Category: queer history

Edward Melcarth

The Artwork of Edward Melcarth

Born at Louisville, Kentucky in January of 1914, Edward Melcarth was an American painter, photographer and sculptor who developed his own style, Social Romanticism, a Renaissance-influenced attempt to describe man’s idealized view of himself. Active in the post-World War II art scene, Melcarth spent most of his career in New York City where he painted and sculpted images of blue-color workers, sailors, hustlers, and tradesmen. 

Known for his emotionally evocative and heroic portrayals of the male figure, Melcarth focused his work on masculinity, portraiture, religion and contemporary American culture. His images of working-class men showed their grit, brute strength and determination to overcome difficulty. At the same time, the images were visual vehicles that examined gay male desire in a society that found it socially unacceptable. Melcarth’s paintings ranged in size from smaller portraits to large-scale, complex scenes of interacting figures accentuated with light and shadow.

Edward Melcarth, born Edward Epstein, was the son of the wealthy Jewish couple, Edward Epstein Sr. and Eva Ehrmann. His grandfather was the noted Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey distiller Hilmar Ehrmann. Melcarth’s uncle was activist lawyer and author Herbert B. Ehrmann; his aunt Sara R. Ehrmann was a Boston civic activist and first president of the League of Women Voters. 

Eva Ehrmann, after the 1920 death of her husband, remarried in 1926 to Sir Reginald Mitchell Banks, who was a Member of Parliament. The family moved to the United Kingdom where Melcarth spent his early formative years. To pursue his interests and a career, he studied at Chelsea College of Arts in London; painter Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris; and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

In February of 1936, Melcarth rejected his family’s Jewish religion and changed his last name from Epstein to Melcarth, possibly a variation of Melqart, a protector god of ancient Semitic people. Although he considered himself both a communist and openly gay, he was briefly married in Paris from 1939 until the divorce in 1944. During World War II, Melcarth traveled with other American volunteers in 1943 to Persia where they constructed air strips for the allied forces. In 1944, he served as a seaman in the United States Merchant Marines until the end of the war. Melcarth returned to the United States in the fall of 1951 and taught briefly at Kentucky’s University of Louisville. 

In February of 1952, Edward Melcarth traveled to Italy where he resided for a period at Venice’s Casa del Tre Oci, a modern neo-Gothic palace on the island of Giudecca. Melcarth returned to the United States in November of 1952 and made New York City his primary residence. His acquaintances and friends included writers Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, photographer Thomas Painter, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, artist Henry Faulkner, art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and businessman Malcolm Forbes, who established a major collection of Melcarth’s work.

In 1957, Melcarth created a ceiling mural depicting theatrical muses for the newly renovated Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, originally the Globe Theatre, on 46th Street in Manhattan. Beginning in 1967, Melcarth worked on a two-year project of trompe l’oeil murals and sculpted busts for the rotunda at the luxurious Pierre Hotel that faces New York’s Central Park. The painted Italian landscape murals included mythological figures and couples viewed between illusionistic columns.

Edward Melcarth relocated to Venice in 1970 where he lived until his death from cancer at the age of fifty-nine in December of 1973. Throughout his career, he taught at the University of Louisville, Parsons School of Design, Columbia University, the University of Washington, and New York’s Art Students League. Melcarth received both a grant and the Childe Hassam purchase award from the Institute of Arts and Letters, Chicago Art Institute’s Altman Prize, and the National Academy of Design’s Thomas B. Clarke Award. 

Notes: Edward Melcarth’s papers, correspondence, and writings are housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/edward-melcarth-papers-7865

An article by museum curator Hunter Kissel entitled “Illuminating the Underrepresented: Presenting Edward Melcarth” can be found at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3cc8a11aef1d1735f564f7/t/5cf29f0ad328900001e55860/1559404302304/IlluminatingTheUnderrepresented.pdf

The bi-monthly literary and history magazine Gay & Lesbian Review has an interview between writer Taylor Lewandowski and painter Richard Taddei, a former student and friend of Melcarth, on its site: https://glreview.org/article/richard-taddei-on-his-mentor-edward-melcarth/

Ifti Nasim: “Stranded at This Point in the Galaxy”

Photographers Unknown, Stranded at This Point in the Galaxy

So much already exists in written words
all over the world, and so much more
is being written right now!
What should I read? What should I skip?
Just what should I try to comprehend?
There are a thousand different tongues in which
I do not know a single word.

With my limited means—and a dullard’s mind—-
I sit down at the night’s table,
turn on the moon’s lamp, and toil
to read strange scribbles.
The breeze of ignorance makes the pages fly.
I wish I could at least keep them together;
I wish I were at least a paperweight.

—-Ifti Nasim, Paperweight, Translation C.M. Naim

I have reached a strange stage in my life.
Here, there’s no comforting home,
no enemy,
no fear of loss or gain.
M heart is transfixed——perfectly balanced.
I know what happened in days passed
and what shall happen in coming days—-
my eyes have seen it all.
My pockets bulge with foreign coins,
but my heart is empty—-a beggar’s bowl.
My journeys have left me here,
stranded at this point in the galaxy
where my shadow splits before me
into a thousand different paths.

—-Ifti Nasim, Mid-Life Crisis, Translation C.M. Naim

Born at the industrial city of Faisalabad, Pakistan in September of 1946, Ifti Nasim was a gay Pakistani-American poet who co-founded Sangat, one of the earliest organization to support LBGTQ South Asian youths. This organization published Nasim’s 1994 “Narman”, an award-winning poetry collection, the first to express openly homosexual themes in the Urdu language. Nasim, who was fluent in three languages, served as president of the South Asian Performing Arts Council of America.

Born the middle child to a poor Pakistani family, Ifti Nasim had early dreams to be a Khathak classical dancer but also studied all the classic writings of both Urdu and Punjabi poets. Throughout his teens, he experienced ostracizing, bullying and loneliness as a gay youth, Nasim suffered a gunshot wound to his leg during a protest against martial law; this injury stifled his ability to continue dance lessons. He concentrated on his poetry and continued his studies at Labor’s Punjab Uiversity. After graduating with a degree in law, Nasim emigrated to the United States in 1969 to escape persecution as a gay man and to avoid an impending arranged marriage initiated by his father.

Initially staying at a YMCA center in New York City, Nasim experienced a complete change from the lifestyle he had as a gay man in Pakistan. He relocated to Detroit where he enrolled at Wayne State University, wrote poetry, and worked earning funds to enable his siblings to travel to the United States. In 1974, Nasim settled in Chicago where he discovered its vibrant gay nightlife. He went through the naturalization process, became a U.S. citizen and worked at the Bistro, a gay bar where he met Prem who later became his long-term partner.

In addition to a full-time position at Chicago’s Loeber Motors dealership, Ifti Nasim wrote poetry in English, Urdu and Punjabi as well as worked diligently as an activist. He focused his energy primarily on the immigrant and Muslim communities, as well as the South Asian queer communities. In 1986, Nasim co-founded, along with Viru Joshi, Sangat/Chicago (original name Trikone) at a time when frequent hate crimes made visibility as a queer person dangerous. Although Chicago boasted numerous gay bars and clubs, these were predominantly white and often unwelcoming to South Asians. Sangat created an unified community and a safe place for LBGTQ South Asians to gather in the city.

Nasim was also a regular columnist for the Weekly Pakistan News, writing long columns that unveiled the hypocrisies of some decent members of society. He also initiated his own successful radio talk show, often educating people during the 1980s about HIV/AIDS prevention. Much of Nasim’s time, however, was spent writing and publishing books of poems that dealt with the homosexual communities in Third World countries, an endeavor that earned him recognition as the first gay poet from Pakistan.

Ifti Nasim’s best known work is the 1994 “Narman”, the title taken from the  word meaning hermaphrodite in Persian. Immediately controversial in Pakistan, the book had to be distributed outside the main Pakistani literary channels. Despite this, “Narman” had a profound influence on younger Pakistani poets and formed a movement characterized by openness and emotional honesty regarding queer identity. In 2001, Nasim published “Myrmecophile”, a chapbook collection of poems which addressed queer trauma, taboo desire, and religious hypocrisy. His final collection was the 2005 “Abdoz”, a series of works that contemplated the mortality of life.

In 1993, Nasim became the first poet of a developing nation to read his work at the newly- built Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. Stricken by a sudden heart attack, Ifti Nasim died at the age of sixty-four in a Chicago hospital on the twenty-second of July in 2011. A tribute to his memory was held at Chicago’s Gerber/Hart Library, a repository of gay and lesbian history and culture.

Notes: Mrittika Ghosh authored an article for the Kojal literary magazine on Ifti Nasim’s “Myrmecophile”, a collection of work that covered two decades of Nasim’s life in Chicago: https://www.kajalmag.com/ifti-nasim-myrmecophile/

An audio interview between Ifti Nasim and Kareem Khubchandani for SAADA, a leading source for South Asian American history can be found at: https://www.saada.org/explore/archive/items/20200309-6038

The “Making Queer History” website has an excellent biographical article on Ifti Nasim, written by Marc Zinaman, that includes links to other sources: https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2021/8/28/ifti-nasim

Charles Ludlam: Film and Theater History

Photographer Unknown, “Charles Ludham and Ridiculous Theatrical Company”, 1970, Production of “Bluebeard”, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print 

Born at Northport, New York in April of 1943, Charles Ludlam was a prominent American actor, director and playwright known for his significant avant-garde contributions to Off-Broadway theater and his role in the development of gay and lesbian performance art. Ludlam also founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which became renowned for its innovative productions.

One of three children born to Joseph William Ludlam and Marjorie Braun, Charles Ludlam was raised in Greenlawn, a rural hamlet of Huntington, Long Island. Interested in theater from an early age despite his parents’ discouragement, he directed, produced and performed plays during his senior year in high school. Works by such playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Kan Kikuchi, and John August Strindberg were performed by local students in their “Students Repertory Theatre”, a small loft space in Northport’s Posey School of Dance. 

Ludlam studied at New York’s Hofstra College in Hempstead as an openly gay individual and received his Bachelor of Arts in Dramatic Literature in 1964. After settling in New York City’s Greenwich Village area, he joined the Playhouse of the Ridiculous in 1966. This theatrical company, under the direction of John Vaccaro, was founded the year before by actor and director Ronald Tavel. Inspired by Hungarian producer and dramatist Martin Esslin’s book “Theater of the Absurd”, Tavel’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous set aside naturalistic acting and realistic settings, employed a broad acting style and surrealistic stage settings, and introduced bawdy elements of both queer and camp performance to experimental theater.  

In 1967 at the age of twenty-four, Charles Ludlam decided to found his own theatrical group, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, for which he would act as producer, director and playwright until his death. Though sometimes on welfare, Ludham wrote at least one play a year and raised enough money to keep his company alive. Early shows moved from one venue to another, until the company found a permanent home in a former nightclub at One Sheridan Square in late 1967. Ludham’s company soon found an appreciative audience with such productions as “Conquest of the Universe/When Queens Collide” (1968) and “Bluebeard” (1970), an adaptation of Well’s 1896 “The Island of Dr. Moreau”. 

Ludlam’s works gradually became more structured plays that imitated a variety of sources from gothic novels and old movies to literary works by Shakespeare and operas by Richard Wagner. Using traditional approaches to comedy, these works were unconventional with humor but also conveyed serious undertones. Ludlam’s plays often contained sarcasm, cross-dressing, double-entendre, and melodramatics. He acted in many of his plays and was noted for his female roles. The only member of the theatrical company who surpassed Ludlam in the number of roles was his fellow Hofstra student and close friend Susan Carlson, also known as  Black-Eyed Susan, 

Over his career as a playwright, Charles Ludlam wrote twenty-nine theatrical plays for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. His best known work is the three-act 1984 “The Mystery of Irma Vep”, a satiric blend of theatrical, literary and film genres that included such works as “Penny Dreadful”, “Wuthering Heights” and Hitchcock’s 1940 “Rebecca”. Titled with an anagram of the word ‘vampire’, the play has only two actors of the same sex, who cross-dressing into different costumes, between them play eight roles, The two-hour show has a large number of special effects and props as well as thirty-five costume changes. Opening off-Broadway in Greenwich Village, “The Mystery of Irma Vep” featured Ludlam and Everett Quinton, Ludlam’s lover, in the lead roles; both actors won the 1985 Obie Award for Ensemble Performance. 

In film, Ludlam was involved in ten productions from 1971 to 1983. Among these were: his acting role in director James Bidgood’s 1971 experimental erotic art film “Pink Narcissus”; a role in German director and queer activist Rosa von Praunheim’s 1976 New York underground documentary “Underground and Emigrants”; screenplay and directorial work on his silent 1987 short “Museum of Wax”; a role in Jim McBride and Daniel Petrie Jr’s 1986 neo-noir romantic thriller “The Big Easy”; and a role in Andrew Horn’s 1983 tribute to old school Hollywood melodrama, “Doomed Love”. 

Highly regarded as an instructor, Charles Ludlam taught or staged productions at New York University, Yale, and Carnegie Mellon University. He was awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Ludlam won six Obie Awards over the course of his career and the 1986 Rosamund Gilder Award for distinguished achievement in theater. 

Charles Ludlam was diagnosed with AIDS in March of 1987 and died in May at the age of forty-four from pneumocysttis pneumonia (PCP) at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His obituary appeared on the front page of the “New York Times” newspaper; an essay on Ludlam’s life and art by American novelist and writer Andrew Holleran appeared in the gay-oriented newspaper “Christopher Street”. Charles Ludlam was interred at Saint Patrick’s Cemetery in Huntington, Suffolk County, New York.

Notes: Everett Quinton, Charles Ludlam’s lover, inherited the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. A January 2023 memorial article by Thomas Keith on the company and its history can be found at the American Theatre website: https://www.americantheatre.org/2023/01/30/everett-quinton-humble-hard-working-never-less-than-fabulous/

An excellent April 2013 article entitled “Your Primer on the Great Charles Ludlam” can be found on WordPress’s “Travalanche” site: https://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/on-charles-ludlam/

The WarholStars organization’s website has an article written by Gary Comenas on the history of Theater of the Ridiculous and its connections to Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam at: https://warholstars.org/ridiculous.html

The LiteraryWorld website has an article on Charles Ludlam and the theatrical productions of the Theater of the Ridiculous at: https://literaryworlds.coas.wmich.edu:7000/4034/

An Interview with Charles Ludlam with New York writer and queer theater scholar Don Shewey can be found at Shewey’s website: https://www.donshewey.com/theater_articles/charles_ludlam_CITA.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Charles Ludlam”, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Charles Ludlam, “Stage Blood”, 1974, Evergreen Theatre, Publicity Poster, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jack Robinson, “Charles Ludlam in Long Robe and Floral Headdress”, December 21 1970, Gelatin Silver Print, Jack Robinson, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Ludlam, “Big Hotel- A Farce”, 1968, Vintage Poster, Tambellini’s Gate Theater, Designer Jack Smith, 36 x 21 cm, Private Collection.jpg 

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Charles Ludlam”, circa 1970-1980, Gelatin Silver Print

 

Peter Adair: Film History

Peter Adair, Director and Cinematographer

Born at Santa Monica, California in November of 1943, Peter Adair was an award-winning American director and cinematographer. As a documentary film maker, he used the personal stories of ordinary people to record the progress of the gay liberation movement and the effects of the later AIDS epidemic. 

Peter Adair was the only son of three children born to John Adair, a distinguished anthropology professor at Cornell University who studied the Zuni and Navaho nations, and Casey Adair, editor for the literary journal “New Mexico Quarterly” and her husband’s many research publications. Peter Adair grew up in New Mexico where he was an outsider, participant and observer of the cultures his father was studying. His venture into making films began with the gift of a movie camera from his parents on his high school graduation.

In 1967 near the end of his academic studies at Antioch College, Adair completed his first major documentary, “Holy Ghost People”. Directed and narrated by Adair, the film documents the church service of a faith-healing and snake-handling Pentecostal community in Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Recognized by anthropologist Margaret Mead as being one of the best ethnographic films made, “Holy Ghost People” is used in anthropology and documentary film classes. 

After recognizing his gay sexual orientation, Peter Adair collaborated with his sister Nancy Adair and four other LBGTQ members of the Mariposa Film Group to direct his production of the 1977 “Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives”. This documentary intercuts interviews with twenty-six people from the United States, ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-seven, who speak of their experiences as gay men or lesbians. Each interviewee shared their experiences of ‘coming out’, falling in love, and their struggles against discrimination, prejudice and stereotypes. In production for five years with over two-hundred interview sessions, “Word is Out” was the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identity made by LBGTQ film makers; it was selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2022. 

Adair worked on a series of projects in 1984, the first of which was his directorial and production work on “Stopping History”, a film for the Public Broadcasting Service, which examined ethical questions centered on nuclear weapons. Documenting the nonviolent blockade at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where most nuclear U.S. nuclear weapons are made, the film asked viewers to consider nuclear war and its incurrable destruction. Later in 1984, Adair acted as consultant and did additional camerawork for Rob Epstein’s “The Times of Harvey Milk”. He also produced a series of tutorial videos for the Project Read adult literacy program of the San Francisco Public Library.

In September of 1984, Theatre Rhinoceros, a San Francisco-based theater company, presented “The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival”, a production that addressed the social impact of HIV/AIDS and the fears it generated on the LBGTQ community. Peter Adair and Rob Epstein collaborated as directors on a 1986 documentary film of the same name that became one of the first to examine the impact of AIDS on the arts community. Along with personal narrations by Adair and Epstein, excerpts from the original play were combined with interviews between the play’s creators and its performers to form a  hybrid of drama and documentation.

 After learning of his own positive HIV status, Adair wrote and directed the 1991 “Absolutely Positive”, a documentary that examined the uncertainty within which asymptomatic HIV positive people dwell. After interviewing over one-hundred people, Adair and his producer Janet Cole selected eleven people at different stages of the disease. “Absolutely Positive” contains the interviews of these eleven individuals and examines their lives both before and during their illness. In 1995, Adair collaborated with interactive product creator Haney Armstrong to produce an interactive legal drama-adventure game. “In the 1st Degree” was a CD-Rom in which the player examined  evidence, interviewed witnesses and presented the case at trial. Noted for its sequences, it became the second-place finalist in Computer Game Review’s 1995 Best FMV of the Year. 

In January of 1996, Peter Adair received San Francisco’s The Frameline Award, given to a person who had made a major contribution to LBGTQ representation in film, television or the media arts. Six months later, Adair died at the age of fifty-two from complications of AIDS in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. He was survived by his life partner Rudy Norton, his father John Adair, and sisters Margo and Nancy. Peter Adair was posthumously inducted into the San Francisco Rainbow Honor Walk in 2022. His papers are housed in the James C, Hormel LBGTQIA Center of the San Francisco Public Library.

Notes: The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) has a short article “Remembering Peter Adair” on its website: https://bampfa.org/event/remembering-peter-adair

An on-the-air June 1991 FreshAir interview between PBS host Terry Gross and Peter Adair concerning his HIV-positive status is archived at: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/filmmaker-peter-adair-being-hiv-positive

An article on the production of Peter Adair’s documentary “Absolutely Positive”, written by historian and digital storyteller Brendan McHugh, for Public Broadcasting Service’s station KQED can be found at: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13906624/absolutely-positive-hiv-aids-activism-peter-adair-doris-butler

Milestone Films has an excellent article on the background and production of Peter Adair and Rob Epstein’s “The AIDS Show” film at: https://milestonefilms.com/products/copy-of-common-threads-stories-from-the-quilt

Robert McAlmon: “The Possibility of All Things”

Photographers Unknown, The Possibily of All Things

Almost every night, Joyce and I met for apéritifs, and although he was working steadily on Ulysses, at least one night a week he was ready to stay out all night, and those nights he was never ready to go home at any hour. We talked of the way the free mind can understand the possibility of all things: necrophilia and other weird rites. We agreed in disliking mysticism, particularly the fake and sugared mysticism of many poets and writers. We spoke of what a strange man Robert Burton must have been to have compiled his Anatomy of Melancholy. and he didn’t know in the end a bit more about it than we did. Sir Thomas Browne, not to speak of Ezra Pound and Eliot and Moore and Shaw, we discovered, but sooner or later Mr. Joyce began reciting Dante in sonorous Italian. When that misty and intent look came upon his face and into his eye I knew that friend Joyce wasn’t going home till early morning. 

Wyndham Lewis arrived for a stay in Paris and he was a different man from the Lewis of London. He was free and easy and debonair. Indeed, too many Englishmen will do on the continent what it does not do to do in London. Lewis was intent upon going to the Picasso exhibition; he must meet Picasso and Braque and Derain, although these painters of Paris were cagey and suspicious about English painters of talent. Picasso at the time was doing his pneumatic nudes, which always made me want to stick a pin in them to see if they would deflate. 

Lewis was most gracious and jovial and instructed me with a constant flow of theories on abstraction and plastic values. It would not have done to let him know that I had heard most of what he was saying before, in New York. Somehow there was no wonder in Lewis’ discovery that the engineering demand of structures often give them an aesthetic value. The Egyptians, Greeks and Mayans seemed to have known that before Lewis.

Robert McAlmon, Don’t Be Common, Being Geniuses Together 1921-1927, McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A Self Portrait, 1962, Edited by Robert E. Knoll, University of Nebraska Press

Born at Clifton, Kansas in March of 1895, Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American modernist poet, novelist and publisher who, as an important expatriate in the 1920s, founded the Parisian publishing house Contact Editions. This avant-garde press published the works of such influential writers as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. 

The youngest of ten children born to traveling minister John Alexander McAlmon and Bessie Urquhart, Robert McAlmon grew up in several rural mid-western towns. In 1916, he studied briefly at the University of Minnesota before his 1918 enlistment with the United States Army Air Corps. Upon military discharge from his San Diego, California station, McAlmon studied intermittently at the University of Southern California. His first poems, inspired by his fellow Army Air Corps team members, were published in the March 1919 issue of “Poetry”.

After a brief stay in Chicago where he met Italian-American writer Emanuel Carnevali, McAlmon relocated in 1920 to New York City where he was hired as an art school’s nude model. He quickly became acquainted with Greenwich Village’s literary circle, including artist and poet Marsden Hartley with whom he formed a life-long friendship. Along with physician and writer William Carlos Williams, McAlone founded the literary magazine “Contact” in 1921. Although never financially successful in its short life, the magazine’s four issues published early works from such modernist writers as Hilda Dolittle, Glenway Wescott, Wallace Stevens and Mina Loy. 

On February 14th of 1921, Robert McAlmon entered into a marital arrangement with English writer Annie Winifred “Bryher” Ellerman, the heiress of a vast fortune and lover of Hilda Dolittle. This arrangement, which inspired much gossip, lasted four years and enabled Ellerman to receive control of her inheritance and gave McAlmon financial independence. In 1922, McAlmon moved to Paris where he founded the influential literary press Contact Editions. In addition to his own writings, McAlmon published Hemingway’s first work, “Three Stories and Ten Poems” (1923) and  Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans” (1925).  He also provided financial support to James Joyce and assisted in the revision and typing of the Penelope section of Joyce’s “Ulysses”. 

McAlmon published his first book of short stories, the 1922 “A Hasty Bunch”, with James Joyce’s printer Maurice Darantière in Dijon, France. Contact Editions published his second volume of short stories “Distinguished Air” (1925); two collections of poetry, “Portrait of a Generation” (1926) and “North America, Continent of Conjecture” (1929); and an experimental novel on a North Dakota prairie farm community, “Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period” (1924). Two collections of McAlmon’s poetry were printed through other presses: “Explorations” (1921) was published by London’s Egoist Press, and “Not Alone Lost” (1937) by New Directions in Connecticut. 

Robert McAlmon, who had openly stated his bisexuality, officially divorced Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1927. He closed Contact Editions and left Paris in 1929. McAlmon traveled over the next fifteen years, with visits to the United States, Mexico and Europe during which he drank heavily and, although he wrote, published little. McAlmon was a friend and a drinking buddy with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, whom he introduced to the spectacle of bullfighting. He knew artist Jean Cocteau, surrealist writer René Crevel, novelist Raymond Radiguet, surrealist poet Louis Aragon and many others from the parties, bars and cafés he attended. McAlmon’s closer ties, however, were with avant-garde painter Francis Picabia and modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi. 

After 1935, McAlmon wrote very little. He was interested in radical politics but his views were not supported by the expatriates in Paris. After the German occupation of France, McAlmon was trapped in Paris and eventually stricken with tuberculosis. In 1940, he was able to escaped France through Spain and returned to the United States where joined his brothers in El Paso, Texas. McAlmon sought treatment for his ailment in El Paso and worked with his brothers in a local surgical supply house.

Despite his many published works, Robert McAlmon died almost an unknown writer in his own country. He passed away, at the age of sixty, in February of 1956 at Desert Hot Springs, California. His body was interred at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the 1990s, the first American editions of “Village”, “Post-Adolescence”, and “Miss Knight and Others” were published by the University of New Mexico Press. McAlmon’s memoir “Being Geniuses Together”, first published 1938 in London, was reprinted by Doubleday, New York in 1968.  

Notes: The Internet Archive’s Open Library site has several books by Robert McAlmon that can be read online after free registration: https://openlibrary.org/search?q=robert+mcalmon&mode=everything

Top Insert Image: Berenice Abbott, “Robert McAlmon”, 1925-1930, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 19.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert McAlmon with Canadian Poet John Glassco and His Partner Graeme Taylor in Nice, France”, 1929, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Ernest Hemingway and Robert McAlmon, Ronda, Spain”, 1923, Ernst Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert McAlmon”, circa 1930s, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Robert Duncan: “It Was the Sound of Fire on the Hearth”

Photographers Unknown, Food for Fire, Food for Thought

      good wood
      that all fiery youth bust forth from winter,
         go to sleep in the poem.
      Who will remember thy green flame,
         thy dream’s amber?

Language obeyd flares tongues in obscure matter.

      We trace faces in clouds: they drift apart.
      Palaces of air. The sun dying down
         sets them on fire.

      Descry shadows on the flood from its dazzling mood,
      or at its shore read runes upon the sand
         from sea-spume.

This is what I wanted for the last poem.
A loosening of conventions and return to open form.

      Leonardo saw figures that were stains upon a wall
      Let the apparitions containd in the ground
         play as they will.

You have carried a branch of tomorrow into the room.
Its frangrance had awakend me. No. .

      It was the sound of a fire on the hearth
      Leapd up where you bankd it
      . . .sparks of delight. Now I return the thought

      to the red glow, that might-be-magical blood,
      palaces of heat in the fire’s mouth,

If you look you will see the salamander–

      to the very elements that attend us,
      fairies of the fire, the radiant crawling. .

That was a long time ago.
No. They were never really there,

      though once I saw–did I stare
      into the hear of desire burning
      and see a radiant man? like those
      fancy cities from fire into fire falling.

We are close enough to childhood, so easily purged
of whatever we thought we were to be.

      Flamey threads of firstness go out from your touch,

      flickers of unlikely heat
      at the edge of our belief bud forth.

Robert Duncan, Food for Fire, Food for Thought, October 1959, Poetry, Volume 95, Number 1

Born at Oakland, California in January of 1919, Robert Edward Duncan was an American poet and a follower of Hilda Doolittle, a modernist poet who, with Ezra Pound, co-founded the Imagist group of poets. Duncan featured prominently in the histories of pre-Stonewall gay culture, bohemian communities of the Beat Generation, and cultural movements of the 1960s.

Born the tenth child of Edward Howard Duncan and Marguerite Pearl Wesley, Robert Duncan was adopted after the death of his mother by Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes. The prominent architect and his wife were a Theosophist family who embraced the spiritual teachings of Western esotericism as founded by Russian-American mystic and writer Helena Blavatsky. Robert Duncan grew up in a stable environment with new parents interested in both the occult and social community projects.

Encouraged by an English high school teacher, Duncan chose poetry as a vocation while still in his teens. After the death of Edwin Symmes in 1936, he began his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. While in his sophomore year, Duncan met graduate student Neo Fahs and entered into his first recorded homosexual relationship that lasted until 1940. While living in New York City with Fahs, he met many literary figures including playwright Arthur Miller and French-born essayist and writer Anaïs Nin.

During 1938, Robert Duncan briefly attended North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, an experimental educational project that became known for its artists and post-modernist poets. When he was drafted for military service in 1941, Duncan declared his homosexuality and was discharged. He became a prominent figure in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture with his 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society” published in editor and publisher Dwight Macdonald’s “Politics”, an outspoken magazine with articles by such notables as George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, and Mary McCarthy.

Duncan relocated to San Francisco in 1945 where he became friends with poets Helen Adam and Kenneth Rexroth as well as painter Lyn Brockway. He returned to U.C. Berkeley where he studied Medieval and Renaissance literature, eventually becoming a shamanistic figure in the artistic and poetry circles of San Francisco. Duncan’s first book, “Heavenly City Earthly City”, a collection of verse that reflected his admiration for the metaphysical work of British poet George Barker, was published by writer and physicist Bernard Porter’s newly founded Ben Porter Books in 1947.

In 1950, Robert Duncan met painter and collagist Jess Collins and began a relationship that would last thirty-seven years until Duncan’s death. They took marriage vows and settled in a historic Victorian home in San Francisco’s Mission District. Duncan began to publish his work regularly in the early 1950s and taught at Black Mountain College during 1956. His artistic and critical success occurred in the 1960s with the publishing of three volumes of poetic work: “Opening the Field” in 1960, the 1964 “Roots and Branches”, and “Bending the Bow” in 1968.

After the publication of his “Bending the Bow”, Duncan vowed not to publish another major collection for fifteen years. In 1984, his next major work “Ground Work I: Before the War” won the National Poetry Award. The concluding volume of Duncan’s poems, “Ground Work II: In the Dark”, taken as a whole was proposed by him in 1968 and later published in 1987.

Robert Duncan’s poetry is one of process not conclusion. It is considered Modernist for his inclination towards the impersonal, mythic and canonical styles; however, it is also seen as Romantic due to its organic, lyric and forward-wandering journey. Beginning in the 1960s, Duncan’s work was influenced by both  “projective verse”, poetry that is shaped by the rhythms of the poet’s breath, and “composition by field”, the use of the page as a field of language beyond traditional margins and spacing. His work includes short lyrical poems and recurring sequences of prose poems, both of which draw inspiration from the poetic work of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and particularly that of modernist Charles John Olson and the Black Mountain School of poetry.

One of the most influential of the postwar American poets, Robert Duncan died in San Francisco in 1988 after a long battle with kidney disease. He was survived by his partner Jess Collins who died in January of 2004 at the age of eighty. Duncan’s papers are housed at the State University of New York-Buffalo and the Special Collections and Archives of Kent State University.

“There is a natural mystery in poetry. We do not understand all that we render up to understanding. . . I study what I write as I study out any mystery. I work at language as a spring of water works at the rock, to find a course, and so, blindly. In this I am not a maker of things, but, if maker, a maker of a way. For the way is itself.”—Robert Duncan, Notebook published in Donald Allen’s “The New American Poetry: 1945-1960”, First Edition, 1960, Grove Press, New York

Notes: The Archives of American Art has an online copy available for public viewing of Robert Duncan and Jess Collins’s scrapbook for Patricia Jordan at: https://www.aaa.si.edu/uv/index.html?manifest=https://www.aaa.si.edu/manifest/edanmdm:AAADCD_item_11139&c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&config=uv-config.json&locales=en-GB:English%20(GB)

Second Insert Image: Original Cover for Robert Duncan’s “Roots and Branches”, 1964, New Directions Publishing, New York

Third Insert Image: Jess Collins, Original Collage Illustration for Robert Duncan’s “The Opening of the Field”, 1960, Private Collection 

Fourth Insert Image: Robert Duncan, “Bending the Bow”, 1968, 1st Edition, Publisher New Directions, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Jonathan Williams, “Robert Duncan”, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Gilbert Lewis

The Portraits of Gilbert Lewis

Born at Hampton, Virginia in September of 1945, Gilbert Braddy Lewis was an American artist and art therapist. Over a span of five decades, he created portraits of friends and acquaintances, a collection of work that included an intimate series that represented the gay male experience in  Philadelphia’s LBGTQ community.  

Gilbert Lewis began his art training at the early age of seven and pursued the arts throughout his teenage years. After relocating to Philadelphia at the age of eighteen, he began studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under such noted painters as Walter Stuempfig, Franklin Watkins, Hobson Pittman, and printmaker and muralist Morris Blackburn. Lewis was committed to his training and became particularly focused on the careful observation and life drawing taught in the curriculum of Thomas Eakins. After completing his certificate program in 1967, Lewis was awarded the eminent Cresson Traveling Scholarship, a two-year scholarship which enabled him to travel to Italy and study the Sienese and Florentine Renaissance artists.

Upon his return to the United States, Lewis enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1974. Lewis received his Masters Creative Arts Therapy degree at Philadelphia’s Hahnemann University in 1978. He obtained a position as art therapist at the Manchester House Nursing Center in Medea, Pennsylvania where he worked from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The animated qualities in Lewis’s portraits of the seniors with whom he worked is evidence of the warm relationships he established with the residents. 

Fascinated by youth and aging, Gilbert Lewis’s work focused on the beginning and the end of adulthood. While working at Manchester House during the day, he was creating gouache, watercolor, charcoal and graphite portraits of young men in the city at night. These portraits express Lewis’s attentiveness to convey the wide eyed awkwardness of those young men who sought both guidance and trust in their artistic relationship with him. Each sitter was encouraged to dress and pose themselves in a way that they would feel most comfortable. Frequent conversations were normal between artist and sitter; many of his models would bring their own music choices to the studio.

Lewis painted models every night from Monday to Friday. His models, often tall and slender, were usually portrayed directly looking at the viewer with a slightly awkward vulnerability. Using a soft color palette, Lewis would sometimes paint his figures against solidly-colored backgrounds. Not overly concerned with realism, Lewis was drawn towards the ethnographic approach to the detail and the sense of longing found in American frontier painter George Catlin’s depictions of the indigenous peoples on the Great Plains of the 1830s.

Gilbert Lewis taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s certificate and continuing education programs. He also supported himself throughout his entire career by working at Philadelphia’s art supply stores, including Blick Art Materials, South Street Art Supply, and Pearl Art and Craft Supply. Gilbert Lewis died at the age of seventy-eight on the seventh of December in 2023 at the Belvedere nursing home in Chester, Pennsylvania, from complications caused by Alzheimer’s disease.

Gilbert Lewis’s first solo exhibition was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s Peale House Gallery in 1981. He had numerous solo exhibitions in Philadelphia, among which were the Rosenfeld and Noel Butcher galleries. His largest exhibition, “Becoming Men: Portrait Paintings by Gilbert Lewis”, was presented in 2004 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. Lewis’s work can be found in the permanent collections at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey.

“One of my motivations in painting has been to celebrate the beginning of adulthood for the young and the final period of life for the old,” Gilbert observes. “What struck me is that both young men and the old are ignored by society. Despite our ostensible focus on youth, young men are in a sort of nether world, no longer teenagers and yet not full adults. They’re in transition with no established identify and no real place in society.” —Gilbert Lewis

Notes: The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art has a short article written by Christian Bain entitled “Becoming Men: Portrait Paintings by Gilbert Lewis” in which Lewis discusses his work process and motivations for painting: https://leslielohman.org/exhibitions/becoming-men-portrait-paintings-by-gilbert-lewis

The WilliamWay LBGT Community Center in Philadelphia has a collection of paintings by Gilbert Lewis on its site located at: https://www.waygay.org/gilbert-lewis-1 

Anthony Rullo was a portrait model who posed at least sixty times for Gilbert Lewis between 1986 and 1996. Rullo’s memories of Lewis and his mentorship are contained in a Visual Arts article by Peter Crimmins for Philadelphia’s WHYY newsletter: https://whyy.org/articles/gilbert-lewis-remembered-as-artist-mentor-to-phillys-gay-80s/

Second Insert Image: Gilbert Lewis, “Nude- Composition in Red and Green”, January 1985, Gouache on Board, 111.8 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gilbert Lewis, “Seated Man with Shell”, circa 2020, Pastel on Paper, Private Collection 

Bottom Insert Image: Gilbert Lewis, Untitled (Young Man Standing with Legs Spread), 1987, Gouache on Paper, 76.2 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

Christopher Cox: “A Key West Companion”

 

Photographers Unknown, A Key West Companion

I had met Doris on an earlier trip. She approached me in the supermarket and told me to put back the papayas I’d piled into the shopping basket. “Come over and pick them off the ground outside my fence. I’ll be glad to get rid of them. Take some sapodillas too.” Now she appeared behind the wrought-iron fence with a mild hello, released a tabby cat from her arms, and led me down a narrow brick path into the cool dark garden where hundreds of parakeets and canaries fluttered in several mesh-covered gazebos, each chirping in a different key. 

Doris is a wiry woman with white hair who must be in her mid-eighties. She was wearing a turquoise artist’s smock with both the sleeves torn off at the shoulders. Her eyes were a similar blue. “I’ve been here I don’t know how long,” she said. “I came from South Carolina after World War II. I was a WAVE.” Since then she has been involved in various jobs and projects around the island, mostly in connection with the tourist trade. At present she’s creating a Key West historical museum in her back yard. 

In the center of the garden Doris had built an Indian chickee, a hut made of thatch and berm (local mud) and encircled by a jagged stick fence. “The abode of the southeast Indians,” she announced. “I’m building a miniature in one of my bungalows, with little Indians and itty bitty pigs turning on spits. It’s for my Indian exhibit.”

There are several bungalows around the garden, each of which will house an exhibit based on a different period of Key West history. But the Indian comes first. Doris pointed to the “historically accurate” piles of coral rock that were arranged near the Indian chickee, then to a huge gooseberry tree that shaded the entire garden. “I grew this tree from two seeds I brought back from Katherine Mansfield’s house in the South of France.” she said. “Mouton, Mentone—I don’t remember the name. Don’t ask me any questions; it’s so long ago. All I know is that it’s never produced gooses or berries.” She laughed at her own joke and then stopped for a moment to perk up the purple orchids, vermilion and staghorn fern that grew on the dark trunk of the tree. 

Christopher Cox, The Indians in Doris’s Garden, A Seaport Town, A Key West Companion, 1983, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born at Gadsden, Alabama in August of 1949, Christopher Cox, birth name Howard Raymond Cox Jr., was an author, editor, director and producer. Along with his position as senior editor of Ballantine Books, he is known for his collaboration within The Violet Quill, a group of seven gay male writers whose work established gay writing as a literary movement. 

One of four children born to prominent banker Howard Cox and Dorothy Trusler, Christopher Cox received his elementary education at  the local Emma Sanson High School. In 1966 at the age of sixteen, Cox was given a summer job in Washington D.C. as a page for Alabama Senator John Sparkman. After his high school graduation, he returned the following summer season to work for Alabama Representatives George Andrews and Armistead Selden. Cox attended the University of Alabama for two years befor moving to New York for a possible career in the  theater.

In the fall of 1969, Cox studied acting at director Herbert Berghof and actress Uta Hagen’s HB Studio in New York City. His first role was as understudy for the Mute in a production of “The Fantasticks”. Using Christopher Cox as his professional name, he performed, directed and wrote both plays and lyrics. Cox was the director of the New Play Series and the Writers Workshop at the Joseph Jefferson Theatre Company for which he produced a dozen works between 1974 and 1976. Cox performed during the 1970s in both Off-Broadway and Broadway productions, including Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona”. During the 1980s, he changed his focus to writing, editing and photography. 

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Christopher Cox was affiliated with the Violet Quill, also known as the Lavender Quill. This group of seven writers are regarded as one of the strongest collective voices of the gay male experience in the post-Stonewall era. Cox, Robert Ferro, Andrew Holleran, Michael Grumley, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore met several times between 1975 and 1981 to read aloud and discuss their works in progress. The agenda of the Violet Quill also included working together to promote the recognition, acceptance and publication of gay literature beyond the boundaries of their own community. 

As a writer, Cox’s memories of Alabama and its people appeared regularly as central themes in his stories. Significant events in his life, such as the suicide death of his uncle Ray in 1956 and his mother’s death from cancer in 1975, became focal points for his writing. From March of 1975 to 1977, Cox served as secretary to composer Virgil Thompson for whom he arranged and catalogued correspondence and music manuscripts before their transfer to Yale University. This position gave Cox access to Thompson’s circle of people as well as his neighbors in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, which included such notables as Dylan Thomas, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Miller and Robert Mapplethorpe. Cox’s 1978 video piece “Neurotic Moon” is a semi-autobiographic work that describes his role as secretary putting together pieces of a famous composer’s life. 

In the 1980s, Christopher Cox worked for publishing firms, most notably E.P. Dutton and Ballantine. He wrote freelance articles and reviews for several papers and magazines, including New York City’s weekly alternative “Soho Weekly News” during its run from 1973 to 1982. Cox published his “A Key West Companion” through St. Martin’s Press in 1983 and, in 1987, his monograph on photographer Dorothea Lange through the fine art photography periodical Aperture. 

In the spring of 1986, Cox met his lifetime partner William R. Olander, an art historian, critic, and curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.. Christopher Cox died in New York from AIDS-related complications on September 7, 1990 at the age of forty-one. His death was preceded by the death of William Olander, also from AIDS-related complications, on March 18, 1989 at the age of thirty-five.

Notes: After internships at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art, William “Bill”Olander held the position of curator of modern art at the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin College from 1979 to 1984. He became the Allen Museum’s acting director for his last two years. The co-founder of the Visual AIDS art project, Olander was known for his work with ACT UP/ NY (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, New York).

Both Christopher Cox and William Olander’s writings, personal papers and correspondence files are contained in the Yale Collection of American Literature Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The collection overview for this material can be found at: https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/caoSearch/catalog/cty-br_beinecke-coxc#summary

The Aperture Foundation’s “Dorothy Lange: Masters of Photography, No. 5”, which contains Christopher Cox’s essay on Lange and forty-three black and white images by Lange, can be found in its entirety on the (SCRIBD) website at: https://www.scribd.com/document/514781915/Aperture-Masters-of-Photography-Linda-Gordon-Dorothea-Lange-Dorothea-Lange-Aperture-2014

Second insert Image: Christopher Cox, “A Key West Companion”, January 1, 1983, Paperback Edition, St. Martin’s Press, New York City

Third Insert Image: “Dorothea Lange: Masters of Photography, No. 5”, 1987, Essay by Christopher Cox, 43 Black and White Images by Lange, Aperture Foundation, Millerton, New York

Danny Fitzgerald: Les Demi Dieux

The Photography of Danny Fitzgerald: Les Demi Dieux

Born in the Brooklyn, New York area of Carroll Gardens in 1921, Danny Fitzgerald was an American photographer who produced male nude physique photography between 1958 and 1968. The photographs were produced and marketed by Fitzgerald and his partner, Richard Bennett, under the name “Les Demi Dieux (The Demigods)”.

Born to first-generation Italian-Irish parents, Fitzgerald developed a love for art and film at a very young age. Although he would later travel throughout the world with his camera and his partner, Fitzgerald always considered the working-class Italian-American neighborhood of Carroll Gardens as home and the wellspring for many of his photographs. 

Danny Fitzgerald did not seriously considered photography as a possible profession until he was in his thirties. His first series of photographs were of the young bodybuilders at the Abe Goldberg Empire Health and Studio, a second-floor loft gymnasium in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where top bodybuilders of the period would train. Both a physically small and deeply private person, Fitzgerald gained the confidence of these men through asking for assistance with his own workout and sparring as their training partner. 

Fitzgerald’s early images were standard compositions with models presented in bikini trunks or posing straps. These photographs, processed by Fitzgerald in his own studio, were initially sold to private collectors. Later marketed under the pseudonym “Les Demi Dieux”, these posed male images were regularly published on the covers and pages of magazines printed by Canadian bodybuilder and entrepreneur Josef Weider. Fitzgerald’s male photos appeared in such popular publications as “Demi Gods”, “The Young Physique”, “Muscles a Go-Go”, and the publisher’s compilation volume “Era” that recognized the best photographers of the 1960s.

Now in his forties during the 1960s, Danny Fitzgerald met bodybuilder Richard Bennett who would become his partner, primary model and collaborator in the photographic process. With Bennett at his side, he returned to Carroll Gardens and began photographing the Italian-American gangs, known as “The South Brooklyn Boys”, as they gathered on the streets. It was at this time that Fitzgerald’s work shifted from standard ‘beefcake photography’ to grittier, realistic documentation of the Brooklyn youth culture. 

Influenced by twentieth-century art and film, Fitzgerald began to produce images that were free of the contrivance and overworked poses of standard physique photography. His nudes, presented as portraits set in landscapes or cityscapes, were given a larger context that invited aesthetic discussion. Inspired by the modern artists around him, Fitzgerald employed cinematographic techniques in his images, often placing compositions off-center and dramatizing his subject with the light and shadow contrast technique of chiaroscuro. His disciplined approach towards precise focus, clarity and vivid tonal range displayed Fitzgerald’s meticulous attention to the lighting, lenses, and camera settings.

Danny Fitzgerald’s work was little seen during his lifetime after he broke from the clichés of the beefcake genre. He died in 2000 at the age of seventy-nine without having exhibited his work in a gallery setting. In October of 2013, Berlin’s Bruno Gmünder Verlag published “Brooklynn Boys: Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux”, a collection of the documentary work he had shot in Carroll Gardens. On the twelfth of December in 2013, a posthumous public exhibition of Fitzgerald’s images was held at the Steven Kasher Gallery on New York City’s Second Avenue. The opening and book signing was attended by Fitzgerald’s longtime partner Richard Bennett. 

Notes: Abraham Goldberg was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in November of 1924.  After his service in the army during World War Two, Goldberg  opened his second-floor Manhattan gymnasium, Empire Health and Studio, at 80 Clinton Street in 1950. A fitness trainer and bodybuilder, he appeared on the covers of such magazines as “Your Physique” and “Santé et Force”. Abe Goldberg died in December of 2002 at the age of seventy-eight.

Born in Montreal in November of 1919, Josef (Joe) Weider was a Canadian bodybuilder and co-founder of the International Federation of BodyBuilders (IFBB). He published the first issue of “Your Physique” magazine in 1940 and designed numerous training courses beginning in the 1950s. Weider was the creator of such contests as Mr. Olympia, Ms. Olympia and the Masters Olympia. He founded several major American fitness magazines in the 1980s including “Men’s Fitness”. Josef Weider died in March of 2013 at the age of ninety-three, He was inducted into the International Sports Hall of Fame in 2014. 

The Steven Kasher Gallery is located at 166 Second Avenue, 3A, New York, New York. (Appointments only). The gallery can be reached through 9179226861 or steve@stevenkasher.com

Top Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, Untitled (Demi-Dieux Model), 1960, Gelatin Silver Print on Double Weight Paper 12, 12.5 x 10 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, “Johnny, New York”, 1963, Gelatin Silver Print, Printed 2013 Steven Kasher Gallery, Edition of 10, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, “Richard Bennett”, circa 1960s, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection 

Bottom Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, “Swim Hole, New York”, 1964, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Dario Bellezza: “Crazed, Crazed for Love”

 

Photographers Unknown, Crazed, Crazed for Love

For Pier Vittorio Tondelli

At night we lose sight of the Tiber.
The wind forces open your honeyed
mouth; I taste firsthand
the languid roses of your springtime.

The quick pace of a police officer
perhaps young and willing, or maybe
elderly who gropes for the stairs
confounds the memories and the sky
goes dark–

Crazed, crazed for love, to love
thresholds oblivious and rabid for trade
where I enter without looking for the gloom
within, muted lover, I shout
to get through the days, arrived
midway through life and sated,
but still unknown to myself
restless, high-wired for sex –
inclined to abandon personal grievance,
to abjure, repudiate the celestial spheres
of nightly idleness or of infected Narcissus.
I’ll trample History
out of dishonor or delight.

Dario Bellezza, Crazed, crazed for love, Snakewoman, Translated in 2025 from the Italian by Peter Covino

Born at Rome in September of 1944, Dario Bellezza was Italy’s first openly gay major prizewinning poet, author and playwright. He is considered to be among the best poets of the second half of the twentieth-century due to the veritable variety of his work from epigrams and brash love-lyrics to unfaltering political chronicles.

Bellezza’s elementary education was at Rome’s classical lyceum from which he graduated in 1962. His education led to writing for several Italian literary and poetry magazines, including the 1967-1968 journal “Carte Segrete (Secret Cards)” dedicated to avant-garde and contemporary literature, art and thought. Bellezza began his rise to prominence in the 1960s through his lifelong collaboration with the magazine “Nuovi Argomenti (New Subjects)”, a literary magazine founded in 1953 by Alberto Moravia.

Through his association with literary critic and writer Enzo Siciliano, Dario Bellezza entered the intellectual world of mid-1960s Rome, at a time when Italy was undergoing convulsive ideological confrontations in its culture and politics. Those writers who primarily influenced his work included Italian poet Sandro Penna, French novelist and playwright Jean Genet, symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud whose entire poetic works  would later be translated into Italian by Bellezza, and Elsa Morante, poet, novelist and wife to Alberto Moravia.

Bellezza’s first published prose work was the 1970 “L’innocenza (Innocence)”, a dark partially-autobiographical story of the protagonist Nino, who after recognizing his own homosexuality, chose condemnation rather than acceptance. In 1971, Bellezza’s first volume of poetry “Invettive e Licenze (Invectives and Licenses)” was published by the Milan press Garzanti. Noted for its technical precision, the autobiographically-inspired poems depicted people overwhelmed by bitterness, guilt, scandal, and shame. 

Dario Bellezza’s debut poetry volume was praised by poet, film director and playwright  Pier Paolo Pasolini, prominent in the Roman intellectual scene and a major figure in European cinema and literature. Bellezza was very grateful for Pasolini’s affection and support for his work. Upset and angry at his friend’s death, Bellezza wrote the 1981 biographical essay “Morte di Pasolini” in response to the November 1975 brutal kidnapping, torture, and murder of Pasolini in the Roman coastal neighborhood of Ostia. This was followed three years later by a second work on Pasolini, “Turbamento (Disturbance)”.

In 1983, Bellezza published “io (me)”, a collection of autobiographical poems that described his everyday life and the desperation of his loves. Seeing himself as a highly educated bourgeois man and homosexual bigot, Bellezza suffered from insomnia that he felt was due to feelings of guilt as well as the many contradictions that struggled within him. The difficulty of a secret and clandestine homosexual life in Rome was a predominant topic in both his poetic and prose work. Bellezza cites the systematic refusal of the self as the only salvation from homosexuality in his 1972 “Lettere da Sodoma (Letters from Sodom)”,

Over his twenty-five year career as a writer, Dario Bellezza published more than twenty books, including eight full-length poetry collections, eight novels, two theater plays, and translations from the French. He received the 1976 Viareggio Prize, Italy’s prestigious literary award, for his 1976 poetry volume “Morte Segreta (Secret Death)”. In 1994, Bellezza received the Montale Prize for his poetic work “L’avversario (The Adversary)” and the Fondi la Postora Prize for his play “Ordalia della Croce (Ordeal of the Cross)”

Known for his candid exploration of homosexuality and its complexities in the modern world, Dario Bellezza, in the midst of writing a book about his struggle with AIDS, died a premature death related to complications from AIDS on the last day of March in 1995. He is interred at Campo Cestio (Cimitero Acattolico), Rome, Lazio, Italy.

Notes: The Poetry Foundation has a May 2025 article on Dario Bellezza written by essayist and poet Daniel Felsenthal, entitled “Drink Me, Lick Me Even” at its online site: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1679372/drink-me-lick-me-even

The online literary site Asymptote has two poems by Dario Bellezza translated by University of Rhode Island Associate Professor Peter Covino: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/dario-bellezza-what-sex-is-death/

An obituary on Dario Bellezza written by James Kirkup for the online “Independent” news magazine can be located at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dario-bellezza-1303484.html 

There is a collection of Dario Bellezza’s poetry, translated by Italian literature researcher Luca Baldoni, in Volume 1 of the 2006 Italian Poetry Review available as a PDF  at Academie.edu: https://www.academia.edu/44358397/Dario_Bellezza_Selection_of_Poems_Translated_into_English

Top Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Second Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Morte di Pasolini”, January 1, 1981, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore , Milan, Italy

Third Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Addio Amori, Addio Cuori”, January 1, 1996, Fermenti Editrice , Rome, Italy

Bottom Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Hervé Guibert

The Photography of Hervé Guibert

Born at Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. The author of two-dozen published works, he wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion through a mixture of diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Both his writings and photography were closely linked to his private life. The subjects of Guibert’s writings often became his friends; those whom he loved were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.

Guibert’s photographic oeuvre contains interior scenes and landscapes as well as portraits of family, friends and lovers. He worked in black and white with tones drawn to soft grays. Photographs of Guibert’s immediate surroundings, his bookcase or desk, were created with the same intensity as photographs of nudes in his bed. His work is both restrained and subtle, created more for his person or close friends rather than public exposure. Although most of his work remains elusive, never having been exhibited or published, those images that have appeared are cool, confident and emotionally warm.

Hervé Guibert was born into a conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and his wife, a former teacher. He relocated to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, Guibert  entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”, a glossy women’s magazine. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”. 

In 1978, Guibert was hired as a photography critic for France’s evening newspaper “Le Monde”. He successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume, “Suzanne and Louise”, containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of mini-essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires.

In 1982, Hervé Guibert completed his “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”. This collection of short stories,  published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris, centered on a singular character’s life over a period of three years. He shared the Best Screenplay César Award in 1984 for a collaborative work with opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau on the 1983 film “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.

Guibert was granted in 1987 a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert received a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began to record in his writings what would be the remainder of his life. He was the long-time friend of both Christine and her partner, film director Thierry Jouno, considered the man in Guibert’s life. Guibert married Christine to ensure that his royalty income would pass to her and her two children with Jouno.

In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his earlier intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. He revealed his HIV status in his 1990 real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. Following the release of this novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances.

Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his autumn 1991 hospitalization and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991.

Notes: An excellent article on Hervé Guibert’s 1981 essay volume “Ghost Image” can be found on British photographer Felix Pilgrim’s site: https://www.felixpilgrim.com/blog-1/herve-guiberts-ghost-image

The contemporary Vienna gallery Felix Gaudlitz, in collaboration with Attilia Fattori Franchini, organized a 2020 exhibition of Hervé Guibert’s photographic work entitled “…of lovers, time, and death”. The gallery’s article with several of Guibert’s photographs can be found at: https://felixgaudlitz.com/exhibitions/herve-guibert-of-lovers-time-and-death/

Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno

A more extensive biographical article on Hervé Guibert, with additional links, can be found in this blog’s November 2024 archive: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2024/11/18/hevre-guibert-he-who-wished-to-be-master-of-the-truth/

Top Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Self Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.7 x 30.2 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Poet Eugène Savitzkaya, New Year’s Eve, Rio nell’Elba, Italy”, 1984, Gelatin Silver Print, Semiotext(e)

Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Christine”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.8 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Thierry Juono, Hotel Gellért, Gesellschaft”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print

CAConrad: “Be the Storm Love Places in Someone’s Home”

Photographers Unknown, The Storm Love Places in Someone’s Home

            I do not take any
           calls except from
          the century we are in
when there is no bible in my hotel room
 it makes me sad to have no place to put
     my filthy poems for future guests
      it is important to let them know
everyone should bum with abandon as soon as the heat is available
 be a self-styled alarm clock no one can shut off
   be the storm Love places in someone’s home
         are you sure we can handle this
          because I am absolutely certain
           c’mon wind knock us around
             we are a tide that cures ills
               look at us in the mirror
       as soon as the invented language enters
      us something else will vibrate in our skin
     opening door with teeth of the future to
   the place where we let the freer feeling go
when you told me you had been looking for me
        we pressed through every
       invisible barrier between us
     I watched you gently let the gods
   know you are ready to win the lottery
        there were people from the
           19th century alive in my
            lifetime many years ago
              I met some of them
            they are all gone now
             as we hold on to
             the side of one
           another howling down
           the velocity of seconds

CAConrad, Acclimating to Discomfort of the System Breaking Beneath Us, Amanda Paradise, 2021, Wave Books

Born in Topeka, Kansas in January of 1966, CAConrad is an American poet and professor currently teaching poetry at New York’s Columbia University and the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Having worked with the processes of poetry and rituals since 1975, CAConrad is the originator of the poetic format known as “(Soma)tics”, a meditative writing exercise that emphasizes personal perception and experience. 

The child of a Vietnam War veteran and his wife, CAConrad’s early years were spent in the small factory town of Boyertown, Pennsylvania where bullying often occurred. CAConrad began writing poetry while in high school during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a time in which the AIDS epidemic emerged and friends began dying. Placing poetry as the focus of his life, CAConrad relocated to the city of Philadelphia in 1984  to live openly in a queer neighborhood. 

In Philadelphia, CAConrad began a member of its poetry community and met such writers as Etheridge Knight and Sonia Sanches, both important members of the Black Art Movement,  poet and performer Essex Hemphill, and poet and essayist Gil Ott, who founded Philadelphia’s Singing Horse Press. Other influences on CAConrad’s work include those works by poets Emily Dickinson and Audra Lorde, poet and novelist Eileen Myles, narrative poet Alice Notley, and writer Will Alexander who later became a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. 

In 2005, CAConrad began writing poetry in the  (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual format, a personal process of writing focused on one’s engagement in the present moment. The first publication of CAConrad’s poetry was the 2006 “Deviant Propulsion” printed through Soft Skull Press. The poems in this collection examined the repression inflicted on queer culture by society and the elimination of the fear produced by that repression. To date, CAConrad has published seven collections of poetry. Among these are the 2017 “While Standing in Line for Death”, winner of a 2018 Lambda Book Award, and the 2021 “Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, a 2022 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award winner. 

CAConrad appeared as Jeremiah in the 2015 short film “Boyland”,  directed by Gabe Rubin and Felix Bernstein for the Brooklyn Film Festival. CAConrad was also approached by directors Belinda Schmid and David Cranstoun Welch, both who had seen the poet’s performances in New York and published works, for the production of a documentary. The resulting film “The Book of Conrad”, released in 2016 by Delinquent Films, examined CAConrad’s life and work as well as the horrific murder in Tennessee of his boyfriend Mark Holmes, known as Earth. In 2018, CAConrad and poet Eileen Myles read their work in filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s 2018 short resistance-documentary “I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead”, a montage of photos overlaid with poetry and music.

“Felix Bernstein interviewed me for The New Museum and he asked me what philosophy has to do with my work. I told him I believe poetry is strong enough. The power of poetry has not failed me like it has failed some poets in recent decades who hoist philosophy to buttress the poem. It is misogynistic to say poetry is too feminine, too weak, needs a man’s ideas to move forward. Love philosophy–go ahead, I am not the least bit anti-intellectual; I simply do not need philosophy to make poetry appear more masculine. Sigmund Freud said, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” Not philosopher, but poet. And you can have whatever feelings you want about Freud but no one can disagree that he changed how we view the landscape of human emotion and the origins of feeling. “Everywhere I go” is bold. It is direct and from a man who was as careful with his words as a poet.”  —CAConrad, September 10, 2013 Interview with Christopher Soto, The LAMBDA Literary Review

Notes: The Poetry Foundation has an April 2020 essay article written by CAConrad entitled “Sin Bug: AIDS, Poetry, and Queer Resilience in Philadelphia” which recounts the poet’s life experiences in that city from 1982 during the AIDS epidemic that led to the deaths of many of his close friends. The article can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/83869/sin-bug-aids-poetry-and-queer-resilience-in-philadelphia

The Poetry Foundation also has a selection of CAConrad’s poems as well as several podcasts produced by the poet which include group discussions and readings from CAConrad’s 2024 “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-a-conrad

The Lambda Literary online site has a September 2015 interview between CAConrad and Christopher Soto that discussed the film “The Book of Conrad” and the poet’s belief in the power of poetry as a healing ritual: https://lambdaliteraryreview.org/2015/09/ca-conrad-on-the-film-the-book-of-conrad-and-his-life-in-poetry/  

Rachel Zucker of the Commonplace Podcast has an interview with CAConrad that discusses the poet’s life, writings and the (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals at: https://commonplace.today/commonplace-podcast/episode-49-caconrad

For those interested, Delinquent Films’s 2016 “The Book of Conrad”, directed by Schmid and Welch, is available for rental or purchase on Amazon Prime. Filmmaker Matthew Thompson’s short film for the 2025 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival presents CAConrad reading his poem “Golden in the Morning Crane Our Necks”. The film is available for viewing at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation’s site: https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/golden-in-the-morning-crane-our-necks

Top Insert Image: Matthew Thompson, “CAConrad”, 1993, Gelatin Silver Print, The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation

Second Insert Image: CAConrad, “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”, 2024, Wave Books, Seattle, Washington

Third Insert Image: CAConrad, “You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemisis and Other (Soma)tics”., 2023, Penguin Imprint

Bottom Insert Image: Eve Ariza, “CtConrad”, 2019, Color Print, Neopajamas Magazine

Upcoming Getty Museum Exhibitions

These black and white photographs of past Sam Francisco Pride events between 1984 and 1990 were taken by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover. These scenes were among many published in the June 27, 2014 edition of Mother Jones.

For those interested, Los Angeles’s Getty Museum is having two exhibitions on LBGTQ+ culture beginning in June. Note that these two exhibitions close on the 28th of September!

“Queer Lens: A History of Photography”

On view June 17–September 28, 2025

Since the mid-19th century, photography has served as a powerful tool for examining concepts of gender, sexuality, and self-expression. The immediacy and accessibility of the medium has played a transformative role in the gradual proliferation of homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual imagery. Despite periods of severe homophobia, when many photographs depicting queer life were suppressed or destroyed, this exhibition brings together a variety of evidence to explore the medium’s profound role in shaping and affirming the vibrant tapestry of the LGBTQ+ community.

Generous support from the Getty Patron Program

“$3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives”

On view June 10–September 28, 2025

“$3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives” celebrates the contributions of LGBTQ+ artists in the last century. From pioneers who explored sexual and gender identity in the first half of the 20th century, through the liberation movements and the horrors of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, to today’s more inclusive and expansive understanding of gender, $3 Bill presents a journey of resilience, pride, and beauty.

Generous support from the Getty Research Institute Council and the Getty Patron Program

Additional support from The Danielson Family Foundation

Alvin Baltrop

The Photography of Alvin Baltrop

Born in Bronx borough of New York in December of 1948, Alvin Baltrop was a working-class American photographer who extensively documented the dilapidated Hudson River piers and New York City’s clandestine gay culture during the 1970s and 1980s. 

Alvin Baltrop was the younger son of Dorothy Mae Baltrop who had moved from Virginia to the Bronx with her eldest son James. He discovered photography while attending junior high school and began photographing with a twin-lens Yashica camera. Baltrop studied under the older photographers in his neighborhood and taught himself the techniques of film development. During the Vietnam War, he enlisted in 1969 as a medic in the U.S. Navy and photographed his fellow crew members. After his military service ended in 1972 with an honorable discharge, Baltrop returned to New York City where he worked in a variety of odd jobs, including as a street vendor and cab driver.

In December of 1973, a truck laden with asphalt crashed through Manhattan’s elevated West Side Highway between West Twelfth and Gansevoort Streets and forever closed that section of highway to the south. The abandoned and dilapidated Hudson River piers to the west of the closed highway presented opportunities both as art platforms and meeting places. Fifteen years elapsed before the elevated structure was fully dismantled; the location served during this time as a major New York experimental art and social venue.  

In 1973, Alvin Baltrop enrolled in the School of Visual Arts where he studied photography until 1975. Interested in photographing the Hudson River piers, he became a self-employed mover of household furniture and belongings, work that allowed him to spend more time with his photography. Although initially terrified of the area, Baltrop constantly photographed the West Side piers from 1975 to 1986, particularly those piers that bordered Greenwich Village starting at the meatpacking district and extending south to Christopher Street. 

Baltrop often shot images at the piers for several days and lived inside his moving van parked nearby. Capturing both the personalities and the structure of the piers, he became a well-known member of its artistic and gay community and remembered every person he photographed. Baltrop eventually became established as both friend and confidant to many of those who frequented the pier areas. 

Although his work had both documentary and aesthetic value, Baltrop had great difficulty in finding a gallery to sponsor an exhibition of his work during his lifetime. In 1977, he had a small solo show at the Glines, a non-profit gay art organization best known for producing Harvey Fierstein’s 1982 “Torch Song Trilogy”. Baltrop also had an exhibition of his “Pier” series at an East Village gay bar where he occasionally was employed as a bouncer. However, the established photography galleries, even those that presented explicit homoerotic work, were unreceptive to Baltrop’s work.

As a result, Alvin Baltrop never gained the finances necessary to print the vast majority of his thousands of negatives or to properly care for those he managed to print. The majority of his printed photographs are small, approximately 13 x 18 centimeters (5 x 7 inches), however, he did print a few larger images. His photographs of the Hudson River pier area  constitute a significant record of a lost era of New York City’s industrial landscape and the gay culture’s pre-AIDS history. While his photography was documentary in nature, its studied compositions, intimacy, and the attention to both light and shadow attest to an artistic ambition.

Baltrop was befriended by the New York City glass artist and writer John Drury in the late 1990s. Drury, who recognized Baltrop’s  photographic abilities, nominated him for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award for the Arts. Baltrop received a diagnosis of cancer in the 1990s, a time when he was impoverished and without insurance for care. After only a few exhibitions during decades of photographic work, Alvin Baltrop passed away due to complications from cancer and diabetes at the age of fifty-five in New York City on the first day of February in 2004. 

In 2012, a retrospective solo exhibition entitled “Perspectives 179-Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass”, which included almost one hundred gelatin silver prints, was held at Houston’s  Contemporary Art Museum. New York’s Bronx Museum of Art, custodian of many Baltrop photographs and negatives, held a 2019 retrospective of his work, entitled “The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop”, that included works from Baltrop’s private archive never before viewed by the public. 

Alvin Baltrop’s work has also been included in several exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art including its 2015 “America is Hard to See”, 2016-2017 “Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection”, 2020 “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970-1986” and the 2024 “Trust Me”, an exhibition of intergenerational artists.

Unless noted otherwise, all photographs in this article are used courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust, @ 2010, The Alvin Baltrop Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS) and Galerie Bucholz, New York. All rights reserved. 

Notes: New York’s Museum of Modern Art has an article on Alvin Baltrop, along with several images from its collection, on its website at: https://www.moma.org/artists/48461-alvin-baltrop

An extensive biography of Alvin Baltrop, composed by the Alvin Baltrop Trust and drawn from audio recordings and interviews, can be found at the global strategic-consultancy Third Streaming site located at: http://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-biography

Issue 4 of GAYLETTER Magazine has a short biography on the life of Alvin Baltrop written by Chris Stewart entitled “Alvin Baltrop’s Days on the Piers” located at: https://gayletter.com/alvin-baltrops-days-on-the-piers/

PIN-UP magazine has an article by Alejandro Carrion entitled “Masculinity Under Construction” that discusses, among other artists, the Hudson River pier area and Alvin Baltrop’s photography at: https://www.pinupmagazine.org/articles/sexy-construction-workers-urban-homoeroticism

Top Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “Self Portrait with Alice”, 1975, Ektachrome Slide, The Alvin Baltrop Trust

Second Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers ( Sunbathing Platform with Tava Mural)”, 1976-1985, Gelatin Silver Print, The Alvin Baltrop Trust 

Third Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers (Two Men)”, 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Three Sunbathers), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 35  cm, Printed 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Male Portrait), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, and The Alvin Baltrop Trust 

Kyle Dunn

The Artwork of Kyle Dunn

Born in 1990, Kyle Dunn is an American artist who creates sensuous and psychologically complex scenes on canvas and panels. His work is a meld of theatrical elements and personal introspection that explores those relationships between the artist and his subject, two people in love, and the individual and society. 

Kyle Dunn received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in 2012 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A modernist with a classical style, he began his career as a painter with a prolific series of images on canvas. In 2016, Dunn returned to his sculptural roots and created a visual language that employed three-dimensional elements constructed of epoxy resin, plaster and relief foam panels.

Dunn’s domestic tableaux and still lifes are staged, highly stylized images that include trompe l’oeil and bas-relief. All of his paintings contain a wealth of detail; your attention is drawn to the many thoughtfully placed objects that fill the canvas and surround its protagonists. Within Dunn’s melodramatic scenes, figures are staged in a variety of positions and activities that are open to the viewers’ own interpretations. His figures are often presented in solitary moments of self-reflection or scenes of domestic intimacy. 

The lighting of each scene is an important component of Kyle Dunn’s work; the theatric lighting style of both horror and noir films is evident in his paintings. In many of Dunn’s paintings and bas-relief works, light comes from a strong, external source, located either from above or below, or the side through a window or open doorway. Blocks of sunlight flood into rooms in such images as “Hyacinth and Pears” and “Devil in the Daytime”. Scenes, such as “Midday” and “Downward Dog” present  strong contrasts between light and shadow, an effect that highlights the scene’s subject and increases the drama of the depicted moment.

Kyle Dunn’s work was included in the 2022 “Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from the ICA Miami’s Collection”, an exhibition of work housed by Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art. His most recent exhibitions include a series of colorful nocturnal scenes in a successful April/May 2023 solo exhibition, entitled “Night Pictures”, at New York City’s  P.P.O.W. gallery on Broadway. In June of 2024, Dunn had a solo institutional show, entitled “Matrix 194”, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival structure in Connecticut. His solo exhibition “Devil in the Daytime” is currently on view from February 8th to March 29th in 2025 at the Vielmetter Gallery in Los Angeles. 

Dunn has shown work in many international venues including the Marlborough Gallery in London, Amsterdam’s GRIMM gallery, the Maria Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, and Berlin’s Galerie Judin, among others. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Hong Kong’s Sunpride Foundation in Kowloon, and the X Museum in Beijing, China. 

Notes: There is an excellent 2019 interview, entitled “Ghost World”,  between Jessica Ross of Juxtapoz Art & Culture and Kyle Dunn located at: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/kyle-dunn-ghost-world/

The Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program has a personal and well-documented December 2020 Visiting Artist Lecture by Kyle Dunn located on YouTube under the title: “Kyle Dunn: Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series”.

Top Insert Image: Justin J. Wee, “Kyle Dunn, Brooklyn Studio”, 2021, Color Print, Galerie Magazine

Second Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Into the Crevasse”, 2019, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster and Foam Panel, 121.9 x 175.3 x 5.1 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Window”, 2020, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster, and Foam Panel, 162.6 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm, Private Collection