Tag: gay

Yannis Tsarouchis

The Paintings of Yannis Tsarouchis

Yannis Tsarouchis is one of a group of twentieth-century Greek artists who portrayed and defined modern Greek identity. A sensual painter influenced by French Impressionism, Tsarouchis is a significant gay artist who painted images of vulnerable men and occasionally strong women.

Born in January of 1910 in Piraeus, Greece, Yannis Tsarouchis initially trained in the studio of Byzantine artist Fotis Kontoglou, an influential Greek modernist who introduced him to Byzantine iconography. He later studied at the Athens School of Fine Art, graduating in 1935, The major influence on Tsarouchis’ work, however, came from a trip to Paris, Istanbul, and Italy in the mid-1930s that exposed him to the bohemian lifestyle and both Renaissance and Impressionist art.

Tsarouchis’ work moved in two main directions: toward the orientalist and sensual, with strong influences from Matisse, and toward the ancient Greek ideal as expressed by the Renaissance and the Baroque movements. In doing so, Tsarouchis played a pivotal role, alongside his contemporaries, in portraying and shaping modern Greek identity.

Returning to a war-torn Greece in 1936, Tsarouchis become a soldier in the Greco-Italian war in 1940. With a more political and humanist perspective after his service, he  began painting scenes of young men who were preparing to defend their homeland from the rise of Fascist Italy. Tsarouchis’ depiction of the soldiers and sailors was controversial; some of his exhibits were taken down by censors, who saw his work as unpatriotic and  degrading to the Greek male image. 

Tsarouchis’ paintings of soldiers and sailors he admired captured not only a Greek identity, but also a gay awareness. Transforming Rodin’s bronze statue into an icon for Greek culture, he painted his 1936 “The Thinker”, showing a modern young Greek sitting on a cafe stool, a cigarette in hand, with a faraway look in his eye. Among Tsarouchis’ other paintings are:  the 1939 “Young Man Posing as an Olympic Statue”; “Sailor with Coffee Cup” painted in 1954; and the 1956 “Forgotten Guard”.

Yannis Tsarouchis established in 1949, along with other Greek artists including sculptor Nikos Nikolaou and seascape painter Panayiotis Tetsis, the “Armos” art group which worked to promote Greek traditional painting. In 1951 he had exhibitions in Paris and London and participated in the 1958 Venice Biennale. Tsarouchis moved to Paris in 1967 in a self-imposed exile to.wait out the years of military dictatorship in Greece. 

During this exile, Tsarouchis designed theater sets for productions at Milan’s La Scala opera house, the Greek National Theater, the Dallas Opera, and London’s Covent Gardens, as well as the annual Avignon Art Festival in France. He also designed sets and costumes for films by Jules Dassin and Michael Cacoyannis. After his return to Greece in the middle of the 1970s, he designed an acclaimed operatic set for director Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Italian classical composer Luigi Cherubini’s comedic opera “Médée” at the ancient amphitheater at Epidauros. 

Residing in northern Athens at the age of seventy nine, Yannis Tsarouchis died on July 20th of 1989. The Yannis Tsarouchis Museum, an art collection hosted in the artist’s home in Maroussi, Athens, was officially opened in 1982 in recognition of Tsarouchis’ contributions and respect for Greek culture. Upon the reading of his will and testament, it was found that Tsarouchis bequeathed all his assets to the Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation. 

Note: A more extensive biography of Yannis Tsarouchis and collections of his work can be found at the online site of the Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation located at: https://tsarouchis.gr/en/

Second Insert Image: Yannis Tsarouchis, “Departure with Oval Mirror”, Detail, 1970, Oil on Canvas, 110 x 209 cm, Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation

Third Insert Image: Yannis Tsarouchis, “Portrait of a Man”, 1976, Oil on Canvas, 51 x 65 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Yannis Tsarouchis, “Sailor”, circa 1970, Oil on Panel, Private collection

John Keith Vaughan

Paintings by Keith Vaughan

Born in August of 1912 in Selsey, England, John Keith Vaughan was a British painter and photographer who was one of the leading proponents of Neo-Romanticism. Britain’s foremost painter of male nudes before David Hockney and Patrick Procktor, he created muted depictions of anonymous male nudes set in abstract landscapes that expressed his internal struggle with his homosexuality. Due to legal laws against homosexuality, Vaughan was compelled to self-censor and veil his imagery due to legal risks and possible charges from obscenity laws.

Keith Vaughan attended Christ’s Hospital school. As an intending conscientious objector during the Second World War, he was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps, providing physical labor to the army. In 1942, stationed at Ashton Gifford in Wiltshire, Vaughan had his first exhibition of paintings at the Manchester Art Gallery. 

During the war, Keith Vaughan became friends with painters Graham Sutherland, notable for his work in glass and fabrics, and John Minton, an illustrator and stage designer. In 1946 after leaving service, the three men shared living and studio premises. It was through their association that Vaughan became part, for a brief period, of the Neo=Romantic movement of the immediate post-war period.  Upon his leaving the genre, his work, concentrating on studies of male figures, became increasingly more abstract.

During the years of the mid to late 1940s, Keith Vaughan produced around twenty-five paintings of male bathers, as well as scenes and drawings in gouache and other media. At Pagham, on the south coast of England between 1947 and 1948, Vaughan met John McGuinness, an ill-educated, working-class orphan from Liverpool. In some ways, the young man reminded Vaughan of his younger brother Dick, who was killed in the war seven years earlier, which led Vaughan to provide clothing, meals and an education for McGuinness. 

McGuinness, with his large hands and athletic body, represented something raw and honest, embodying all the qualities that Vaughan was attracted to. McGuinness’s gentle, unaffected character allied him with nature in Vaughan’s imagination. John McGuinness’s broad, broken nose, fringe and rugged look make their appearance in several works from this time onwards. The 1947 oil painting “Standing Male Figure”, with its blue background, and the 1949  color lithograph “The Woodsman”, both shown above. are two of the works featuring McGuinness.

An art teacher at the Camberwell College of Arts and later at the Slade School, Keith Vaughan is also known for the journals he kept, published  in 1966 and posthumously in 1989. A gay man who was troubled by his sexuality, Vaughan’s life is mostly revealed to us through these daily journals. Diagnosed with cancer in 1975, John Keith Vaughan committed suicide in London on November 4th of 1977, writing in his diary as the drug overdose took effect. 

For more extensive information on the life of Keith Vaughan, I suggest the Keith Vaughan Society which is located at: https://www.thekeithvaughansociety.com

An article by award-winning poet and art critic Sue Hubbard on Keith Vaughan’s life and his photographic work on Pagham Beach can be found online at The London Magazine located at: https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/review-keith-vaughan-pagham-beach-photographs-collages-1930s/

Top Insert Image: Francis Goodman, “Keith Vaughan”, January 1947, Gelatin Silver Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Middle Insert Image: Keith Vaughan, “Les Illuminations de Rimbaud, Parade”, 1975, Gouache on Wove Paper, 48 x 43 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Keith Vaughan, “Seated Bathers on the Shore”, 1945, Ink Charcoal Crayon and Gouache on Paper, Private Collection

Salman Toor

Paintings by Salman Toor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tove Jansson: “Moominland Midwinter”

Photographers Unknown, Snapshots

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

—Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hernan Bas

Paintings by Hernan Bas

Born in 1978 in Miami, Florida, Hernan Bas is an American painter whose work presents a world composed of personal and historical references. Graduated from the New World School of the Arts in 1996, Bas creates his multilayered, densely textured works of art, by combining the mediums of woodcut, linoleum print, airbrush or gold leaf with painting,.

Hernan Bas takes his inspiration from literature, history and contemporary culture, presenting in his work references to Romanticism and Nihilism, and literary allusion to such writers as Robert Frost and Oscar Wilde. Inspired by the aesthetics of the male androgynous dandy, Bas constructs narratives of adolescent exploration, which often serve as metaphors for a sexual and sensual awakening.

Portrayed usually alone in sprawling natural surroundings, the figures in Bas’s large-format paintings reside in a utopian world of innate sensuality, painted with lush, abundant brushstrokes. The stories of their adventures are woven together with classical poetry, mythology, religious stories, the paranormal, and classical literature.

Hernan Bas’s 2017 exhibition at the gallery Victoria Miro Mayfair was inspired by the lore and romanticism of life at Cambridge, England. Following a period of research while in residence at Jesus College Cambridge in 2016, Bas developed new subject matter including the famed ‘Night Climbers of Cambridge’, a group of students whose nocturnal ascents of the ancient buildings of the university and town, taking photographs while trying to avoid detection, gained them a cult following during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Loosely based on vintage men’s fashion magazine covers, the Bas’s most recent work depicts male magazine-cover celebrities surrounded by a choreographed array of artifacts, accessories and architectural elements that point to the idea of identity. Infused with an aura of eroticism and decadence, and loaded with codes and double-meanings, these recent works of Hernan Bas further point to the intricacies of self-identity, while celebrating moments of transformation from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Hernan Bas had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2009, Miami’s Rubell Family Collection in 2008, and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in 2002. He currently, October 17 to December 10 2020, is showing at gallery Ocula in Paris.  Hernan Bas’s work has also been widely exhibited in group exhibitions, including shows at the Venice Biennale, the Busan Biennale, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Whitney Biennial, among many others. 

Hernan Bas has work in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and others.

Second Insert Image: Hernan Bas, “The Palm Tree Enthusiast”, 2021, Acrylic and Gouache on Arches Paper, 76.2 x 57.2 cm, Anat Ebgi Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Hernan Bas, “A Gathering of Minds (The Agoraphobic), 2021, Acrylic on Linen, 182.9 x 153.4 x 4.45 cm, Anat Ebgi Gallery

Andrew Salgado

Paintings by Andrew Salgado

Born in 1982, Andrew Salgado is a Canadian artist living and working in London. He received his BFA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2005; he graduated in 2009 with a MFA form Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Salgado’s work, striking a balance between abstraction and figuration, deals with questions of masculinity. His paintings are concerned with the political, social, and psychological aspects that effect his subjects. 

In Salgado’s most recent work,  colorful, symbolic, and compositional elements are the driving force of the painted image, but a complex interweaving of figures remain a common thread. His subjects are depicted in a fantastical, often ominous tableaux, with any combination of patterns, abundance, and excess play upon the painted surface. References to the tradition of figurative painting, both historic and contemporary, are recognizable, including those to  Matisse, Gauguin, and Francis Bacon.

Since 2010, Andrew Salgado has had many solo exhibitions in London, New York , Zagreb, Toronto, Cape Town, Basel, and most recently in 2019 at the Untitled Art Fair in Miami. He was the youngest artist to receive a survey-exhibition at The Canadian High Commission in London. An openly gay artist, Salgado frequently donates to charities including Pride London, Stonewall, Diversity Role Models, Pride London, and GLAAD. His donations to the Terrence Higgins Trust are of particular note, having have raised over £100,000 since 2014.

Salgado’s works are in both public and private collections worldwide, including the Government of Canada, The Jordanian Royal Family, London’s prominent legal firm Simmons & Simmons, and the Esquinazi Collection.

The artist’s site : https://andrewsalgado.com

Bottom Insert Image: Andrew Salgado, “Buzzati’s War”, 2023, Oil and Oil Pastel on Linen, 95 x 85 cm

Luke Austin

Luke Austin, “Self-Portrait”, 2018

Australian-born and now living in Los Angeles, Luke Austin started out as a photographer doing photo shoots of bands and musicians, later moving to portraits representing his own gay community. Working with his Instagram app, he has traveled the world and shot many photo shoots of over a hundred men in different cities. Austin has gone from a large Instagram following to becoming a published photographer with his series of “Mini Beau Books” and his latest book “LEWA”, a photographic study of race, masculinity, and sexuality.

Austin has recently shown at a solo 2018 exhibit “LEWA” at PT Gallery in Berlin, the 2018 “Queer Biennial” group show at Navel in Los Angeles, and the 2017 “Home” group show at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives, in Florida.

His work can be seen at his gallery in Los Angeles and at his site: www.lukeaustinphoto.com,

Image reblogged with many thanks to https://doctordee.tumblr.com

 

 

Keith Haring

Keith Haring, Unfinished Painting, 1989

The Keith Haring Foundtion

The mission of the Keith Haring Foundation is to sustain, expand, and protect the legacy of Keith Haring, his art, and his ideals. The Foundation supports not-for-profit organizations that assist children, as well as organizations involved in education, prevention, and care related to AIDS.

Keith Haring generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and disadvantaged communities. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.

The Keith Haring Foundation makes grants to not-for-profit groups that engage in charitable activities. In accordance with Haring’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: the support of organizations which enrich the lives of underprivileged children and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention, and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection.

Keith Haring additionally charged the Foundation with maintaining and protecting his artistic legacy after his death. The Foundation maintains a collection of art along with archives that facilitate historical research about the artist and the times and places in which he lived and worked. The Foundation supports arts and educational institutions by funding exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate Haring’s work and philosophy.

For more information on the Foundation, current exhibitions, and information on Keith Haring’s life, please visit: https://www.haring.com

Notes: For those interested in Keith Haring’s life and art, I recommend Brian Ferrari’s reprint of the short-lived gay men’s magazine “Heat” article entitled “The Life and Loves of Keith Haring” which can be located at Ferrari’s blog: https://brianferrarinyc.com/2025/06/12/keith-haring-in-heat-magazine-1992/

Vaslav Nijinsky

N. Rimsky-Korsakov, “Vaslav Nijinsky in the Ballet Scheherazade”, 1910, Private Collection

Born Waclaw Niżyński on March 12, 1889, in Kiev to Polish parents, both touring dancers, Vaslav Nijinsky was a ballet dancer and choreographer, considered the greatest male dancer of the early 1900s. Praised for his virtuosity and intensity of the characters he portrayed, Nijinsky possessed the ability to dance ‘en pointe’, on his toes with feet fully extended, a rarity among male dancers at the time. 

In 1909, Nijinsky joined the Ballets Russes, a new ballet company started by ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who concentrated on promoting Russian arts abroad, particularly in Paris. Diaghilev became deeply involved in directing and managing Nijinsky’s career, eventually becoming Nijinsky’s lover for a time. Despite complications in both reworking existing ballets and financial issues, the 1909 Paris season of colorful Russian operas and ballets was a success, with Nijinsky displaying his unique talents and the performances setting new trends in dance, music and fashion.

Breaking against tradition, Nijinsky began choreographing in 1912 original ballets with new trends in music and dance, sometimes causing riotous reactions at the Théâtre de Champs-Élysées. His “Afternoon of the Faun”, set to music by Debussy, is onsidered one of the first modern ballets; though, the ballet’s sexually suggestive final scene caused controversy among its Parisian viewers. His ballet “Rite of Spring”, set to music by Stravinsky, which exceeded the limits of traditional ballet, music scores, and propriety, resulted in violence among the audience at the premier.

In September of 1913, while on tour with the Ballets Russes in South America, Nijinsky married Hungarian aristocrat and actress Romola de Pulszky, despite warnings to both parties by friends. They toured together with the troupe for the season, living in seperate rooms. Nijinsky realized he had made a mistake with the marriage; but the marriage was never legally ended. After the tour was ended, Nijinsky and troupe traveled back to Paris.

Relations, both work and personal, between Diaghilev and Nijinsky had been deteriorating for some time. Upon his return from the South American tour, Nijinsky was notified by an assistant to Diaghilev that he would no longer be employed by the Ballets Russes and also learned that none of his original ballets would be performed by the group. This was particularly devastating as the Ballets Russes was the pre-eminent ballet company and the only innovative modern-thinking one. An attempt was made by Nijinsky to form his own dance company, but he did not succeed.

Classified a Russian citizen and no longer with a military exemption from service, Nijinsky was interned in Budapest during World War I, under house arrest until his release was arranged in 1916. The complex arrangements for this included the agreement that Nijinsky would dance and choreograph for the North and South America tour of the Ballets Russes. The tour proved very stressful to Nijinsky, already in an unsteady position, resulting in anxiety and bouts of rage and frustration. His last performance was in Montevideo, Uruguay, for the Red Cross on September 30, 1917 at age twenty-eight. It was at this time that signs of Nijinsky’s existing schizophrenia became apparent to members of the company. 

In 1919 in Zurich, Nijinsky was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to Burghölzli, the leading psychiatric hospital in Switzerland. For the next 30 years, Nijinsky was in and out of hospitals and asylums, maintaining long periods of silence during his years of illness. From 1947 Nijinsky lived in Surrey, England, with his wife Romola who tended to his care. He died from kidney failure at a London clinic on April 8, 1950, and was buried in London, his body later being moved in 1953 to Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

Nijinsky wrote his “Diary”, reflecting the decline of his household into chaos, during the six weeks in 1919 he spent in Switzerland before being committed to the asylum to Zurich. Discovering years later the three notebooks of the diary plus another with letters to a variety of people, his wife Romola published a bowdlerized version of the diary in 1936, translated into English by Jennifer Mattingly. She deleted about forty per cent of the diary, especially references to bodily functions, sex, and homosexuality, recasting Nijinsky as an “involuntary homosexual.” Romola also removed some of his more unflattering references to her and others close to their household. The first unexpurgated edition of “The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky” was published in 1995, edited by New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella and translated by Kyril Fitz Lyon. 

Nijinsky is immortalized in numerous still photographs, many of them by British portrait photogaper E. O. Hoppe, who photographed the Ballets Russes seasons in London extensively between 1909 and 1921. No film exists of Nijinsky dancing; Diaghilev never allowed the Ballets Russes to be filmed because he felt that the quality of film at the time could never capture the artistry of his dancers.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Vaslav Nijinsky in His Practice Outfit, Krasnoya Selo”, 1908

Second and Third Insert Images: Auguste Bert, “Vaslav Nijinsky as the Golden Slave in Scheherazade”, 1911

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Vaslav Nijinsky, circa 1910, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library Collection

Danny Ferrell

Paintings by Danny Ferrell

Danny Ferrell is an artist living and working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2014 he received a BFA from Penn State University in drawing and painting, and an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. Ferrell is represented by the Marinaro Gallery in New York City and Galerie Pact in Paris. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches drawing and painting. Ferrell has exhibited in New York City, Pittsburgh and the New England area.

Danny Ferrell was born in Flint, Michigan, and spent his formative years in rural Pennsylvania. In this deeply conservative area, most residents placed religion above all other virtues; the result was anyone deviating from religious law was treated as a herald of immorality. Ferrell’s love for other men violated the cultural norms, forcing him to conceal his identity as a gay person from those in the public sphere.

Consequently, his work represents fantasies and fears about the Other in the form of the queer male experience. By creating code homoerotic images of ubiquitous scenes that could appeal to mainstream audiences, the work is both universal and human. Ferrell admires Cadmus and Tooker and follows their lead to bring together the epic and banal in his work.

Greeks Come True

 

Konstantinos Rigas by Vangelis Kyris, “Greeks Come True”, 2019

“Greeks Come True” is a movie filmed by Vangelis Kyris in conjunction with a photo shooting for the Greeks Come True annual print calendar which is available every December. Filmed entirely on a Greek mountain farm, the eighty minute film follows the fifteen men and athletes involved in the calendar shoot. The film’s multi-genre sooundtrack features some of Greece’s promising musical artists.

Jean Genet: “I Shall Dare What Must Be Dared”

“I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it
will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty
lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter
beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the
casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a
glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.” 

-Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal

 

Duncan Grant

Duncan Grant, “George Mallory”, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 22 x 25 Inches, Private Collection

Born in 1885 into a military family, Scotish painter Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, an English group of artists and scholars associated with the French Bohemian Movement.  He studied at the St. Paul’s School in London and for five years attended the Westminster School of Art. Traveling abroad after finishing school, Duncan met and became apprenticed in 1906 to French painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, a successful self-taught portrait painter working in Paris and London.

Returning to England, Duncan Grant was introduced by his cousin Lytton Strachey to the Bloomsbury Group which included the Strachey brothers, Virginia Woolf , Vanessa Bell and her husband English art critic Clive Bell, and artist and art critic Roger Fry. This Modernist art group gathered to discuss philosophical and aesthetic questions, and believed in the value of truth and friendship. Open and shifting intimate relationships developed among its members, leading to Duncan fathering a child with Vanessa Bell. Although Vanessa was greatly in love with Duncan, he, an active and well-known gay man, had many relationships with other men, particularly in the Bloomsbury group.

Duncan Grant joined the London Group in 1919, changing his painting from abstraction to landscapes and still lifes. In 1920 he had his first of many solo shows in London. In 1922 Duncan and Vanessa Bell began producing furniture, textiles, and other interior designs. Now a renowned artist, he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in the years 1926, 1932 and 1940. A revived interest in his work produced a retrospective exhibition in 1959 and another one-man show in 1975 in New York City.

At the age of sixty, Duncan Grant met the young Paul Roche, who became the main love of his late life. Duncan continued working on his art, mainly decorative projects and private commissions. His lover, Paul Roche, tended to his needs in his later years, until Duncan’s death by pneumonia at the age of ninety-three. He is buried beside Vanessa Bell in the churchyard of Saint Peter’s Church in West Firie, East Sussex, England.

The above painting of George Herbert Leigh Mallory, the mountaineer, is one of many portraits that Duncan Grant painted of his close friend. Mallory was a friend to many of the Bloomsbury Group, particularly with the English writer and critic Giles Lytton Strachey.

Paul Jacoulet

Paul Jacoulet, “Boy with Dragonfly”, Date Unknown, Woodblock Print

Paul Jacoulet is renowned for his stunningly intricate designs, his eloquently romantic subjects and his complex printing techniques.  He was born in Paris in 1902 and moved to Japan with his family at the age of four. He developed skills in drawing, music and languages early on, speaking Japanese, French and English fluently. World War One and the devastating 1923 earthquake that effectively leveled Tokyo had a profound effect on Jacoulet.

Jacoulet left his job as a translator and resolved to focus entirely on his true passion: art.  Having been intensely moved by the works of Gauguin on a recent visit to Paris, Jacoulet departed for the South Seas, visiting Saipan, Truk, Rota, Titian and dozens of small atolls, where he filled up several sketch books with copious drawings and notes of the local people and landscapes. By 1930, he had added subjects from Korea, Mongolia and Manchuria.

Jacoulet produced his first woodblock print in 1934.  His technical requirements for the craftsmanship of his prints were so demanding that he could only work with the best, most talented printers.  He employed some very elaborate techniques and materials, including features such as embossing, lacquers, micas and the use of metal pigments and powdered semi-precious stones. Jacoulet was involved in very facet of the production and published many of his prints himself, selling them by way of subscription.  To keep costs down, he would print only enough to fill the subscriptions, and so often printed far less than the proposed edition number would suggest.

Jacoulet was a self-promoter and sent prints to famous people to enhance his reputation. Mrs. Douglas MacArthur received an annual Christmas gift, and Jacoulet’s work hung in the general’s headquarters in Tokyo and later at the Waldorf-Astoria. Jacoulet was flamboyantly and openly gay at a time when that was not accepted. His sexual orientation and gender fluidity are clearly reflected in his work. Near the end of his life Jacoulet was barred from entering the U.S. due to his “undesirability” as a gay person. Undeterred, he dressed up in a white suit and, carrying a silver-headed cane, walked into the U.S. at Niagara Falls.

In Jacoulet’s best work, images of the most extravagantly aristocratic exoticism stand beside spare studies of the very poor.  This balance of sentiment and objectivity, spiced by imagination, is the life work of an eccentric and passionate artist who was influenced by both the East and West, yet stands firmly and defiantly outside of both traditions.