art Nouveau and Symbolist styles. He was a prolific painter and produced a large number of photo-realistic canvases throughout his career depicting both clothed and nude male figures.

Expelled from the family home at the age of twenty-two due to his homosexuality, Sultana decided in 1963 to relocate to Paris where he found residence in the 16th arrondissement. During the 1970’s, Sultana created a remarkable series of graphite drawings centering on male nudes and employing surrealist or psychedelic motifs. Of these, his 1975 graphite on paper “L’Oiseau Rare” is considered one the best in the series.

After a period as an art teacher, Jacques Sultana began working in 1978 as a graphic designer and illustrator. He created fashion trade advertisements for several clients, among which was Eminence, a French manufacturer of men’s swimsuits and underwear. Sultana also created illustrations for the distiller Pernod and automobile manufacturer Renault as well as the French Ministry of the Navy for which he illustrated all the service’s military outfits. 

Beginning in 1994 until his death, Sultana devoted himself entirely to painting, most often male nudes in a hyper-realistic and often homoerotic style. He died at the age of seventy-four on the twenty-fourth of July in 2012 at his longtime 16th arrondissement home in Paris. 

A retrospective of Jacques Sultana’s work, entitled “Jacques Sultana, Pentre Hyper-Réaliste”, was held in March to April of 2022 at Paris’s Galerie du Passage in coordination with the publication of an art book of the same name. Sultana’s work can be found in many private collections including the collections of Pierre Passebon and Jean-Paul Gaultier. 

Notes: There is a dearth of biographical information on Jacques Sultana’s life as well as details on his paintings. If anyone has more information, please share it. I am particularly interested in the time he spent in Paris and the titles of his work. 

Top Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “La Pantalon Rouge”, 2001, Oil and Acrylic on Masonite, 63 x 38.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Tendresse”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Marche de Soho”, 1997, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Claude Cahun

The Photography of Claude Cahun

Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in October of 1894 to a literary Jewish family in Nantes, Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor and author. She was the niece of avant-garde symbolist writer Marcel Schwob and the great-niece of historian and Orientalist writer David Léon Cahun. 

Cahun adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914 for its gender neutrality, Claude being a French name that can be used by any gender with the same spelling and pronunciation. After experiencing antisemitism in the Nantes school system, Claude Cahun attended the private Parsons Mead School in Ashtead, Surrey, and continued her education at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. 

Claude Cahun’s father, newspaper publisher Maurice Schwob, divorced his wife after her permanent internment at a psychiatric facility. In 1909, he met the widowed Marie Eugénie Rondet Malberbe and, after a lengthly courtship, married her in 1917. Claude Cahun had met Marie Malberbe’s daughter, Suzanne Alberte Malberbe, previously at school in 1909. They were already years into their lifetime artistic and romantic partnership by the time their parents married. 

In 1922, Cahun and Malberbe, now an established designer, illustrator and photographer under the name Marcel Moore, settled in Paris. At their home, they held salon meetings attended by Paris’s intellectuals and artists. As prominent members of the Parisian art world, Cahun and Moore would host such notables as poet and painter Henri Michaux, writer Adrienne Monnier, Surrealist leader and theorist André Breton, and American-born bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach.

Claude Cahun is known primarily for her highly staged self-portraits and tableaux that incorporated visual surrealistic elements. She began shooting her series of self-portraits at the age of eighteen while studying at the University of Paris. During the 1920s, Cahun’s self-portraits featured her attired in such various guises as an angel, doll, body builder, aviator, vampire and Japanese puppet. Some of these images, which presented a blurring of gender indicators and behaviors, are believed to have been taken with Marcel Moore behind the camera. Cahun and Moore collaborated on many projects and equally shared the credit for their collage work. 

In 1925, Cahun published “Heroines”, a series of monologues based upon female fairy tale characters intertwined with witty comparisons to contemporary women. She was active during 1929 in the experimental theater group Le Pateau for which she played Elle in “Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”,and Satan in “Le Mystère d’Adam”. In 1930, Cahun published “Aveux non Avenus (Disavowed Confessions)”, a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages by Marcel Moore. 

In 1932, Cahun joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, a coalition of revolutionary artists and writers who eventually mobilized against war and fascism. It was through this group that she met Breton and surrealist writer René Crevel. Cahun participated in a number of surrealist exhibitions, including the London International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Gallery and the Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, both in 1936. 

With the rise of antisemitism in 1937, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore fled Europe and settled on the island of Jersey. After German troops invaded Jersey in 1940, they reverted to their original names and masqueraded themselves as being sisters. For several years, Cahun and Moore heroically risked their lives by producing and distributing anti-Nazi fliers to the German soldiers. Many of the anti-Nazi fliers contained translated snippets of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence: these BBC excerpts were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh critiques. Cahun and Moore would don their best dresses and attend German military events at which they secretly placed their pamphlets in cigarette boxes and in soldier’s pockets or on their chairs.

In 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death. Their home and property was confiscated and much of their art was destroyed by the Germans. Cahun and Moore survived, saved by the 1945 liberation of Jersey from German occupation. Cahun’s health, however, never recovered from her treatment in the prison. She died at Saint Helier, Jersey, in December of 1954 at the age of sixty and was buried in St. Brelade’s Church, one of the twelve ancient parish churches on the island. After Cahun’s death, Moore relocated to a smaller home in Jersey. She died by suicide in February of 1972 at the age of seventy-nine. Moore is buried alongside Cahun in St. Brelade’s Church. 

Claude Cahun’s work was largely unrecognized until forty years after her death. Her participation with the Parisian Surrealists, predominately male, brought an element of diversity to their creative work through her gender non-conforming photography and writings. Cahun’s work was meant to upset the conventional understanding of photography as a document of reality. Her poetry and writings challenged the prevailing gender roles as well as social and economic boundaries. 

Notes: All images, unless noted, are part of the Jersey Heritage Collections of the Bailiwick of Jersey.

An extensive article on Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, entitled “Marcel Moore, Her Life and Art”, written by the JHT Curator of Art Louise Downie can be found at the Jersey Heritage Organization’s site. This article primarily covers the life of Moore who was a successful illustrator, photographer and fashion designer. The article is located at: https://www.jerseyheritage.org/media/PDF-Heritage-Mag/marcel%20moore.pdf

The November 4th 2020 edition of the online The Art Newspaper has an extract from author Jeffrey H. Jackson’s history book “Paper Bullets” which outlines Cahun and Moore’s artistic campaign against the Germans during World War II. The article is located at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/11/04/extract-or-how-artist-couple-claude-cahun-and-marcel-moore-resisted-the-nazis-with-their-paper-bullets

Top Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Autoportrait”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Second Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait with Roger Roussot in Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”, 1929, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Third Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Color Crayon and Ink on Paper, Jersey Heritage Collections

Fourth Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait in Orchards”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore”, circa 1929-30, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Ben Kimura

The Art of Ben Kimura

Born in 1947, Ben Kimura (木村べん) was a Japanese artist known for his gay erotic artwork. As noted by historian and artist Gengoroh Tagame, he and Sadeo Hasogawa were among the central figures in Japan’s resurgence of gay artwork in the 1970s.  

Ben Kimura began his career in 1978 as an illustrator and cover artist for “Barazoku”, Japan’s first commercially circulated gay men’s magazine. The monthly magazine, edited by Bungaku Itō, began publication in July of 1971 and published four-hundred issues, the last being in 2008. Kimura was a regular art contributor until his departure in 1989. During this time, he was also a major contributor for cover and story illustrations for “Sabu”magazine. 

Kimura also contributed illustrations to the early yaoi magazines “June” and “Allan”, both male to male romance-fiction magazines for a female audience. His work for these magazines placed him among the first gay artists to achieve crossover success with a female audience. 

Ben Kimura’s artwork was highly sought after by the Japanese gay publications throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Unique among contemporary Japanese homoerotic artists, his work typically depicted masculine, handsome men rendered in a style that was romantic and sensual rather than explicitly pornographic. Kimura’s fit and stylish young men evoked both familiarity and a sense of nostalgia for life’s past encounters . 

In addition to work done for periodicals, Kimura self-published two collections of his homoerotic illustrations. The first collection was the 1997  “Tan-Pan Body (画集)” which was primarily a collection of cover art done for Sabu magazine prior to 1997. Kimura’s second collection “Go-One Boy (作品集)” was published in 1998. 

Ben Kimura died from a pulmonary embolism at the age of fifty-six on the eighteenth of February in 2003. As a tribute, a second printing of his “Tan-Pan Body” was reissued shortly after his death. Kimura’s collected works are managed by his partner and artistic executor Kihira Kai. 

Benoit Prévot

The Artwork of Benoit Prévot

Born in the Ardennes region between France and Belgium in 1968, Benoit Prévot is a French illustrator and comic artist. A graduate of EMSAT, he has worked at various design and advertising studios. Prévot received formal training at the CFT Gobelins, a Paris school for visual communication and the arts,  after which he worked on several animated television series. Throughout his career, he has created artwork for comic books and fanzines, as well as illustrated book covers and promotional posters. 

Prévot’s more current and  personal work, reminiscent of illustrations produced in the 1920s, often displays a stylish homoerotic atmosphere. Although his favorite medium is ink and graphite on paper, Prévot has also produced works with watercolors and oil paints. 

Benoit Prévot is the writer and illustrator for Class Comics’s “Angelface”, a graphic novel series set in the 1920’s era of prohibition, which was epitomized by that era’s illicit liquor bars, swing music, and loose morals. The illustrated series combines the elegance of that era with Prévot’s stylish homoeroticism. The story of Alan, known as Angelface, and his lover Red conjures up the glamour of upper-class wealth and Trans-Atlantic ocean liner travel as well as the grime of the working class world which Alan and Red want to escape. 

Prévot’s work has been shown at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City and has been shown regularly at the Tom of Finland Art and Culture Festivals. Issues of the graphic novel “Angelface” were donated in 2011 to the Tom of Finland Foundation. Benoit Prévot currently lives and works in Paris. 

Bottom Insert Image: Benoit Prévot, “Décolleté”, Date Unknown

 

Ego Rodriguez

The Illustrative Work of Ego Rodriguez

Born in Gijón, Spain, in 1976, Ego Rodriguez is a self-taught, freelance graphic designer who has been based in the East End of London for the last twenty years. Born into an artistic family and initially trained by his parents in the arts, he began drawing in sketchbooks at an early age. Rodriguez’s work is currently focused on digital media; but he also creates work in acrylics, inks, mixed media, and watercolor.

Inspired by the fashion illustrations of Antonio López and Stefano Canulli, Rodriguez’s illustrative work is predominately  portraiture, done with well-defined aesthetics, clean edges, bold strokes, and contrasting colors, similar in style to the fashion illustrations of René Gruau, one of the best known artists of the haute couture world during the 1940s and 1950s. The central part of Rodriguez’s work has formed around his homoerotic images of male figures and his film world images due to their popularity.

In the beginning of Rodriguez’s art career, commissioned portraits for friends formed the basis of his art. Since then, his current body of work has included postcards, editorial work, logos, websites, wall paintings, and illustrative work for magazines, both online and published. Some of his clients have been Attitude, QX Magazine, Gay Times, and The Advocate. Rodriguez has also contributed work for The Pigeon Hole, an online global book club, and Swide, an online luxury magazine. 

Ego Rodriguez’s exhibition entitled “Macho” was featured in 2012 and 2014 in London, and also has been shown at Pride events worldwide.

More images, information on commissions, and contact can be found at the artist’s site: https://www.egorodriguez.com

Salem Beiruti

Salem Beiruti, “Cernunnos”, 2020, Digiatal Art Print with Watercolor and Gold Gouache

Born in Lebanon, Salem Beiruti is a conceptual artist and illustrator residing in Madrid. Working after graduation as an art director in the fields of advertising, graphics, and fashion design, he has more than seventeen years of client and freelance work. Upon his move to Madrid, Beiruti became a full=time illustrator and artist.

Beiruti’s skillful digital illustrations are unique and inspired by such artists and photographers as Patrick Fillion, Paul Freeman, Issauro Cairo, and Francisco Prato. His project  of mixed-media works “Morphosis” is a result of his personal journey as a man of an Arabic mid-eastern culture and its traditions to the man he is today. The art book was published in June of 2017 by German publisher Bruno Gmnuender.

Salem Beiruti’s “Cernunnos” is based on model Francesc Gascó.

For those interested in purchasing a print, Art of Salem is offering all prints at a 40% discount for Easter 2021. Please reference Ultrawolves when ordering. Thank you.   https://www.instagram.com/artistsalem/

Leo Maximus

Illustrations by Leo Maximus

Leo Maximus is a French graphic artist based in Paris and Montreuil, Ile-de-France. He studied graphic design and illustration in Paris. 

In his initial illustrations, Maximus used a rectangular format with strong shadowing and bold calligraphy which combined the feel of vintage advertisement with eroticism . For his current “Purgatoire” Series, Leo Maximus used a circular format  in his compositions called a tondo. This format, popular during the Renaissance, was used traditionally for religious scenes in paintings and reliefs. In this new series, Leo Maximus has softened his colors and tones to produce a more classical effect.

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

Felix d’Eon

Illustrations by Felix d’Eon

Guadalajara-born artist Felix d’Eon is influenced by multiple historical art styles, including vintage American comics, Edwardian fashion, illustrations from children’s books, and the prints of Edo period Japan. Doing careful research in costumes, settings, and the style of a period, he gives his work, done on antique paper, the illusion of antiquity, D’Eon’s thoroughness and accuracy allows his illustration to appear taken from the pages of an art history textbook. 

D’Eon uses the vintage illustrative style, with its delicate romance and aesthetics, as a tool for narratives of both marginalized and historically oppressed gay communities. He employs this technique in his illustrations, both erotic and provocative, to challenge the modern-day stigmas, still present, around same-sex relationships. 

Ultimately, D’Eon’s illustrations read as an alternative history for the queer people he draws. None of his characters suffer from tragic endings or acts of injustice like they perhaps might have in the past or even present day. Instead, D’Eon recreates the world not as it was or is, but imagines the world as it can be. 

Felix d’Eon has produced a series of tarot card illustrations and is currently working on a series of astrological signs painted with queer subjects. Many of his illustrations can be found for purchase at the artist’s site at Society6:  https://society6.com/felixdeon

Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester

Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester, “Manuel” Series, 1983-1985, La Luna de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

Born in Tangier in 1950, Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester was a draftsman, illustrator and a sculptor. He was considered one of the most representative draftsmen of Madrid’s “La Movida”, a countercultural movement that took place during Spain’s transition after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. One of Rodrigo’s few works in the comic genre was “Manuel”, an experimental and unconventional work, telling the tale of an nonreciprocal gay love story through an autobiographical character. The “Manuel” series was published in the oversize pages of the monthly magazine “La Luna de Madrid” between 1983 and 1985.

Rodrigo’s technical perfection and his mastery of perspective are evidence of his training as an architect and his study of Fine Art. In his illustrative work, he shows his fondness for realism and the classical paintings in the Prado Museum; he also recognizes the influence of the painters he admires, such as Edward Hopper and fashion illustrator Antonio López.

In 2005, a compilation of Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester’s work, containing “Manuel” and seven other works not published in La Luna de Madrid, was published, entitled “Manuel No Está Solo”, by Sins Entido, a Spanish publisher committed to graphic novels. Unfortunately, this compilation book is currently out-of-print.

Buckhead1111

Buckhead 1111, “Colaboration with Paul Cadmus”, Digital Art Photography

Buckhead1111, born Steve Douglas, is an artist and designer living on Maui, Hawaii. He is a multi-media artist who has produced work in a wide range of media including theater set design, jewelry, sculpture and painting. He is currently working in digital art using multiple apps on his iPad. Buckhead1111 weaves textures that he digitally creates into photographs that he has processed, frequently collaborating with other artists on their work.

Image reblogged with thanks to the artist: https://buckhead1111.tumblr.com

Alireza Shojaian

Alireza Shojaian, “Hamed Sinno et un de ses Frères (Hamed Sinno and One of His Brothers)”, 2018, Detail, Acrylic and Color Pencil on Wood Board, 150 x 120 cm, Private Collection

Alireza Shojaian is an Iranian gay artist, born in 1988 in Tehran. He studied at Islamic Azad University In the Faculty of Art and Architecture center located in Tehran, and obtained his Masters degree in Fine Arts. He now spends time living and working between his birthplace of Tehran and Beirut, Lebanon, a more tolerant country in the Middle East in terms of protection and acceptance for sexually and gender diverse people..

Shojaian’s artwork tries to highlight subjects which society tries to hide from view. His paintings often deal with the intimacy of his characters, sometimes confronting the viewer with a sense of suffering or embarrassment. Shojaian’s Pentagon and Hexagon series deals deeply with the issue of being a gay man in Iran. The two series depicts the final moments in the life of a gay friend, who was brutally murdered in his own home during the final year at the university.

For further information on the life of Alireza Shojaian and his experience within the Iranian culture as a gay artist, I suggest the following article: https://wearequeerhere.com/queerart

Image reblogged with thanks to a great site: https://bloghqualls.tumblr.com

Sadao Hasegawa

Graphic Work by Sadao Hasegawa

Born in the Tōkai region of Japan, Sadao Hasegawa was a Japanese graphic artist known for creating homoerotic fetish art. His first solo exhibition, “Sadao Hasegawa’s Alchemism: Meditation for 1973” was held in Tokyo, Japan, and featured collages, sculptures, and oil paintings. In 1978 Hasegawa’s art was published for the first time in “Barazoku”, a monthly magazine for gay men. Later he would be published inthe magazines “Sabu”, “Samson” and Adon”.

Sadao Hasegawa cited japanese homoerotic artist Go Mishima and artist Tom of Finland as major influences on his work. Hasegawa’s early works reflected European styles,;but after regular trips to Bali and Thailand, his work put greater focus on Asian iconography and mythology. On November 20, 1999, Hasegawa died from suicide by hanging in aBangkok, Thailand, hotel. Ownership of his work was eventually granted to Gallery Naruyama in Tokyo, which holds the majority of Hasegawa’s colledted works.

Hasegawa’s artworks are noted for their extensive detail, elaborate fantasy settings, and  for elements of Japanese, Thai, Tibetan Buddhist, African and Indian art. While Hasegawa focused primarily on depictios of muscular male physique, he oftren incorporated extreme sexual themes and subject matter into his works.

Sadao Hasegawa is regarded as one of the most influential creators of homoerotic art in Japan. Very little of his work was publihed in Japan and only one work “Sadao Hasegawa: Paintings and Drawings”, a collection of his magazine work, was published internationally by the British publisher Gay Men’s Press in 1990.

 

 

Kent Neffendorf

Kent Neffendorf, Title Unknown, (The Park Rangers)

Born in Texas in 1959, Kent Neffendorf is an American gay painter and illustrator living and working in Los Angeles. His art, depicting nude and partially clothed figures as icons of masculinity and sexuality, is done in oil and acrylic paints, pencils, and ink.

Neffendorf has been published in over 100 issues of popular gay entertainment publications, including: Men, Mandate, Playguy, Freshmen, Torso, Honcho, Inches, In Touch, Indulge, and The Advocate. He was included in the 2014 exhibition at the Leslie- Lohman Museum in New York City which showed the rich history of the male pinup in the golden age of gay men’s magazines.