Eros & Adonis by Grady Harp & Firehouse Publishing

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“And who is so barbarous as not to understand that the foot of a man is nobler than his shoe, and his skin nobler than that of the sheep with which he is clothed.� ~Michelangelo

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Eros & Adonis The Male Figure in Art History; A Compilation of Articles from The Art of Man

Chief Editor E. Gibbons Art Historian Grady Harp Editor Paul Rybarczyk Layout, Design, Production E. Gibbons Reader David Jarrett Design Consultants Dana Ranning, Paul Rybarczyk Publisher Firehouse Publishing Contributions by: Grady Harp Peter Dobson E. Gibbons Edward Moran Arthur Lambert ISBN-10: 1481845756 ISBN-13: 978-1481845755

Information: The Art of Man is a quarterly journal founded in 2010, www.artofman.net, produced by www.FirehousePublications.com.

Subscriptions: Please visit www.theartofman.net for the most current pricing, store locations, and subscriptions of both current and back issues.

For questions, please e-mail LOVSART@gmail.com or call 609-298-3742. Price is subject to change without notification. Š 2013 by Firehouse Publishing and Firehouse Gallery. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the express consent of Firehouse Publishing, Firehouse Gallery, and its owner, E. Gibbons.

Right: Guido Reni, Bacchus, 1620 (digitally altered detail image) Cover: Renieri Niccolo Regnier Nicolas, St. Sebastian, 1620 Rear Cover: Bronzino Saint Sebastian, 1533

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Eros & Adonis is a collection of art history articles first appearing in editions 1 – 12 of:

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CONTENTS:

10. Introduction by Grady Harp

18. Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin

22. Willian-Adolphe Bouguereau

28. Jean-Léon Gérôme

34. Thomas Eakins

40. Jacques-Louis David

48. Guido Reni

56. Cornelius McCarthy

69. Agnolo Bronzino

76. Icarus

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84. Shozo Nagano

94. The Orient and the Occident

104. Green and Roman Sculpture

118. Ganymede

124. Wade Reynolds

132. The Influence of Saint Sebastian

140. The Influence of Apollo

158. William Blake

156. The Influence of Hercules

166. Eugène Frederik Jansson

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EROS & ADONIS: A Survey of Some Significant Artists

by Grady Harp Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. ~Thomas Merton The articles and images found in this book represent a glimpse at the history of art as practiced by painters and sculptors who found the perfections and imperfections of man to be worthy subjects for honoring and placing before the public eye. The essays examine individual artists throughout history whose motivations in painting the male figure are varied, but the common denominator is consistently a sense of awe at the beauty and sensual perfection of the human body. Gathered from the initial twelve issues of the quarterly journal The Art of Man as conceived and designed and published by Eric Gibbons, these writings are meant to underline the flow of thought from the ancient past to the present.

Left: Guido Reni, Bacchus (Digitally Altered), 1620

Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, Male Nude, 1864

Giorgio Vasari was a painter and sculptor from Tuscany and in 1550 penned Lives of the Painters – generally accepted as the first true history of art – a book that emphasized art’s progression and development, basically confined to biographies of his Italian confrères, the most famous being Michelangelo. While this present book cannot be compared to Vasari’s inestimable contribution to studying art, the concept is similar. Samuel Butler has said ‘The history of art is the history of revivals’ and that stance is in many ways the same as the one Jean-Léon Gérôme, Whirling Dervishes, 1889

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Wade Reynolds, Figure as Landscape 1, 30 x 40 in. 2002

taken here. The earliest art discussed here is Greek and Roman Sculpture with images from the 4th century BC and progressing through Michelangelo, Cellini, Giambologna, Bernini, Canova and Fedi (1892), a near 6000 year survey of artists representing man.

Interspersed with the artists’ histories are essays on some of the consistent topics or figures that have influenced artists from the beginning of art to the present, figures more often myths or gods or legends such as Icarus, Ganymede, Apollo, Hercules, and Saint Sebastian. The artists addressed here often referenced these ideal heroes and therein is the seed for the title of this volume – Eros & Adonis.

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875

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Jacques-Louis David, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1799 (Detail)

In addition to the myths and themes mentioned here, there are compositional ideas, technical aspects, positioning of the model, and the use of partial or complete nudity that can be traced throughout history as seen in the artists presented here. Or as Stephen Spender shared, ‘History is the ship carrying living memories into the future.’ And it is to that memory that this book recalls the histories that share imagination with contemporary work.

One of the guiding principles behind the Art of Man Quarterly Journal, aside from drawing attention to artists who are dedicated to continuing the representational depiction of the male figure, is to underline the thread of continuity between the past and the present, how studying the classics informs the art of today. Contemporary artists vary in the technique of rendering the male figure in richly divergent ways and yet it is the heritage of past artists whose ideas echo in today’s art.

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According to Aristotle, ‘The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.’ Yet it is that outward appearance as well as the inward significance that the artists remembered here celebrate. The artists honored here are Agnolo Bronzino (1503 – 1572) [see The Descent of Christ into Limbo, oil 1551], Guido Reni (1575 – 1642) [see Bacchus and Ariadne], JacquesLouis David (1748 – 1825) [see The Coronation of the Emperor and Empress, The Intervention of the Sabine Women(detail), 1799, Paris and Helen (detail) 1788], William Blake (1757 – 1827) [see Ancient of Days, 1794], Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin (1809 – 1864) [see Flandrin, Male Nude], Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904) [see Gerome, Whirling Dervishes, 1889], Thomas Eakins (1844 – 1916) [see Eakins, The Gross Clinic], Eugène Jansson (1862 – 1915) [see In the Doorway, oil on canvas, 199X89 cm, 1907, Skaters, oil on canvas, 159 X 209 cm, 1902], Shozo Nagano (1928 – 2007), and Wade Reynolds (1929 – 2011) [see Figure as Landscape 1, 30 X40 in, 2002].

This online sample of the book contains watermarks to protect its content. These do not appear in the printed edition available at www.TheArtOfMan.net Left: Eugène Jansson, In the Doorway, oil on canvas, 199 X 89 cm. 1907

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Eugène Jansson, Skaters, oil on canvas, 159 X 209 cm. 1902

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These artists represent art from the 17 to the 21 century and each is notable not only for their importance in history but also for their celebration of the male form. Together they define the title of this volume - strong sensual love (Eros) of male beauty (Adonis). In the following pages are the geneses that continue to challenge and inspire contemporary artists. And in this concept history does indeed repeat itself in a most stimulating way.

“A man’s work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” ~Albert Camus

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Jacques-Louis David, Paris and Helen, 1788 (Detail)

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Jacques-Louis David, The Coronation of The Emperor and the Empress, 1806

Agnolo Bronzino, Descent of Christ into Limbo, oil, 1551 17

William Blake, Ancient of Days, 1794

Flandrin, Jeune Homme Nu Assis au Bord de la Mer, (The Young Man by the Sea) 1855

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THE FAMOUS UNKNOWN by Grady Harp An image that has become an icon in many circles is a painting hanging in the Musee du Louvre in Paris titled Jeune homme assis au bord de la mer or Young Man Sitting by the Seashore. (above left) The painting remains a favorite because it portrays a nude youth, his head bent down as if due to sadness or loneliness or simply

thoughtfulness. He is vulnerable and he is isolated and he is beautiful, all factors with which so many others can identify. And yet despite the fact that this image has been used on greeting cards, on posters, in reproductions to grace the home, and in art magazines such as the use in the designed title of this first issue of The Art of Man, few are familiar with the name or the work of the artist who created this lasting icon. That artist is Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, a man born to a struggling family of artists in Lyons, France in 1809. His father was a frustrated artist who because of lack of adequate formal training never moved beyond the status of painting miniatures.

His older brother René-Auguste (1804 – 1842) was both a painter and lithographer and taught Jean-Hippolyte and the youngest brother JeanPaul (1811 – 1902) the art of lithography.

Together the brothers managed to support their financially insecure family by selling their lithographs. René-Auguste remained in Lyon as a teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-art where both Jean-Paul and Jean Hippolyte studied until 1829, when with the encouragement of their teachers and peers, they walked to Paris to enter the center of the art world.

Flandrin Brothers, Paul and Hippolyte

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Once in Paris the brothers, always very close both emotionally and in physical resemblance (many thought they were twins), Paul and Hippolyte entered the atelier of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, the brilliant figure painter of his time, and under Ingres’ tutelage the brothers thrived. The relationship among the Flandrin brothers and Ingres was profound and they were to remain close friends as well as colleagues for life.

In 1832 Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin took a step above his brother and even his teacher in winning the Grand Prix de Rome for his painting Recognition of Theseus by his Father, (right) a painting of a nude Theseus (his genitalia carefully obscured by the placement of a beef roast on the table before him!) whose other elements appear like figures from the works of da Vinci and Raphael. The painting and its accompanying prize money brought an end to the poverty suffered by the Flandrin family. Jean–Hippolyte moved to

Rome in 1833: Jean-Paul joined him there in 1834. It was in this rich Roman period when Jean-Hippolyte became well known for his painting of the figure – paintings that reflected the theatricality, the homoeroticism, and the neo-classical pomp so popular in this period.

Jean-Paul found new success in his landscape paintings and to this day is thought of as a craftsman of elegiac pastoral scenes.

But do these paintings suggest that JeanHippolyte Flandrin was a practicing homosexual?

Not if we examine him the way cold history details have slotted him into the realm of ‘married with several children’: one of his extant portraits now hanging in the Louvre is the very fine Portrait of Madame Flandrin, apparently his wife. And while Flandrin himself did not apparently classify these paintings as homoerotic, he held them as models of the purity of the ideal and the sensual aspects of mythological creatures. And most art historians writing today acknowledge the highly homoerotic overtones of The Young Man Sitting by the Seashore and the Polytes Son of Priam paintings – paintings that combine the erotic and the contemplative, raising the bar between the real and the ideal, and finding that specialized niche between form and emotion.

Polytes, Son of Priam Observing the Movements of the Greeks Near Troy

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Pieta by Hippolyte Flandrin, 1842

After his time in Rome, and despite his struggle with a bout of cholera, Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin devoted his work to portraits of famous people (among them Napoleon III who was both his model and the fortunate owner of The Young Man by the Seashore), and grew more interested in religious painting. In 1837 be began the successful work on St Clare Healing the Blind for the Nantes cathedral, and Christ Blessing the Children, He eventually returned to Paris to paint the very successful, if technically cold and austere, frescoes in Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Church of St. Severin among others in Paris. But the climate of Parisian churches and his compulsion to work weakened his already

challenged health and in 1863 he returned to the warmer climes of Italy where he died of smallpox in 1864.

And so we have the advantage of examining the work of Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin with the knowledge of historical accounts. Interpretation of art is always heavily weighted in the eye of the beholder. In the end it matters little about the ‘facts’ of the creator of this artistic icon that has become so closely associated with the rise in appreciation of The Art of Man. The painting speaks more eloquently than any dissection by words from history or from written interpretation warrant. It is, then, a mysterious example of The Art of Man.

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William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Dante and Virgil in Hell, 1850

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Knowledge, Taste, and Refinement

By Grady Harp Bouguereau was able to travel to Paris where he entered the pinnacle of art instruction, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, at age twenty-one.

Sensitive to the temper of the times, he elected to paint historical canvases not unlike those that France upheld as the epitome of culture and civilization and that decorated both palaces and public spaces. After several attempts, Bouguereau achieved the zenith of art in the Ecole. He was awarded the coveted Prix de Rome in 1850. The winning canvas was Zenobia Found by Shepherds on the Banks of the Araxes. In this painting are found aspects of Bouguereau’s art that would remain with him throughout his career – a profound appreciation for the human body, attention to detail, mythological themes, and a bold sense of narrative. For an artist whose majority of his over seven hundred paintings created in his lifetime emphasized the female form, both nude and clothed, this initial masterpiece clearly reveals his ability to present the male nude in the fashion of his esteemed predecessors – Michelangelo, da Vinci, Raphael, and Caravaggio. It should be noted that the brilliant and very masculine canvas Dante and Virgil in Hell was created the same year as his winning the Prix de Rome.

“When will the day come when I can do something worthy of a grown man? How many things must I yet learn before reaching that stage?” ~Bouguereau

A man as devoted to his art as William-Adolphe Bouguereau must have had a reason for voicing such vulnerability. Born in 1825 in La Rochelle, France, he was discovered to have inordinately fine drawing skills as early as the age of four. Though his parents were proud of their son’s gifts, the family’s financial needs required that he work in their wine and olive oil business: the young William would draw labels for the merchandise to both practice his drawing skills and add further support to his family income. Yet he remained insecure of his creative abilities. Fortunately his uncle Eugene tutored the young William in Latin and Greek (along with those mythologies) and was instrumental is encouraging the shy lad to enter the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Bordeaux. Despite his near self-loathing, within two years Bouguereau won first prize in figure painting and the direction of his psyche and career was set.

With the aid of his family and admirers and with money earned from painting portraits,

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One of the aspects of wining the Prix de Rome was the invitation extended to the artist to live in Rome in the Villa Medici to study the Italian Renaissance masters. It was here and in his studies throughout Italy that his artistic vocabulary was formed. He brought back his success to Paris and the Salons where his art met with immediate financial success.

Such paintings flowed freely from his brushes: Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1862; Homer and his Guide, 1874; The Flagellation of Christ, 1880; The Youth of Bacchus, 1884; and The First Mourning (the artist’s rendering of the death of Abel, lying across the lap of grieving Adam as Eve weeps – all in a form that suggests a Pieta), 1888.

Bouguereau’s private life remained secluded from the public.

His emphasis was obviously on his art. ‘Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the morning to come... if I cannot give myself to my dear painting I am miserable.’

What little we do know about the man away from the easel and his studio was that he was married and fathered five children, yet all five of this children died either shortly after childbirth or from diseases such as tuberculosis. But despite his personal tragedies, in 1877 he did court an American artist, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, who elected to pursue her own career, not marrying Bouguereau until 1896, the year that Bouguereau’s dominating mother died.

Bouguereau, Zenobia Found by Shepherds on the Banks of the Araxes, 1850

The victim of a long-standing heart disease, he died in 1905 and is buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse.

Controversy over the talent of William Bouguereau continues to this day. In th the last part of the 19 century Bouguereau remained a solid academic painter, a champion of realistic renderings of images that reflected a quieter, more genteel time.

Left: Bouguereau, The First Mourning, 1888 Previous Page: The Flagellation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, oil on canvas, 1880

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Bouguereau, Homer and his Guide, 1874

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He had little use of the Impressionist or Symbolist movements, and in turn these artists as well as many critics condemned his unimaginative and retrogressive style. In his words, “In painting, I am an idealist. I see only the beautiful in art and, for me, art is the beautiful. Why reproduce what is ugly in nature? I do not see why it should be necessary. Painting what one sees just as it is, no—or at least, not unless one is immensely gifted.

Talent is all-redeeming and can excuse anything.

Nowadays, painters go much too far, just as writers and realist novelists do. There is no way of telling where they’ll draw the line.” Yet in his time he was honored by many societies and academies throughout Europe, and he was highly successful in the new ‘galleries’ that formed in Paris. In his

lifetime he painted over 700 paintings and these sold readily, especially to American collectors. He is considered the last representative of the great academic tradition.

Despite the fact that Bouguereau is still considered an artist who concentrated his talent on painting beautiful women and children, few recognize the power of his paintings dealing with masculine images. It is in such journals as The Art of Man where this oversight can be addressed—and corrected. Bouguereau understood male anatomy as well as any artist who has painted in his academic style: the paintings shared here pay homage to an artist whose fame extends well beyond the shepherdess and nymph and mythological femme fatale!

Bouguereau, The Youth of Bacchus, 1884 27

G茅r么me, The Black Poet, 33 x 57 in. 1882

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Seeking Sensuality by Grady Harp style was a successful fusion of the French Academic style of Neo-classicism’s universal themes and the psychological dramas inherent in the Romantics, a style viewed as ‘historical genre painting.’ Gérôme was popular and generous with his fellow students and৲was a particular favorite of his teacher, so much so that he accompanied Delaroache to Rome for a year described as the best time of his life, studying not only the ruins of an ancient civilization but also the accoutrements such as gladiator tools and costumes that would serve him well in future paintings such as PolliceVerso, Gaulish Gladiator, and The Christian Martyrs Last Prayer. Unfortunately a bout of typhoid fever ended his stay and he returned to Paris to prepare paintings for the Salon–so important to success in Paris and the art world in general.

The world knows Jean-Léon Gérôme as a painter of nudes, especially females, cavorting in luminous mythological settings or at bath or in slave markets of the painter’s signature obsession with things Oriental. He enjoyed a very successful career, being one of the first painters to be associated with a dealer– Adolphe Goupil, who was also his publisher (and eventually his father-in-law!) and was successful financially, his paintings being all the rage in Paris and abroad. Gérôme’s oeuvre of beautifully painted voluptuous women, however, was not limited to that popular idiom. It is of note in examining his entire output just how fascinated he was of things masculine, both painting stories from history that involved only males, and also in his often more erotic paintings we will examine here.

Born in Vesoul, France in 1834, the first son of Pierre Gérôme, a goldsmith who provided his household with an appreciation of luxury, Gérôme৲was noted early on to have a penchant for drawing, and in 1840 at the age of 16 he moved to Paris where he studied with the famous Paul Delaroache, a painter whose

In 1847 Gérôme painted The Cock Fight, interestingly featuring a nude young male along with the fighting birds, a very secondary partially clothed female in the background. The painting became a favorite of poet and critic Théophile Gautier whose review of the work in essence launched Gérôme’s career.

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Gérôme, The Cock Fight, 80 x 56 in. 1847

Of note, one of Gautier’s more controversial novels, MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN, concerns a cross dressing intrigue: one character, D’Albert, explores the possibility of gender reversal or same sex love. The relationship between Gautier and Gérôme appears to be only that of a champion of a new artist, though Gautier’s strong defense of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Decadence won him the esteem of fellow artists Balzac, Proust, Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde! The freedom of at least implicit sexual innuendoes in all their works may indeed be a bond worth exploring. The 1857 painting Duel after a Masquerade Ball appears now as a culmination of the approaches to the arts by all of these men.

Gérôme, Gaulish Gladiator, 33 x 22 cm 1872

Gérôme, Police Verso, 59 x 38 in. 1872

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Gérôme, Duel After a Masquerade Ball, 20 x 28 in, 1857

Gérôme found success in his works depicting moments in history, paintings that almost invariably were composed of male subjects as in The Death of Caesar where the camaraderie of evil leaves the Senate and the murdered body of Caesar, his decorum intact with his bloodied face covered, dramatically alone. Or in The Pyrrhic Dance where the male audience plays instruments and watches as two men dance with swords and shields, performing in the manner of battle, but for entertainment. He also drew admiration for his ‘portraits’ of single men of history as in Diogenes with his dogs, the sensitive depiction of a wellmuscled prisoner in Cave Canem (Beware the Dog), and the outraged Cyclops Polyphemus hurling stones at the fleeing Odysseus.

For many of the admirers of the art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, his most popular paintings were those from his ‘Orientalist’ period, paintings greatly influenced by his travels to Turkey and Egypt in 1855, especially after his paintings resulting from these excursions won such acclaim in Paris. He traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, learned Arabic, and was given entry into places few other visitors shared. From these exposures he created many paintings of his signature nude women in exotic settings, but he also was drawn to the masculine aspects of the society he discovered and shared. These paintings were rich in saturated color, in content that include both the business and the entertainment of men. The business of The Carpet Market, the solitary humor of Arnaut Blowing Smoke in his Dog’s Nose, and the erotic suggestions of the entertainment in Whirling Dervishes (pg. 76) are all moments in Oriental realm made available to the world by Gérôme.

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Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, 48 x 33 in. 1870

Though Jean-Léon Gérôme gained fame and financial success as an artist who sold well not only in Paris but in the rest of the world as well, he was unable to adjust to the ‘new’ trends in art that rejected his style in favor of Impressionism. He was vocal in his criticism of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) and Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and gradually his standing in the art world submerged. Gérôme died in 1904. It is only in the recent past the world has resurrected interest and appreciation for his particular gift to the world of Art. He is now the subject of retrospective exhibitions and an increasing number of monographs. Perhaps the public will now appreciate his meticulously produced paintings not only for the famous nude women, but also for his insight into the sensual psyche of men.

But it is in the particularly sensuous and homoerotic painting The Serpent Charmer that Gérôme was able to depict a nubile naked lad in tandem with his writhing snake arousing lustful admiration from the court of men admirers.

When Gérôme returned to Paris to paint in his studio he carried with him these Oriental images and painted his models in the costumes and paraphernalia he had gathered from his travels–men and boys with attendant hookahs, vases, knives, headdresses and garments–selling these portraits as fast as he could paint them: The Black Poet, Black Bashi-Bazouk, The Pelt Merchant of Cairo and Markos Botsaris are fine examples of these.

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G茅r么me, Pelt Merchant of Cairo, 20 x 24 in. 1869

G茅r么me, Diogenes, 39 x 30 in. 1880

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THOMAS EAKINS: Some Light on the Conundrum by Grady Harp ‘Eakins considered the body amazingly beautiful and a remarkable mechanism of movement. In his images from the late nineteenth-century of the athletic figure in action, Eakins created a new modern American hero; the sportsman–who can still be admired today by athletes and sports enthusiasts, as well as connoisseurs of great art.’ ~Ilene Susan Fort

profession of painting. He was a Realist, having traveled from his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to study in Paris’ L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts with that giant teacher and practitioner of classical realistic painting, Jean-Léon Gérôme. And while he assiduously absorbed all that Gérôme would instill in him, he was less interested in the filigree and excesses that decorated his master’s canvases than he was with the nudity and verity that would inform his paintings throughout his career. His excursions to Spain introduced him to the bold, raw passion of the works of Velázquez and Ribera and it was this combination of approaches to the human figure that he brought back to his work in the United States.

In a letter to his father in the year 1868 Thomas Eakins put forth his aesthetic stance that would remain in focus throughout his career: "She [the female nude] is the most beautiful thing there is in the world except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited ... It would be a godsend to see a fine man model painted in the studio with the bare walls, alongside of the smiling smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amidst the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle wax flowers & purling streams running melodious up & down the hills especially up. I hate affectation."

Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (1844 -1916) is widely hailed today as one of the most important artists in American history. Though Eakins’ early interest was in anatomy as observed in the operating theater and the dissection tables of Jefferson Medical College, The Gross Clinic, 1857, even to the point of considering a career as a surgeon, his early drawing skills were encouraged by his calligrapher father and he transferred his passion for the human body to the

Since his childhood Eakins had been obsessed with sports–swimming, wrestling, rowing, sailing and gymnastics–and his first paintings mirrored those preoccupations with the male form pushing the boundaries of showmanship and competition. The Biglin Brothers Racing, Sailing, Max Schmitt in Single Scull and Turning the Stake are prime examples

Facing Page, Eakins, Salutat, oil on canvas, 9 3/4" X 39 3/4", 1898

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Eakins, The Swimming Hole, oil on canvas, 32 3/4" X 96 1/4", 1884-85

of his study of the figure in athletic activity while still maintaining his ability to paint the landscape of Pennsylvania like few others, as in Arcadia. But Eakins would also paint from the model either in his studio or in the gymnasium, producing such works as The Wrestlers, a painting that capitalized on the sensual coming together of two male bodies. And other paintings of his athletic genre approach observer sports such as boxing, as so atmospherically described in Salutat and Between Rounds.

most influential in providing visual material that caught in slow sequential motion the running figure, the male form in action. Eakins quickly adapted Muybridge’s motion studies to create his own series of the male nude models in the process of jumping, running and other forms of interaction. Photography would become an important adjuvant to his career as his many extant photographs of nude men in groups that at time included the artist, such as in the accompanying photographs suggest. But perhaps his most famous photographs of art students at the swimming hole, Art Students Bathing, would lead him to paint one of his

In the 1870s Eakins encountered the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the man likely

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most controversial paintings, The Swimming Hole.

Eakins’ insistence on painting from the nude figure was not only a major contribution to the understanding of human anatomy as he taught art at the Pennsylvania Academy, but also the signal of a long struggle with the mores of the times. His “Naked Series” were nude photos of students and professional models which were taken to show real human anatomy from several specific angles, and were often hung up and displayed for study at the school. His demand that these be part of his teaching, in addition to a little scandal of removing the loin cloth from male models in the presence of female students, resulted in his humiliating dismissal from the Academy.

So what do we learn from the man whose eye demanded realism and whose interest was in the nude male figure as is easily seen in the numerous photographs he took of his ‘special friends’ and students? Biographers either approach or completely avoid the sexual implications these preoccupations suggest. Eakins was married but it is felt by some that his wife completely accepted what now seems evident—that he was homosexual in his friendships and in his obsession with the male nude—photographs of nude boys and students and men—and his paintings such as the Swimming canvas that is one of his finest achievements. But the term homosexual was not even created during Eakins' time and it is a well-established fact that male-male relationships that explored sexuality were far more common in the first half of the 19th century than in later times. Eakins suffered periods of depression and conflicted emotions and these aspects of his personality perhaps gave him the ability to inform his portraits and paintings of the inner aspects of the model he so carefully and realistically portrayed.

Photographs, 1883-85

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Eakins, Between Rounds, oil on canvas, 50 1/8" X 39 7/8", 1898-99

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Eakins, Turning the Stake, oil on canvas, 40 1/4" X 60 1/4", 1873

Thomas Eakins, friend and portraitist of Walt Whitman and contemporary of Henry James, lead a puzzling life, a life that from one vantage was the dominant influence on American art while from a different vantage was a man plagued by demons not of his own making. Perhaps in today’s more open climes he can be viewed for all aspects of what has made him the standard bearer of the finest in American art.

‘As a supreme realist, Eakins appeared heavy and vulgar to a public that thought of art, and culture in general, largely in terms of a graceful sentimentality.

Today he seems to us to have recorded his fellow Americans with a perception that was often as tender as it was vigorous, and to have preserved for us the essence of an American life which, indeed, he did not idealize—because it seemed to him beautiful beyond the necessity of idealization.’ ~John Canaday

Eakins, The Wrestlers, oil on canvas, 48 3/8" X 60", 1899

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Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1801

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JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID and the Birth of Neoclassicism: Revolutionaries as Mythic Heroes

he created a cerebral form of history painting that dispensed with the superficialities of Rococo filigree and focused on classical austerity and severity with a sense of involvement that incorporated the moral climate of the last of the old regime. But his devotion to the meaningful men in his life continued to challenge his stability. It is said that when his finest pupil Jean-Germain Drouais died of smallpox at the tender age of 24, David grieved ‘I have lost my emulation.’ And he was again so distraught at the death of his hero and close friend Jean-Claude Marat—physician, political theorist and scientist best known as a radical journalist of fiery character and uncompromising stance toward "enemies of the revolution" and basic reforms for the poorest members of society—that, when Marat was murdered by Charlotte Corday, David painted one of his most famous works, The Death of Marat, 1793, to honor his memory.

The life and times of Jacques-Louis David (17481825) and his contribution to art belies the adage that art and politics are immiscible. David’s life began with tragedies: at age nine his father was killed in a duel. Jacques-Louis sustained a deep facial wound in a fencing incident, disfiguring his face with a tumor and resulting in a speech defect, making him a poor student and the brunt of ridicule. He committed to art and ultimately entered the Royal Academy in Paris, but after multiple attempts to win the coveted Prix de Rome he attempted to starve himself to death in revolt, only to finally win his Prix de Rome in 1774. His subsequent travels to Italy introduced him to the grandeur of the ruins of Rome and the Italian Masters. It was here that he painted his famous The Oath of Horatii, 1784 and The Death of Socrates, 1787. Already David was emotionally committed to the coming Revolution and he depicted the heroes of that movement as powerful gladiators ready for the new arena.

When another close friend, the political activist Maximilien Robespierre, fell from power, David was arrested and narrowly escaped execution in the political backlash following his friend’s overthrow, and for a time he turned his back on politics to concentrate on his art, only to find himself again thrown into the political limelight with his fervent embrace of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The emotionally fragile Jacques-Louis David was to become the artist most closely associated with the French Revolution. Both as a painter and a teacher

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Jacques-Louis David, Nude Known as Hector, 1778

This loyalty formed the foundation of some of David's most imposing paintings, from the equestrian portraits of Napoleon (Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1801) to the pomp of The Coronation of the Emperor and Empress, 1806, to the grandeur of The Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1799, and Leonidas at the Pass of Thermopylae, 1814. These two important works were conceived as a pair and started while David was in prison though the latter work was only unveiled in 1814. But once again, David's political hopes were dashed with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, which led the painter into self-imposed exile in Brussels, where he died a decade later.

Jacques-Louis David’s neoclassical art is defined by its classical form, structure, clarity, and his particular form of realism. His work may have been obsessed with the naked form suggested by the fact that David sketched or drew all of his figures in the nude, subsequently finishing them as clothed figures. In addition to his grand tableaux he favored detailed studies of the masculine form, as in his emotionally involving and sensuous Nude Known as Hector, 1778; Nude Known as Patroclus, 1780; the vaguely effeminate Stanislaw Kostka Potocki, 1781; and the male dominated Paris and Helen, 1788.

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Jacques-Louis David, Stanislaw Kostka Potocki, 1781

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His pupils or descendents include Girodet (1767-1824; The Sleep of Endymion, 1793) and Ingres (1780-1867; Oedipus and Sphinx; 1818). David’s founding of the neoclassical school of painting is apparent in the works of both of these fine painters.

In the past century the work of JacquesLouis David fell into disrepute, being criticized for it’s formality of structure and glorification of pompous ideas– aspects of painting that remained points of contention as painting grew more concerned with raw human passions through the movements of Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism–until the recent past, when there has been a renewed interest in the gesture and ideal male image so honored in the works of David.

Jacques-Louis David, Nude known as Patroclus, 1780

Because David’s approach to the heroic figure grew out of his response and involvement with the Revolutionary Era, could it be possible that a similar need for honoring the human form by current artists is in response to dismay over the troubled chaos of the governments around the globe today? Art is prescient as well as responsive: Jacques-Louis David’s contribution to art history is worthy of our careful attention.

“In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.” ~ Jacques-Louis David Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793

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Girodet, The Sleep Of Endymion, 1793

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787

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Ingres, Oedipus and Sphinx, 1808

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Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of Horatii, 1784

Jacques-Louis David, Leonidas at Thermopylae, 1814

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THE DIVINE CONFORMIST Despite the fact that Guido Reni’s name does not rank among the Baroque Masters–Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Vermeer and Poussin–as immediately notable, he was during his lifetime he was considered an important artist.

His subject matter was almost entirely biblical in content and when not depicting innumerable scenes of the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Crucifixion, his focus was on mythological tales. In many ways Reni’s paintings reflected spiritual visions rather than works of intense drama. There is a term ‘seicentismo’ that best describes both the art th of the 17 century and especially that of Guido Reni —an era of triumph of that bombastic, meaningless and paradoxical style: Reni’s art was persuasively and beautifully lyrical. One of his most famous paintings, The Abduction of Helen, 1626, is the epitome of this seicentismo style, the sort of images that have persisted on Catholic saints cards of today.

In retrospect it is this contrast between Reni’s somewhat vapid and less than dramatic religious paintings and the visceral, earthy, andocentric paintings of his colleagues that suggests why his art th fell into disrepute later, in the 19 century.

By Grady Harp Guido Reni (1575 –1642) – the name does not immediately conjure particular paintings for most.

Nor is the name more than vaguely recognizable for many art devotees. But Guido Reni’s paintings (Atalanta and Hippomenes, 1612) and frescoes (Aurora, 1614) and drawings usually bring the ‘a-ha!’ experience, as his visual legacy is more memorable than his rather idiosyncratic personal history. During th the 17 century he was one of the most celebrated artists and his reflection of the grandeur of his Renaissance predecessors Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo allowed him to be referred to similarly as the ‘Divine’ Guido Reni—for a while. Why then is this artist not recognized in the same echelon as his contemporaries? An examination of the manner in which his personality and lifestyle influenced him may clarify that question.

Reni was an Italian painter of the high Baroque style from Bologna. Other painters from this period include the Italians Caravaggio, Gentileschi, and Tiepolo; the Dutch Rembrandt, Vermeer, and van Ruisdael; the French Poussin, de La Tour, and Lorrain; the Flemish Rubens, van Dyck, and Breughel the Elder; and the Spanish Ribera, Velázquez, and Zurbarán. The term Baroque was initially used with a derogatory meaning, to underline the excesses of its emphasis, to describe its eccentric redundancy and noisy abundance of details, which sharply contrasted the clear and sober rationality of the Renaissance.

What little we do know about the man Guido Reni comes from Reni’s associate and biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia who informs us that Reni was an odd sort: he feared women, remained a virgin, believed in the occult and witchcraft, was a compulsive gambler, and was obsessed with money and luxury. He apparently was physically angelic

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Guido Reni, The Abduction of Helen, 1626

(artists often modeled images of angels on Reni’s appearance), blushed easily, and even portrayed himself as a woman in the painting St. Benedict Presented with Gifts by Farmers, 1604! Malvasia suggests Reni had ‘atypical sexuality’: ‘he was neither heterosexual nor homosexual but absolutely sexless. His obsessive fear of women reached the point where he believed their slightest touch might poison him. Finding a woman's blouse in his laundry left him terrified. There was a relationship between the asceticism of his life and the subdued, withdrawn quality of his art.

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Guido Reni, Atalante et Hippomene, 1612

approach to the depiction of the male form with the attendant sexual overtones evident. And as well, his approach to the Christ figure reveals a muscular figure accompanied by a handsome young Angel as in Christ Appearing to the Virgin, 1608.

But this ‘asexuality’ leans toward an infatuation, even worship, of the male body. Reni’s multiple paintings of Saint Sebastian, 1615, 1617, etc., not only reveal a Sebastian as a man of great physical beauty but also suggest erotic interpretations of martyred men in sexual masochism. Even in his deeply religious paintings such as Ecce Homo, 1639, The Victorious Samson, 1612, David with the Head of Goliath, 1605, Saint Michael Defeating Satan, 1636, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1604-5, and The Baptism of Christ, 1623, and especially in the painting The Fall of the Giants, 1638, is his erotic

Reni’s mythological paintings are ripe with passion, a passion more obviously focused on his male figures than their female counterparts. In The Rape of Deianeira by the Centaur Nessus, 1620, Hercules on the Pyre, 1617, Hercules Vanquishing the Hydra, 1621, and Bacchus and Ariadne, 1620 the focus

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Guido Reni, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1620 52

is on the massive muscularity of his male models.

Despite his frequent depictions of swooning and weeping women, Reni was rabidly misogynistic which may explain why he reportedly remained a virgin. He was a man vain in appearance, deeply religious, neurotically terrified of witches, and obsessed with money–living in splendor when he returned to Bologna to form an important Bolognese school after he had established himself in the art world in Rome.

The art of Guido Reni fell into disrepute in the 19th century and this is likely due to the later works he produced from his school in Bologna. He had many devoted students and their paintings fell into the same tendency to depict surface sentiment with at times empty pretentiousness. He worked to soften the dark shadowy peasantry of Caravaggio and in doing so his works became gradually more premeditated and superficial in style and in content.

His handling of the nude became studies in perfection of form: few of his contemporary painters could equal the quality of detail in the hands and feet of his figures. When he was good he was very good indeed, and when he was not, his paintings became veiled with rather cheap sentiment. At his best he produced the magnificent The Rape of Deianeira by the Centaur Nessus. As he diluted his powers he offered canvases such as The Circumcision of the Child Jesus, 1635, where his once vibrant colors and sophisticated formalism of drapery and pose fade into pale, thinly painted and for the most part disturbingly delicate and banal studies. By the time of his death in Bologna in 1642 he had become and imitation of himself.

Guido Reni, The Circumcision of Jesus (detail) 1635

With gender studies encouraging the re-examination of artists of the past, perhaps the art of Guido Reni will be better understood and appreciated as the expressions of a sexually conflicted man whose surface beauty informed his paintings, settling for appearance rather than probing truth. Time and the vagaries of taste may return him to the status of ‘Divine.’ Guido Reni, Saint Michael, 1636

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Guido Reni, Aurora, 1614

Guido Reni, Crucifixion of St. Peter, 1604-5

Reni, The Rape of Deianeira by the Centaur Nessus, 1620

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Guido Reni, The Victorious Samson, 1612

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Cornelius McCarthy, 1935-2009

Peter Dobson has been an admirer of Cornelius McCarthy’s work for many years and collaborated with him on a book about his paintings which was published by the Adonis Art Gallery, London, in 2007.

Soon after the artist’s sudden death in November 2009, he began work on McCarthy’s archive and was commissioned to write his biography. Here he reflects on McCarthy’s achievements and examines the ways in which his life and art were interrelated.

AOM: Can you give us a micro-biography here about his upbringing and education as an artist?

P.D.: Yes. In many ways it was his early life which determined the direction he took. He was born in 1935 into a working-class Irish Catholic family in the East End of London. This was one of the most culturally diverse parts of the city with its own distinctive social, educational and religious institutions, and it was these, fortuitously, which offered him the opportunities he needed. So the earliest visual art he remembered were the devotional images with which he was brought up— pictures by Raphael and other Italian masters. His parents encouraged his artistic talents from the beginning, and while he was still a schoolboy he attended evening classes at Toynbee Hall, the local University Settlement project, where he studied art history and (with special permission because he was so young) life drawing. At about the same time he enrolled for classes at the Whitechapel Art Gallery nearby, which was already pioneering art education in the area and later became an important showcase for the modernist movement. This special East End milieu was obviously a formative influence on his development, and certain persistent memories from this time—the grand baroque churches, the young working-class men who labored in the docks and workshops—haunted his imagination all his life.

In 1950 he won a place at Goldsmiths’ College of Art, within commuting distance, where he seems to have undergone a rigorous training in techniques and materials. By the time he left at age 18 he was already an accomplished draughtsman and a

Art Of Man: What is it about McCarthy’s work which attracts your interest?

Peter Dobson: It’s quite difficult to describe! There’s something about the way his pictures draw your eye into a dynamic process of integration and balance, making you feel the tension between pattern-making and representation, which I find fascinating. And the contrast of form and tone, the figures sensuously three-dimensional but also part of a linear surface design where zones of color can be read both as painted surface and as foreground and background, always seems to be reaching a point of equilibrium as you look. Yet there is great clarity and often an impression of calm. His approach to the depiction of the human body, I think, often achieves a strong sense of intimacy and erotic presence and at the same time creates respect and emotional distance.

This seems to me very special.

Left: McCarthy, Summer House-Boy, oil on canvas, 102x81 cm. 2003, Private collection of David Jarrett

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This may in part reflect his deep religious conviction (and the idea that God made Man in His own image) but of course the concept was formulated in classical times and is familiar from art history. You recognized this classical inspiration when you included McCarthy in your 2009 book Powerfully Beautiful . Another motivating force, a focusing mechanism if you like, must have been the strong personal attraction he felt towards the male form.

He said that all his life he tried to do justice to its sculptural qualities and its sensual appeal. He was a th st modern artist living in the 20 and 21 century, so the traditional forms are given a contemporary inflection. In his later work he was able to explore sexuality and the erotic much more boldly. Maybe it’s here that he made his greatest contribution.

sensitive colorist (some work from this period still survives). Before doing his National Service he managed a visit to Italy, where he said seeing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes fulfilled a childhood ambition. This was the first of many journeys abroad to see paintings and art collections in Europe, Russia and the United States. In a very real sense, I think, he never stopped looking and learning.

AOM: How did you come to know him?

P.D.: I was introduced to him by his long-term partner Alec Ayres. All three of us worked for the same local authority at the time, Tower Hamlets in the East End of London. I soon became a regular visitor at Alec’s home in Stepney. We had interests in common, and talked endlessly about art, music and literature.

AOM: How would you describe McCarthy the man?

P.D.: Charming, easy to be with, good company, genuinely interested in other people. If necessary he could show great empathy and be very supportive.

He and Alec had a talent for making friends (this is still true of Alec), and the house they shared in London and later on in Norfolk became a sort of haven for many visitors. There was always stimulating talk, books, pictures and music, wonderful food and a lot of laughter. In Norfolk there was also the large peaceful garden which McCarthy designed and planted. As I got to know him better I realized he had great depth. He was the most visually literate person I’ve ever met, with an encyclopedic knowledge. Yet he remained quite modest. He was also a serious reader, a thinker, and a lifelong Catholic who nonetheless viewed the Church with a critical eye, not least because he had a strong sense of social justice. But for me he eventually became above all an inspiring friend, a creative artist who seemed happy to share his ideas, to allow me into his studio and to show me work in progress. This was a great privilege.

Cornelius McCarthy and his partner Alec Ayres

AOM: Why do you feel he is important to the world of figure painting?

P.D.: First of all I think it’s clear that his work connects with the mainstream, with art going back to the Renaissance and even beyond, to classical Greece. By this I mean that he shares a certain attitude to the human body—and in particular the male body—which sees it as a form of the ideal.

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McCarthy, Deposition Thurlands Drove, oil on canvas, 21.5x28 in. 1992

McCarthy, Black Bathers, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in. 1999

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McCarthy, Favorite Model, acrylic on canvas, 70x38 cm. 2007 60

AOM: Why do you think he chose to paint the male figure at a time he knew it would be unpopular?

P.D.: I don’t think it was a matter of choice exactly.

He said that he thought the male form was the most beautiful in the world, so of course it became a main subject. But he also painted religious pictures, landscape, still life and some fine portraits. Those have not received as much attention. Probably the focus on the male figure was the result of several factors: its centrality in the art he loved most, his own sexual orientation, political and social changes during his lifetime, especially the debates around sexual identity, his response to the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland or the ravages of the AIDS epidemic… if we contextualize his work it becomes possible to see it as a real contribution to these discourses and struggles.

AOM: Was McCarthy influenced by any other artists? Did he socialize with any other artists?

P.D.: Picasso was the influence he acknowledged most often. The 1960 Tate Gallery exhibition in London made a great impression on him. This can be seen in the economy of line in McCarthy’s work, and in many of the still life details in his paintings. The British painter Keith Vaughan was also influential, showing him how the male figure could be a subject in its own right, freed from its usual historical or religious context and seen instead in everyday settings. There are elements from other artists which can be detected in his mature style, I think— Poussin’s warm tonalities and strong sense of pictorial structure, for example—but all these influences are thoroughly absorbed and given a distinctly modern inflection which is characteristic of McCarthy’s vision.

AOM: What is it about his technique or approach that sets his work apart from other artists working with the male figure?

P.D.: Often the way the figure is integrated into the setting is particularly striking. The body is invariably drawn realistically, with an incisive, containing line, the limbs, muscles and faces sensitively modeled, while the surroundings—still life, enclosed spaces, landscape—are less governed by perspective and frequently rendered as surface pattern. This introduces a pleasing tension between perspective with its illusion of solid form, and flat pattern which insists on the real two-dimensional painted surface.

The relationship between the two is so deftly handled that the linear rhythms and contrasts of light and shade are very subtle. The way he uses color is distinctive too. Sometimes it has a structural effect, emphasizing the surface pattern with zones or blocks of flat pigment, sometimes it’s deployed more subjectively, creating a particular mood with carefully chosen combinations of tones. In the late 1990s he experimented with his own version of divisionism, or ‘optical mixing’, overlaying parts of the painted surface with a mosaic of small colored spots. The result was a different kind of overall unity which looks especially rich and luminous.

He certainly took an interest in some of his contemporaries, becoming friends with the Serbian artist Nebojsa Zdravkovic whom he met through the Adonis Art Gallery in London where they both exhibited regularly, and corresponding with Hannes Steinert in Stuttgart. He also admired the work of British artist Michael Leonard, and was very pleased to learn that Leonard had bought something of his.

The young artist, Cornelius McCarthy, circa 1955

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AOM: How has his work changed over the years?

P.D.: That’s a particularly interesting question. The first picture of his that I recall seeing was a very large Agony in the Garden in glowing colors and with strongly drawn sculptural figures reminiscent of Graham Sutherland. This must have been in the late 1960s. Later there were architectural studies of Hawksmoor’s East End churches (a subject he returned to) and a series of small gouaches inspired

by Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations poems. It was some time afterwards that I encountered one of his paintings of nude youths in a landscape. I’d never seen anything quite like this before. It was then I realized McCarthy was a serious artist. His style evolved quite quickly, I think, absorbing influences and becoming more personal. I’d say that by the mid-1970s his work was already distinctive and instantly recognizable.

AOM: Did he encounter any issues about having the male figure in his work?

P.D.: It’s possible. He once told me he had been snubbed by a gallery in Cambridge, although I don’t know the precise details. We need to remember that his early exhibitions featured still life, townscape, portraits and religious pictures. It was only later, at more specialized galleries like St. Jude’s in the late 1980s and Adonis Art from 1996, that he was able to have shows completely dedicated to the male form.

By then attitudes had softened somewhat, at least in London.

AOM: Did he gain more acceptance as his career advanced and matured?

P.D.: I think so, though it was still limited. He never really broke through to general recognition. In the 1980s, GMP (Gay Men’s Press) used several of his pictures for paperback book covers, and published Interiors, in 1987. But it was Stewart Hardman and the Adonis Art Gallery exhibitions that really enhanced his reputation. Up until then he had been known by a small circle of admirers and collectors.

McCarthy had a whole series of quality one-man shows at the Adonis over a period of about fourteen years, usually organized around a theme, and presenting some of his finest work. In 2007 the Gallery published a handsomely illustrated monograph on McCarthy’s paintings documenting eight of these exhibitions held between 1996 and 2007. The development of the internet also played a part in increasing sales and creating interest abroad.

Last year’s Memorial Exhibition was probably the most comprehensive survey of his work ever shown—it drew on a career of over fifty years and ranged from drawings, etchings and pastels to paintings in acrylic, gouache and oil on canvas, and was accompanied by a thirty-two-page catalogue.

I’m glad to say it seems to have been a commercial success.

He continued to develop his technique all through his career, exploring oil paint, gouache (which he seems to have found especially congenial), etching, lino-cuts, pastels and acrylic, and drawing all the time. His sketchbooks are full of wonderful things.

Changes in subject matter were partly a response to different working environments; in London he painted a whole series of figures in interiors. Some of these are reproduced in the 1987 book titled Interiors, Paintings by Cornelius McCarthy). After he and Alec moved to Norfolk in 1990, the figures are more often shown in garden settings or in the flat East Anglian landscape with its riverside villages and huge skies. Another very fine series depicted bathers in full sunlight on the vast sandy beaches of the north Norfolk coast. But he also engaged with overwhelming current events like the troubles in Northern Ireland or the effects of the AIDS epidemic, reinterpreting the traditional religious imagery of the Stations of the Cross or the Pieta or Deposition to meditate on new kinds of suffering.

These pictures are not so well known but many of them are very powerful.

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McCarthy, Their Afternoon Off, oil on canvas, 18x24 in. 2001

McCarthy, Andy and Buster Waiting for Clients, gouache on paper, 14x19 in. 2002.

Private collection of E. Gibbons

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McCarthy, Cliff—Jasmine to Honey Color, oil on canvas, 30x23 cm. 2008 64

Another obvious development, no doubt prompted to some extent by social and legal changes in the UK, is the increasingly frank way he treated sexuality and the erotic in his work. This gradually became more explicit, but because it is integrated so naturally into his pictures and is so sensitively composed and painted, it is never prurient.

evidence of McCarthy’s attitude to certain currents in Catholic teaching and popular culture. That sort of playfulness is a sign of deep seriousness, I think.

AOM: Did he have many exhibitions in his lifetime?

P.D.: Yes. In the 1950s he had pictures accepted for the annual East End Academy shows at the Whitechapel Gallery, but his first one-man show was at the old Stepney Central Library in 1961.

AOM: Do you have a humorous story about his work you can share?

P.D.: He was often amused by comments he overheard at his one-man shows. Recalling these always made him laugh. For instance, “He’s not very good—he paints over the lines.” Or at a private view, “He’s very expensive for a living artist!” (Alec on this occasion caused consternation by quipping, “He’s downstairs. Would you like me to shoot him for you?”) Much later on, in 2006, I remember, his Irish Muse exhibition included a set of four mixedmedia pictures apparently showing a male brothel with titles like ‘The Archdeacon’s Choice’ which provoked the response, “I’ve often been to Dublin but I didn’t know about this. I wonder where it is?”

When I told him that I suspected this venue was largely imaginary he just smiled. He didn’t deny it, but he admitted the captions were his idea.

Important later work was shown at Wood Green in north London and elsewhere during the late 1970s and 80s. In 1987 the first book on his paintings, Interiors, was published. Another breakthrough for his pictures of the male figure came with the two exhibitions at the St Jude’s Gallery in Kensington, London, in 1989 and 1991. However, there’s no doubt his most significant exhibitions were those at the Adonis Gallery. These were really remarkable for sheer range and quality, and benefited from the fact that after he retired in 1988 he was able to paint nearly every day and became much more prolific.

The 2007 book documents these Adonis Gallery shows in some detail. More recently he had graphic work and paintings exhibited at the Galerie Mooiman in Groningen, The Netherlands, especially in 2010 as part of their Beauty Without Borders show.

AOM: Did he have any secret talents?

P.D.: He was a skilful and witty caricaturist. From time to time he drew observant, affectionate cartoons of friends. These often appeared in his letters, and captured personal traits or physical features very cleverly. They were also rather beautiful. But some of them could have a sharp polemical edge. Going through his sketchbooks last year I came across a little cartoon character he had created, a sort of cross between Eminem and the present Pope, spewing anti-gay slogans and called Cardinal Rapsinger! Although regrettably this idea had never gone further than the pages of a sketchbook it struck me as very succinct and graphic

AOM: Did McCarthy have a regular job as well?

P.D.: He worked in local government for most of his life. It was only after his retirement that he was able to devote himself to painting full-time.

AOM: Did he collect art himself?

P.D.: He was an enthusiastic collector of etchings and prints for many years, particularly British artists like Turner, Samuel Palmer and David Jones.

Subsequently, though, I think he sold a lot of these.

He also owned good examples of work by artists he’d got to know during his time as Arts and Publicity Officer for the London Borough of Haringey, between 1972 and 1988.

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AOM: Where can one see his work now?

P.D.: The Adonis Art Gallery in London has the largest selection, including some wonderful paintings from recent exhibitions, and two publications on his work which are still available.

There are also good pictures at Galerie Mooi-man in Groningen. (See pages 72-73)

AOM: How did he find or meet his models?

P.D.: I think they were nearly all acquaintances, friends or work colleagues. It’s interesting how he responded to their individual characteristics: different models inspired such a variety of design or treatment. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, but it’s fascinating to see how, for example, the coloring or physique of a particular model apparently suggested the tonal values in a painting or a more sculptural rendering of the body, or indeed the whole setting or situation.

AOM: I understand you are writing his biography.

Can you tell us something about this?

P.D.: Yes. I’ve been busy with the research since December 2009. This has involved working on his archive, interviewing family and friends, and contacting admirers and collectors. People have been very generous with their time, sharing their memories and insights with me. It’s been a great privilege. I’ve already accumulated a lot of material but inevitably there are gaps, and topics which need further investigation.

AOM: How widely collected is McCarthy?

P.D.: He seems to have a very wide appeal. As far as I know his pictures are now in private collections all over the world: in Europe (Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, The UK), in Japan, and in the United States.

AOM: Does he have work in any special collections?

P.D.: Well, apart from one painting in the permanent collection at the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York (www.leslielohman.org) I have to say ‘not yet’. We hope eventually to place at least one of his important pieces in a public gallery in the UK, but this will probably require patient negotiation and depends on raising the artist’s profile in Britain. There are also fine religious paintings which would be suitable for a church setting, so I remain optimistic.

AOM: If someone has a work by McCarthy, or information that might be useful, should they contact you?

P.D.: Certainly. I’d be most grateful. It would be particularly interesting to know what they have, how they first came across his work, what attracted them to it and so on. Perhaps using e-mail would be the easiest way to reach me: my address is peterdobsonmaltcl@yahoo.co.uk Thank you for inviting me to talk about McCarthy and for the opportunity to extend my research further afield.

AOM: How will his work be viewed in the future?

P.D.: It’s hard to predict. I’m convinced this is an important body of work, particularly in its engagement with sexual politics, and the debate about the value of representational as opposed to abstract art. Many of the religious paintings address the meaning of suffering. These are themes which are very much of now, but they’re also timeless. And although to us McCarthy’s work may look nuanced and eclectic, it radiates a compassionate and ultimately joyful vision of the world. Maybe that’s his gift to posterity.

Cornelius McCarthy is reported to have created about 1000 works since 1950. Galleries that currently carry the works of Cornelius McCarthy are in the advertisements that follow this article and in the collection of the Leslie Lohman Gay Arts Foundation of New York, www.leslielohman.org. If you contact any of them, please let them know you heard about their galleries through this book, The Art of Man. ~www.TheArtOfMan.net

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AGNOLO BRONZINO: Court Artist of the Medicis

By Grady Harp Mannerist painter and poet Agnolo di Cosimo Bronzino (1503-1572) was an enigma from his childhood until he died. The son of a butcher, his given name was Agnolo di Cosimo, yet he became known as Il Bronzino, or Agnolo Bronzino likely due to the striking color of his auburn hair. He demonstrated his skills as an artist by the age of 13 and became the pupil—and model—for mannerist painter and portraitist Jacopo Pontormo (14941557). A pause for a moment of definition of an often misunderstood term: the Mannerism period started in 1520 and ended in 1600 and was an art style that depicted the human form in artificial colors, unrealistic proportions, off beat perspective, complex composition, and exaggerated or elongated figures. Mannerists rebelled against the perfectly balanced classicism of the Renaissance painters and in many ways, though accused of disrupting the unity of the Renaissance classicism, created an estimable bridge between the Renaissance period and the emotional Baroque movement that followed in the 17th century. Pontormo introduced Bronzino to this style of painting but it was Bronzino who ultimately defined it.

Left: Bronzino, Portrait of Lodovico Capponi, oil on canvas, 1550

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Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I as Orpheus, oil on wood, 1539

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Bronzino, Andrea Doria as Neptune, oil on canvas, 1540

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In addition to painting, Bronzino was also a poet, a cheeky man who loved the shady side of society and was fond of composing burlesque sonnets, often obscene and erotic with many allusions to homoerotic references. A number of Bronzino’s poems referenced with some ardor the night rough trade of the Florentine streets. His intellect allowed him to use an uncanny play on words, or double entendre, such as the Italian word pennello, a word that could mean either ‘paintbrush’ or ‘penis’ as in the following naughty poem: Del Pennello (On the Paintbrush, or, On the Penis) Who is the person who does not take pleasure in discussing the things that this thing does, which is born from the bristle or tail hair? And there is no man or woman so savage that he or she does not seek to have some of its things or to have himself drawn from life. There are those who portray themselves on the bed or in difficult positions, standing up, or seated—those who hold something in hand, those who hide it, those who want to be seen behind another person, those who want to be painted in front of another, those who hold on, those who pretend to fall. I would not know how to recount one of the thousand different actions and extravagant ways; you know that everyone likes variety. It is enough that in order to make it from behind, in front, across, foreshortened, or in perspective one uses the paintbrush for them all.

Bronzino Portrait of Eleanora of Toledo with her son Giovanni de' Medici, oil on panel, 1545

Depending on whether the reader substitutes the phallic meaning for ‘paintbrush’ this poem could easily be descriptions of various sexual positions!

What Bronzino could not say with his brushes and canvas or frescoes he could suggest in his poetry. It is through his sonnets written at the death of his teacher Pontormo that it becomes obvious that the intimacy of the relationship between the two men went far beyond teacher and pupil.

Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici, oil on panel, 1560’s

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Bronzino, Portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, oil on panel, 1532

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And later once Bronzino became the teacher of such fine pupils as Alessandro Allori (1535-1607), he mirrored his relationship with Pontormo and ‘adopted’ the handsome young pupil as his son, a th not unusual 16 century Florentine practice and one that was thought to represent a sexual relationship between and older man and his younger lover. The two artists lived together from 1552 until Bronzini’s death in 1572.

While Bronzino polished his skills as a portraitist, becoming the appointed artist of the court of the Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, he grew in reputation as the premiere portraitist of his time. In this esteemed position he painted not only the his famous portrait of the Duchess Eleanora di Toledo, the beautiful wife of the Duke, but in addition to gaining her facial likeness he added a gown of fabric that is exquisitely detailed—likely a fabric of his own design—in Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo with her Son Giovanni, 1545. He likewise painted elegant portraits of the Duke, not only representing the Duke’s station in Court as in Portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici, 1543 but also constructing his patron’s figure as images of mythology as in Cosimo I de' Medici as Orpheus, 1539, and of religious figures as in Cosimo I de' Medici as St. Sebastian, 1528, and of his son Giovanni de’ Medici as John the Baptist, 1560. His portraits were highly prized for their chillingly naturalistic style, even though the painter saw the portrait as a mask, more representing the social standing, the elegance, the worldly possessions through his attention to lace collars, jewelry, and other decorative aspects of the sitter.

Gradually, Bronzino turned from his ‘frozen in time’ portraits and incorporated his grand depth of study in art history and mythology—a style that prefigures that of Caravaggio and his school.

Top: Bronzino, Noli me tangere, oil, 1561 Right: Bronzino, St. Sebastian, oil on panel, 1533

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Bronzino’s fascination with the male figure is evident in his many drawings of the male nude, as in Standing Nude, 1541, Seated Male Nude, 1565, and Crawling Male Nude, 1548, and Seated Male Youth, 1540. But his paintings of men often drew focus to the radiant, jeweled codpieces sported by the young men of the court as in Portrait of Lodovico Capponi, 1551 and Portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, 1532. His proclivity toward understated eroticism is also suggested in his Portrait of a Young Man,1540 where he manages to bring to the handsome youth the dignity of learning (the two books in his hand) and a suggestion of a feminine bent in the pinky ring on his extended hand. He elects to paint the Admiral Andrea Doria as the king of the sea in Andrea Doria as Neptune, 1545 and his Portrait of a Sculptor, 1550. And as an aberrant novelty to his output he made several studies and paintings of The Dwarf Morgante at Court, 1552, an errant butterfly concealing the genitalia of the robust figure!

Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man, oil on canvas, c. 1530

Though not a religious man, Bronzino could demand a high enough price for his work to execute religious paintings such as Noli me tangere (Christ appears to Mary Magdalene), 1561. The erotic presentation of Christ’s body suggests a fear of a possible physical encounter with the ‘former sinner’, and hence the warning, ‘do not touch me.’ His most famous altarpiece, The Descent of Christ into Limbo, 1552, and The Martyrdom of St Lawrence, 1569, his last great fresco and one that combines all of the characteristic features of Bronzino’s Mannerist art, and sums us his life. St Lawrence, though being roasted on the grill, appears rather aloof of those around him. Beneath the statue of Mercury he painted his self portrait, one of his beloved departed teacher Pontormo, and one of his current paramour Allesandro Allori. The conundrum of his life seems to at last come into focus.

Bronzino, Dwarf Morgante at Court, oil on canvas, 1552

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Bronzino, Portrait of a Sculptor, oil on panel, 1545

Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici in Armor, oil, 1545

Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici, oil, 1543

Bronzino, The Martyrdom of St Lawrence, oil, 1569

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The Inspiration of Icarus

By E. Gibbons The story, completed in 8 AD, has inspired painters, sculptors, jewelers, and playwrights for at least two thousand years. I have collected some samples for you to see here of both classical and contemporary artists. To be sure, there are many more. So many in fact I had considered a book on the subject. For now I will satiate myself with this brief collection and a translation of the original story in Greek, for your enjoyment on the following pages.

The boy who flew too close to the sun is a familiar theme in many works of art. The earliest evidence for the Icarus story comes from a book of Latin poetry titled Metamorphoses by Publius Ovidius Naso. (43 BC—18 AD) He is more popularly known as “Ovid.” His book contained about 250 myths, including the one of Icarus and his father Daedalus.

The dream of flight has been a romantic notion throughout the entire history of man. Though we have planes and rockets, we still dream of that ‘personal freedom’ such an ability would grant us.

The story of Icarus remains relevant because every human has considered this notion of flight at some point in their lives (“wouldn’t it be nice if…”). We have all experienced our own poor decisions in youth. We can empathize with how such a character could rejoice in the power of flight, and be so caught up in it that he would not see the danger. Even in the loss Daedalus experiences, we understand; we all know helplessness based on the poor choices of others we are close to. This combination of experiences—joy, to fear, to regret—resonates with the human condition and keeps this myth alive.

Above: Colin George, Icarus, auto hood ornament, 1924

John Woodrow Kelly, Icarus, oil on canvas, 74 x 50 in.

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Herbert James Draper, The Lament for Icarus, oil on canvas, 72 x 61 in. 1898

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Excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 8 AD …When Minos reached Cretan soil he paid his dues to Jove, with the sacrifice of a hundred bulls, and hung up his war trophies to adorn the palace. The scandal concerning his family grew, and the queen’s unnatural adultery was evident from the birth of a strange hybrid monster. Minos resolved to remove this shame, the Minotaur, from his house, and hide it away in a labyrinth with blind passageways. Daedalus, celebrated for his skill in architecture, laid out the design, and confused the clues to direction, and led the eye into a tortuous maze, by the windings of alternating paths.

No differently from the way in which the watery Maeander deludes the sight, flowing backwards and forwards in its changeable course, through the meadows of Phrygia, facing the running waves advancing to meet it, now directing its uncertain waters towards its source, now towards the open sea: so Daedalus made the endless pathways of the maze, and was scarcely able to recover the entrance himself: the building was as deceptive as that.

by land or sea’ he said ‘but the sky is surely open to us: we will go that way: Minos rules everything but he does not rule the heavens.’ So saying he applied his thought to new invention and altered the natural order of things. He laid down lines of feathers, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. In that way, long ago, the rustic pan-pipes were graduated, with lengthening reeds. Then he fastened them together with thread at the middle, and beeswax at the base, and, when he had arranged them, he flexed each one into a gentle curve, so that they imitated real bird’s wings. His son, Icarus, stood next to him, and, not realizing that he was handling things that would endanger him, caught laughingly at the down that blew in the passing breeze, and softened the yellow beeswax with his thumb, and, in his play, hindered his father’s marvelous work.

In there, Minos walled up the twin form of bull and man, and twice nourished it on Athenian blood, but the third repetition of the nine-year tribute by lot, caused the monster’s downfall. When, through the help of the virgin princess, Ariadne, by rewinding the thread, Theseus, son of Aegeus, won his way back to the elusive threshold, that no one had previously regained, he immediately set sail for Dia, stealing the daughter of Minos away with him, then cruelly abandoned his companion on that shore. Deserted and weeping bitterly, as she was, Bacchus-Liber brought her help and comfort. So that she might shine among the eternal stars, he took the crown from her forehead, and set it in the sky. It soared through the rarified air, and as it soared its jewels changed to bright fires, and took their place, retaining the appearance of a crown, as the Corona Borealis, between the kneeling Hercules and the head of the serpent that Ophiuchus holds.

Lord Frederick Leighton, Icarus and Daedalus, oil on canvas, 54 × 42 in. 1869

Meanwhile Daedalus, hating Crete, and his long exile, and filled with a desire to stand on his native soil, was imprisoned by the waves. ‘He may thwart our escape

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Fran Recacha, Icarus, oil on canvas, 51 x 77 in.

When he had put the last touches to what he had begun, the artificer balanced his own body between the two wings and hovered in the moving air. He instructed the boy as well, saying ‘Let me warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them. Travel between the extremes. And I order you not to aim towards Bootes, the Herdsman, or Helice, the Great Bear, or towards the drawn sword of Orion: take the course I show you!’ At the same time as he laid down the rules of flight, he fitted the newly created wings on the boy’s shoulders. While he worked and issued his warnings the aging man’s cheeks were wet with tears: the father’s hands trembled.

He gave a never to be repeated kiss to his son, and lifting upwards on his wings, flew ahead, anxious for his companion, like a bird, leading her fledglings out of a nest above, into the empty air. He urged the boy to follow, and showed him the dangerous art of flying, moving his own wings, and then looking back at his son. Some angler catching fish with a quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough, saw them, perhaps, and stood there amazed, believing them to be gods able to travel the sky.

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Icarus at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum, designed and fabricated by Karkadoulias Bronze Art A memorial to memorial to graduates from the Air Force and Army Air Corps who lost their lives while in service

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And now Samos, sacred to Juno, lay ahead to the left (Delos and Paros were behind them), Lebinthos, and Calymne, rich in honey, to the right, when the boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher. His nearness to the devouring sun softened the fragrant wax that held the wings, and the wax melted: he flailed with bare arms, but losing his oar-like wings, could not ride the air. Even as his mouth was crying his father’s name, it vanished into the dark blue sea, the Icarian Sea, called after him. The unhappy father, now no longer a father, shouted ‘Icarus, Icarus where are you? Which way should I be looking, to see you?’

‘Icarus’ he called again. Then he caught sight of the feathers on the waves, and cursed his inventions. He laid the body to rest, in a tomb, and the island was named Icaria after his buried child.

Sergei Sergeivich Solomko, Icarus, vintage postcard.

Richard Taddei, Icarus Falling, oil on canvas 42 x 36 in.

Some variations of the story exist, telling that Icarus flew too low and his wings became heavy with the spray of the sea, another story tells that they built a boat and Icarus fell overboard. In all stories however, Icarus dies because of his own hubris. It is a tale that speaks of beauty and youth—and a fatal mistake that results in tragedy.

Blondel, Fall of Icarus, painting on Louvre ceiling, 1818

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Wim Griffith, Icarus, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

Shozo Nagano, Man Reclining, acrylic on shaped canvas, 53 x 54 in.

Photography Credits: Thomas Paul Kiefer for male figurative paintings and Ann Sanfedele for geometric work.

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Shozo Nagano A Retrospective

By Edward Moran As I write these words, I am preparing to fly to New Orleans for the first major exhibition of Shozo Nagano’s shaped canvases since his death on the first of December, 2007. The exhibit, curated by the vibrant Gallery Veriditas in Magazine Street, opened on Friday November 11, two days after what would have been Shozo’s eighty-third birthday. Male figures predominated at the Veriditas exhibit—male figures draped and undraped, male figures in agony and in ecstasy, male figures bound and unbound, male figures in spiritual blessedness and in carnal bliss, amazingly incarnational male figures whose carnality was the very stuff of their spirituality. It was more than just a show of Shozo’s works: it was a veritable Shogasm.

I knew Shozo for thirty-seven years, nearly half of his life and more than half of mine.

The Veriditas exhibition thus represented both closure and culmination for me, and an anodyne for the grief at the passing of such an influential figure in my life. We became many things to each other over those thirty-seven years, Shozo and I: mentor and camerado, daemon and desperado, muse and maenad, erotic charmer and neurotic disarmer—but most significantly, master painter whose heritage I must now carry forward.

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For thirty-seven years we enjoyed one another, endured one another, enchanted one another, incensed one another, repelled one another, compelled one another, estranged one another, deranged one another—and almost anything else that can be described in a mighty procession of those Latin-rooted verbs that lend such nonchalant majesty to our existence.

Shozo Nagano and I met for the first time on a sultry late-summer evening in September of 1970, as we both gazed longingly across the East River toward Queens from our vantage point in Carl Schurz Park in upper Manhattan. Each of us was engaged in the queer charade that staring at the industrial signage of Long Island City might somehow transform mere cruising into a sublimer form of sightseeing. Shozo had arrived in New York in 1965, four years before I did, though he was a full nineteen years older than me. When we met in 1970, he still spoke only halting English. I still remember the scene as if it were last evening. Still gazing Queensward, puffing on a cigarette that then dangled perpetually from his lips, Shozo asked me to interpret the words on the large red neon sign that in those days dominated the riverscape, flashing on and off repeatedly from its factory rooftop: "PEARL-WICK HAMPERS."

Shozo Nagano, Sleeping, acrylic on shaped canvas, 48 x 34 in.

So, after that brief and cerebral conversation about the arcane niceties of guilt and shame in Japanese and American culture, we parted, he going northward to his home on 92nd Street and I going southward to mine at 75th. We shook hands chastely—men didn’t hug or kiss in those days—after which Shozo instinctively dipped his shoulders in an informal farewell bow. Little did I know that this chance encounter in the roseate glow of a Pearl-Wick Hamper sign would lead to a thirty-seven-year rapport that would end with Shozo's passing in December of 2007.

Shozo's limited English vocabulary, and my meager Japanese, allowed me scant opportunity to explain to him the concept of laundry hampers. Despite my earnest efforts, I was unable to convey to him the notion that "Pearl-Wick" was a brand name that attempted to connote the pearly essence of wicker baskets. My own Japanese was haphazard and disjointed: a few odd words picked up here and there in a Far Eastern history class. I remember his being surprised at the fact that an American would be familiar with words like on and giri, which described the Japanese concepts of duty and obligation.

(Fortuitously, I had only recently read Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Chalk one up for that era’s equivalent of Japanese for Dummies.)

Ah, youth! Just fifteen months before meeting Shozo, I had arrived in Manhattan for good, a 21-year-old refugee from the coal regions of eastern PA.

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Three weeks after my arrival, on a Saturday night, I made my way down to Christopher Street after hearing news reports about a police raid on the Stonewall Inn the previous night. It was my first conscious action taken to acknowledge an amorphous feeling in me that life in the coal regions couldn’t quite define for me. Emboldened by my recent removal to New York and by the fervent crowds around Sheridan Square that evening, I marched confidently up to the door of the Stonewall, expecting admission without challenge. But the Stonewall Inn was unlike any of the coal-miners’ beer gardens I had grown accustomed to. I can still remember a pair of beady eyes behind a peephole in the front door, and the gruff, dismissive voice as the peephole slid shut: “You can’t come in. We’re having a private party.”

Like the good country boy I was (and still am), I dutifully obeyed and went home. It was not until several years later that I realized that the “private party” that night was the prelude to a revolution that would engulf Shozo and me and many others in the decades to come.

Shozo Nagano, Hand, acrylic on shaped canvas, 18 x 26 in.

As we parted that September evening in 1970, Shozo gave me his phone number, which amused me because it started with BUtterfield 9—I hail from John O’Hara country, remember—and invited me to visit his studio the following weekend. I discovered that my new artist-acquaintance lived on the ground floor of a shabby railroad-flat tenement on East 92nd Street, then a decaying neighborhood between Yorkville and Spanish Harlem. He was paying $125 a month—quite a steep sum in those days—to rent a flat that still had plumbing facilities from the 1920s. Nearly the entire apartment, except for the tiny kitchenette, and a cot pushed into an improvised sleeping area, was overflowing with the implements of the artist's trade: paintbrushes, dozens of pots of paints, gesso, turpentine, rolls of canvas, paintings in various incarnations hanging precariously on the walls. And lumber. Plenty of it. Planks of solid plywood, 2x4s, particleboard, much of it cut and reassembled into intricate wooden frameworks on which he would stretch his canvases.

Shozo Nagano, Framed Draped Figure, acrylic on shaped canvas, 35 x 37 in.

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In those days, money was scarce and when he couldn’t afford canvas, he substituted bedsheets from Macy's. It all sounded exotic and bohemian and outré. I loved it. It was my first encounter with a real live artist. Though his atelier was on the ground floor, it exuded fin-de-siècle Paris, which was sheer heaven to a kid like me from the coal regions, where life is lived in lower depths of a different sort.

Shozo’s paintings then were hard-edged and abstract, with nary a hint of biological life. In his Creation painting, for example, Shozo confected a pristine aquamarine world of the third day of creation, one still devoid of humans and original sin. Shozo, a born Buddhist for whom Shinto was second nature, had converted to Christianity in the early 1960s before embarking on his life-changing journeys to Chile and the United States. And now here we were together, in Albany, staring up the grand staircase to see his monumental interpretation of the crucifixion, a tenfoot tall canvas titled It Is Finished. True to his style at the time, it was an abstract cross, one that bore no corpus, no suffering Christ. Not a human figure—male or female—in the lot of his paintings. Leo Steinberg would not have seen fit to include Shozo’s work in his magnum opus, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. While God took only six days to make man in his image, it would be another fifteen years before Shozo acknowledged the creation of Adam by crafting his first male nude.

Without realizing what was happening, I found myself being drawn to the most interesting man I had met in my life. Over the next few weeks and months, I graduated from park-bench conversation partner to erstwhile studio assistant, helping Shozo stretch the canvas, fashion the molds, stash the paint in the refrigerator next to the soy sauce and noodles that were among his staples. Not long afterwards, he invited me to move in with him to share the rent. I accepted the offer, occupying a sleeping loft, accessible by a wooden contraption—half staircase, half ladder—he’d built from the kitchen area.

Only a few weeks after meeting Shozo, we took the old Penn Central together up to Albany, the state capital, where a major exhibition of his works was being mounted at the State University museum. It was there, in the shadow of the Brutalist monuments of the Empire State Plaza, that I first beheld a vast assemblage of his paintings in all their glory, amazed at how they had all been created in the tiny tenement flat we shared on East 92nd Street. That 1970 Albany show was a mélange of works showing Shozo’s take on Judeo-Christian creation and apocalyptic traditions, with paintings based on themes in the Old Testament Book of Genesis and the Revelation (Creation and New Jerusalem, for example) and even a few Dante Alighieri references thrown in (the Acheron series).

Left: Shozo Nagano, Man With Banana, acrylic on shaped canvas, 35 x 55 in.

Right: Shozo Nagano, Torso, Suspended in Time, acrylic on shaped canvas, 26 x 20 in.

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Two years after the Albany show, we moved "up" to a nicer, newly renovated tenement a block away, where we had twice the space for only $150 a month. Then in 1974, we hopped the East River (a few miles south of the Pearl-Wick sign) to occupy a carriage house (only $175 a month) attached to a brownstone in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, just around the corner from Gustave Beekman’s notorious male brothel that had once attracted navy yard sailors and Nazi spies, prompting Walter Winchell to call it a place of “swastika swishery.” Shozo and I soldiered on in Boerum Hill during one of the most difficult periods in New York's history, rampant with fiscal crisis, urban unrest, blackouts, graffiti, and a city told to drop dead. In short, a city with the apocalyptic edginess on which artists thrive.

Though we didn't ourselves own a brownstone, we were among the urban pioneers who helped keep the city livable during those years. The local block association (Hoyt St.) reclaimed a trash-strewn lot on Atlantic Avenue that is today prime real estate.

We created a community garden there, with Shozo as the chief designer. The garden flourishes to this day. Shozo was thus enabled, for the first time since leaving Japan, to indulge his passion for gardening, especially tending roses, which was nearly as important to him as his painting. It was during this period that he created the first of hundreds of paintings that portrayed the rose as an integral part of his shaped canvas.

During the Brooklyn years, Shozo continued to develop his geometric-style works. He crafted dozens of paintings with intricate, interlocking shapes, meticulously hard-edged except for the occasional undulating curve. By the end of the decade, after a trip to Greece, he began incorporating elements of classic "drapery" into his works, as when he would create a cube swaddled in a flowing toga-like garment—but still no human figures. It would take the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and his own self-consciousness as a queer artist, to give birth to the male figure as a subject—in all its glory and vulnerability.

Though he spent fifteen years in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Shozo had never really liked New York, especially the commercializing attitudes of the cutthroat art world. Once, we'd met Andy Warhol at a party somewhere in Manhattan. Shozo greeted him with characteristic impishness only halfconcealed by his still-sketchy English accent: "Happy to meet you, Mr. Awful." In 1979, while driving in eastern Pennsylvania, we chanced upon the town of Jim Thorpe (formerly Mauch Chunk), an enchanted village in the mountains along the Lehigh River. We found an old stone house, circa 1848, that would become Shozo's home and studio for the next 27 years. It was a welcome respite for him.

Even as he continued to paint in the relative isolation of a quiet village in the Pennsylvania coal regions, Shozo was kept abreast of life in the big city because I continued to keep a residence in Brooklyn

Shozo Nagano, Nude Back, acrylic on shaped canvas, 39 x 24 in.

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Shozo Nagano, Prometheus, acrylic on shaped canvas, 48 x 43 in.

not far from our old place in Boerum Hill. When the AIDS crisis surfaced in the early 1980s, both of us enlisted in the cause. While I became one of the earliest volunteers with GMHC, Shozo became one of the first artists to explore the dynamics of illness, despair, and transfiguration in his works. While I served on the front lines, he served as the combat artist, so to speak, the alchemist who absorbed all the base-metal stories I told him and transmuted them into gold. It was in 1983 that Shozo began to

use male figures in his paintings for the first time.

His first model was a local handyman we’d employed to help construct his Pennsylvania studio, a brawny young man of Irish descent, with a luxurious handlebar mustache and broad chest. He was at first too modest to pose in the nude, fearing embarrassment or even public scorn in a small town where personal activities were carefully monitored by neighbors and coworkers. Even when he was persuaded, many sessions later, to shed his clothes,

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Shozo thoughtfully depicted him with hand and forearm concealing his face and with membrum virile artfully concealed by bodily contortion and sheet. After Shozo’s death, the model confessed that he ultimately came to see his misgiving as groundless. The act of modeling, he said, transformed him in positive ways he never could have imagined. Submitting himself to the gaze of an artist such as Shozo became almost therapeutic for him, as if shedding his clothing were tantamount to re-investing himself with a more authentic identity. This was typical of Shozo’s modus operandi with his models: selecting ordinary, working-class men—In a fashion reminiscent of Caravaggio, whose models exuded a raw energy at once naively unsophisticated and intensely carnal. Just as the artist benefitted from being able to use their bodily forms to inspire his canvases, the models benefited from the reverence and kindliness he offered them. A true symbiotic relationship, one that involved—and ennobled—artist and model in a mutual groping for the crystallized image, for the “rock crystal thing to see,” in the words of poet Marianne Moore.

frequently concealed under white cloth in his earlier nudes—his version of the stereotypical fig leaf. It was only in the later 1990s that Shozo felt confident enough to depict man’s yard in full glory, a resurgent res erecta symbolizing the triumph of erotically charged spiritual energy after a time of pestilence.

Shozo Nagano’s paintings of the 1960s and 1970s may seem poles apart from his paintings of the 1980s and beyond. True, in the earlier works he used geometric forms and traditional biblical imagery, turning to male bodies and nuanced eroticism only in the later canvases. But to this remarkable artist, the two find a dynamic reconciliation. When viewed retrospectively, the “serene” geometric works seethe with a raw physicality, while the “raw” figurative works exude a turbulent spirituality—an incarnational poise that is truly a reconciliation of opposites. Shozo Nagano’s works thus become a living enfleshment of the energies he sought to capture in paint from his earliest days surveying the wreckage of postwar Japan.

After Shozo died in December of 2007, I repaired to his attic studio and discovered the last painting he had done, a crystallization of his entire life’s work. It included all of the elements and motifs that had come to characterize his work over the years: geometric form (an arched window), the image of

For several years, Shozo chose not to depict facial features in his male nude paintings. In some cases, as described above, he did so charitably, aiming to shield the model from censure. In most cases, he simply wanted to “de-personalize” the painting so it would be perceived not as a portrait of a recognizable person but as an archetype of human passion. He achieved this by one of several strategies: sometimes he depicted headless torsos in a style reminiscent of the broken remnants of classical statuary he had discovered on his journey to Greece; sometimes he would paint the face turned away from the viewer, its features lost in the shadows; sometimes he wrapped the head in bands of cloth or covered it with a shroud, an homage to those who perished in the Epidemic.

The same was true of genitalia, which Shozo

Shozo Nagano, Ascension, acrylic on shaped canvas, 46 x 39 in.

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Shozo Nagano, Torso, acrylic on shaped canvas, 43 x 39 in.

d’être. Unlike his earlier paintings with their hardedged and precise brushstrokes, this one was awash in drips and spillages, reflecting his inability, at long last, to control his hand. But the spirit was still willing, though the flesh was weak. He left no title to this last work, but I have elected to give it the name he gave to his monumental crucifix decades earlier: “It Is Finished.”

the rose (a yellow rose just at the point of withering), and the human figure (a male body with outstretched arms and head bowed in an ecstatic pose that could symbolize either crucifixion or resurrection). In his late years, Shozo’s fingers were so bent by arthritis that he could hardly hold a brush, but he continued to paint to the very end, simply because this was his calling and his raison

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Stimuli and responses in the creation of art constitute a vast spectrum, as all artists appreciate.

Whether the stimulus for a work of art is from a dream, from memory altered by time, from unmitigated imagination, from stored experiential material that is most comfortably expressed in the safety of making art, from a brief observation of an assembled still life in the studio, from en plein air discovered presentations of nature or events outside the studio, or the observations from travels beyond the artists’ homelands—the stimulus must register in the creative region of the brain, and that expression is then expressed as art.

It was an empire inspired and sustained by Islam and Islamic institutions. At the height of its power, in the 16th and 17th centuries, it controlled territory in Southeast Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa. Figures in Middle Eastern dress, quite often the royalty of the Ottoman Empire, appear in Renaissance and Baroque works by such artists as Gentile Bellini (Sultan Mehmed II, 1480) who was sent by the Republic of Venice to Constantinople to paint the portrait of Sultan Mehmet II, Paolo Veronese (Portrait Mehmed II, 1547), and Rembrandt (Belshazzar’s Feast, 1635).

For all the fascination with the allure of faraway places instantly available today via electronically transmitted images or through photographs, old and new, or the magic of cinema in all its forms, artists today have access to infinite stimuli. This was not always the case as, of course, an examination of art history reveals. During the 16th through 19th centuries European artists developed an increasing fascination with things Oriental, but at that time the limits of introduction of Oriental imagery was confined to the Near East instead of the Far East: to artists of that period ‘Orientalism’ was defined by the Ottoman Empire, one of the largest and longest lasting empires in history.

Header: Detail from Rembrandt, Belshazzar's Feast, 1635 Left: Gentile Bellini, Sultan Mehmed II, 1480 Right: Paolo Veronese, Portrait Mehmed II, 1547

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Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Revolt in Cairo, 1810.

Until this point, however, Europeans had minimal actual contact with the East, usually limited to trade and intermittent military campaigns. The artists best known for incorporating the Orientalism style and the opulent eroticism of harem scenes appealing to the French Rococo aesthetic were Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) with The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (French, 1767-1824) with Revolt in Cairo, 1810, and Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) with The Snake Charmer. Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835)—a pupil of Jacques-Louis David and a history painter in Napoleon's employ who never traveled to the Near East himself—conveys this idea in Napoleon Visiting the Victims of the Plague in Jaffa, 1804, featuring an Eastern architectural setting and figures in exotic dress. In these works, the myth of the Orient was depicted as exotic and corrupt. As noted, artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme painted many depictions of Near Eastern culture.

European socially errant sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient as is obvious with the painting The Turkish Bath, 1862 by JeanAuguste-Dominique-Ingres. Had Ingres painted Occidental women naked, it would have shocked many people. Much the same could be said of Cornelius van Haarlem in The Fall of the Titans, 1588, who elected to cover the genitalia of his figures with Oriental butterflies and related façades!

Orientalism was an ‘acceptable’ way of expressing the erotic fantasies of the artists, and the public, of the day.

It is not clear when and how the influence of the Far East—Japan, China, Mongolia, Korea, and Southeast Asia—entered the European art mind. The term Far East was popularized during the period of the British Empire as a blanket term for lands to the east of British India. In pre-World War I European geopolitics, the Near East referred to the relatively 96

Jean Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, 1870.

nearby lands of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East denoted northwestern South Asia and Central Asia, and the Far East meant countries along the western Pacific Ocean and eastern Indian Ocean.

Japonisme (Japanism) might be considered a general term for the influence of the arts of Japan on artists of the West. From the 1860s, ukiyo-e, Japanese wood-block prints, became a source of inspiration for many European Impressionist painters in France and elsewhere, and eventually for those painters involved in both Art Nouveau and Cubism. Artists were especially affected by the prints’ lack of perspective and shadow, the flat areas of strong color, the compositional freedom in placing the subject off-center, with mostly a low diagonal axis to the background. Unlike other varieties of Orientalism, Japonisme mostly involved Western artists using elements of Eastern styles in

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Eugène Delacroix The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827.

works showing their own culture: if only because of the difficulty of travel, there were relatively few artists attempting Eastern scenes in a Western style.

Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Visiting the Victims of the Plague in Jaffa, 1804.

Cornelis van Haarlem, The Fall of the Titans, 1588.

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Ingres, The Turkish Bath, 1862.

Japanese artists who had a great influence included Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849), Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), and Suzuki Harunobu (1725-1770). Works which had great influence were those such asHokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa and the 100 Poems Front; the Kuniswa Covers and Kiunisada Actors and Sumo Wrestlers of Utagawa Kunisada; Peach by Harunobu, and the Fighters on Ohashi Bridge of Utamaro. Utamaro’s work reached Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was very popular, enjoying particular acclaim in France. He influenced the European Impressionists, particularly with his use of partial views and his emphasis on light and shade. The reference to the ‘Japanese influence’ among these artists often refers to the work of Utamaro and Hokusai.

In 1887 van Gogh's admiration for Japanese art forms led him to paint copies of two famous designs of Hiroshige, considered by many to be the great Japanese landscape printmaker. One print is the Bridge in the Rain and the other shows a Japanese Apricot (Van Gogh altered this to be a Plum Tree!).

Hiroshige was one of the few artists who had used some Western elements in his print designs—the most obvious Western element was the use of perspective, visible in the Bridge in the Rain. Two van Gogh paintings after Hiroshige are rather free transcriptions: van Gogh added frames to the originals and decorated them with what he considered to be Japanese characters, saying: “I envy the Japanese artists for the incredible neat clarity which all their works have. It is never boring and you never get the impression that they work in a hurry. It is as simple as breathing; they draw a figure with a couple of strokes with such an unfailing easiness as if it were as easy as buttoning one's waist-coat.”

And in addition to such direct tributes to the prints of Hiroshige, van Gogh also utilized the principles of Japanese art in his paintings Le Père Tanguy and La Courtisane.

So we see the progression of the Far East, Japan in particular, in its influence on Western artists, an influence that would be profoundly felt in the work of James McNeill Whistler, (The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, 1864) and with the development of Art Nouveau (Gustav Klimt, Aubrey Beardsley, Egon Schiele). The potency of Orientalist images remained undiminished for many artists into the 20th century, including Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Gauguin, and Oskar Kokoschka, all of whom took up Orientalist themes.

Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, c. 1829

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Top pair: Hiroshige, Bridge in the Rain.

Vincent van Gogh’s version.

Center pair: Hiroshige, Japanese Apricot.

Vincent van Gogh, Blooming Plum.

Bottom row: Vincent Van Gogh, Le Pere Tanguy.

Vincent van Gogh, La Courtisane.

James Whistler, The Princess form the Land of Porcelain.

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Utagawa Kunisada, Sumo Wrestlers, Japanese wood block print, c. 1820.

between the Orient and the Occident. Rudyard Kipling wrote “OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”—but current scrutiny of the mutually exchanged influences of art so popular in both East and West now proves Kipling possibly wrong!

But another aspect of the influence of Orientalism on Western culture comes by way of a very popular style, the shunga, sexually explicit woodblock prints that were popular in the Edo period (1603-1868).

Some featured couples in a variety of sexual positions. Others featured humorous depictions of men with enormous penises or couples with enlarged genitalia. Some are quite crude, others are exquisitely done and are regarded as works of art. It is possible that they were considered either as pornography, as part of brides’ trousseaus to prepare them for their wedding night, or as visual stimuli for masturbation. Even Japanese famous artists such as Utamaro and Harunobu made them.

Several examples are shown here. Of note are the numerous shunga prints of homosexual encounters, perhaps in partial reference to Samurai traditions of same sex relations.

In today’s art scene there is a continuing fascination from the poles of Eastern and Western art and some of the finest art blends the contrasts, the themes, and the forms of the natural exchange of ideas

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Kitagawa Utamaro, Frustrated Customer with Male Prostitute, c. 1810.

Kitagawa Utamaro, A Male Escort Charms a Client with Agreeable Conversation, from The Pillow Book (Uta Makura), 1788.

Moronobu, Male Couple on a Futon, a Man Reclines with one Wakashū and Converses with Another, hand-colored ukiyo-e print, 1680.

Unknown, Actors on Stage and in Bed, 18th century print.

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Sumo wrestler Somagahana Fuchiemon by Utagawa Kunisada, wood block print, 1850

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GREEK AND ROMAN SCULPTURE: An Appreciation, a Brief Survey, and the Legacy

By Grady Harp “Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.” ~ Gertrude Stein Drawing and painting may embrace the everchanging schools of expression, developing according to the manner of techniques and powers of observation and social and political and artistic trends that are in many cases instigated by artists.

But the grand art of sculpture—of man creating three-dimensional works to emulate the bodies of humans—remains rather steadfast. One could argue this point, referencing the waves of abstraction and expressionism that have brushed the body of sculpture by say, Giacometti, Maillol, Rodin, LeBrun, Martini, Crocetti, Messina, etc., but the reference point always returns to the magnificence of the works of the Greeks and the Romans as the creators of man’s greatest monument to man.

While separating the origin of works of the Greeks from the Romans is at times a matter of opinion, as very often the Romans copied, or restored, or embellished Greek sculpture, there are certain

Left: Roman Sculpture, Apollo Belvedere, c. 130 AD

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aspects that allow assignment to the different periods. Greek statues and Roman statues differ from each other in terms of their styles and characteristics.

Greek statues and sculptures are generally freestanding without any kind of external support, whereas the Roman statues needed some sort of external support since they could not stand upright, instead using posts to support the statues. The Greeks used bronze chiefly in the making of the statues: Romans were assuredly influenced by the Greeks in the use of bronze, but in addition to bronze they used marble and also porphyry (a variety of igneous rock consisting of large-grained crystals, such as feldspar or quartz, and often purple in color, a perfect choice for things royal!) in the creation of statues.

The Romans and the Greeks created sculptures according to the messages each civilization desired to convey. Being more concerned with mythology and events in the past, the Greeks established their identity through their historical narratives and mythological episodes by emphasizing their connection with the Gods. The Romans were more concerned with documenting and commemorating modern day events. References to Greek sculpture occur in most of the monuments that were built by the Roman Empire.

Laocoรถn and His Sons, Marble, copy after an Hellenistic original from ca. 200 BC. Found in the Baths of Trajan, 1506.

Since the foundation of Roman sculpture relies on the borrowing from Greek practices, it seems apparent that Roman sculptural programs would either refer to or appear inspired by Greek sculptural tradition. Roman artisans employed various Greek styles.

Some examples of Greek sculpture are shared here and the reader will note that only a few are connected to the name of the artist. Even in Roman sculpture the works were created by groups of artisans and it was not until the later centuries that Italian sculpture was attributed to individual artists.

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Among the Greek sculptures (or those attributed to the Greeks) are the Victorious Youth, Laocoön and His Sons (a work from the 1st Century BC, attributed by the Roman author Pliny the Elder to three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus. It shows the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being strangled by sea serpents), Greek Youth, Hercules, a detail called Weary Hercules, Discus Thrower, Dancing Faun, and Hermes Holding the Baby Dionysus by Praxiteles, the most renowned of the Attic sculptors of the 4th century BC. Roman sculptures are more difficult to define as is evident when attempting to ascertain a true Roman work and a restored or copied Greek work. Even museum curators are at times at a loss to be certain or the origin. For example the famous and much loved sculpture Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus as shown here is likely the Roman copy: the nucleus of Roman sculpture that has been so imaginatively completed initially comprised the headless torsos of a man in armor supporting a heroically nude dying comrade. The group was made in the late 1st century BC, a Roman copy freely reproducing a Hellenistic Pergamene original of the mid-3rd century BC. Pasquino is another version of the composition, though so dismembered and battered that the relationship is scarcely recognizable at first glance, the most famous of the ‘talking statues’ of Rome. And from that same Hellenistic period is the Greek sculpture the Romans copied as the grand Old Centaur Teased by Eros. The Apollo Belvedere is believed to be a Roman copy of Hadrianic date (circa 120-140) of a lost bronze original made between 350 and 325 BC by the Greek sculptor Leochares. Leaning Satyr is thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original by Praxiteles (4th century BC) as is Hermes from the same period. The Dying Gaul is generally considered a Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic sculpture that is purported to have been executed in bronze, and which was commissioned sometime between 230 BC and 220 BC by Attalus I of Pergamon to celebrate his victory over the Celtic Galatians in Anatolia.

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Victorious Youth, Greek bronze sculpture, c. 100 BCE

But whether considering the works of the Greeks and the Romans or the sculptors who followed one question always is asked: Why do almost all of these works lack that presence of the phallus? And while the question has been studied extensively we are still left with two schools of thought.

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Either the protruding parts of these sculptures (noses, hands, penises, even heads) fell victim to invading armies as simply a part of declaring dominance over the conquered nations as a statement of emasculating the enemy, or changing social mores or ecclesiastic dicta censored the outward display of sexuality. The Fig Leaf Solution reigned for a while but that, too, fell into dispute and into similar excision. It is doubtful the truth will ever be known.

With the rise of Christendom and the fall of the Roman Empire emerged the great artists whose works are of indisputable origin. Primarily working in Italy and usually under the auspices of the Vatican, the art of the following artists with examples of their works follows:

Roman Copy, Menelaus Supporting the Body of Pratroclus

Above, Greek, Discus Thrower, 2nd century BC Left: Greek, Weary Hercules.

Greek, Pasquino, 3rd century BC

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Leaning Satyr, Roman copy, 4th Century BC

Roman copy of Hellenistic work, The Dying Gaul

Above, Michelangelo, The Dying Slave, c. 1515 Right: Greek-Praxiteles, Hermes Holding the Baby Dionysus

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Michelangelo (1475-1564), known to all, was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.

Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man. David and The Dying Slave.

Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) was an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, painter, soldier, and musician, who also wrote a famous autobiography. He was one of the most important artists of Mannerism.

Perseus, Bust of Cosimo I de’ Medici.

Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus

Pierino da Vinci (1529-1553) was an Italian sculptor, born in the small town of Vinci, Italy. He was the nephew of Leonardo da Vinci. River God, Samson and the Philistine.

Giambologna (1529-13 August 1608) is known for his marble and bronze statuary in a late Renaissance or Mannerist style. Rape of the Sabines, Hercules and Nessus.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the leading sculptor of his age, and is considered the successor to Michelangelo; he was also a prominent architect.

In addition he painted, wrote plays, designed metalwork, and stage sets. Detail from St Sebastian, Neptune and Triton, Medusa.

Benvenuto Cellini, Cosimo I de’ Medici

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Giambologna, Rape of the Sabine Women

Pierino da Vinci, Young River God

Right: Giambologna, Hercules and Nessus

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Antonio Canova, Theseus and the Minotaur Left: Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, Neptune and Triton

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Antonio Canova (1757-1822) was an Italian sculptor from the Republic of Venice who became famous for his marble sculptures that delicately rendered nude flesh. The epitome of the neoclassical style, his work marked a return to classical refinement after the theatrical excesses of Baroque sculpture. Damoxenos, Theseus and the Minotaur.

Pio Fedi (1816-1892) was an Italian sculptor known as a Purist. The Rape of Polyxena, below.

Pio Fedi, The Rape of Polyxena

The legacy of both Greek and Roman sculpture is evident in the works of these later artists as it remains so with sculptors practicing their craft today. As Michelangelo stated, “The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.“

Pierino da Vinci, Samson and the Philistine

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Roman copy, Centaur Teased By Eros

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Ganymede The story of Zeus and a boy named Ganymede goes back thousands of years and has inspired generations of artists.

Here is the classical version in an excerpt from Ovid’s, The Metamorphoses, Book 10, as translated

by A. S. Kline The king of the gods once burned with love for Phrygian Ganymede, and to win him Jupiter chose to be something other than he was. Yet he did not deign to transform himself into any other bird, than that eagle, that could carry his lightning bolts.

Straightaway, he beat the air with deceitful wings, and stole the Trojan boy, who still handles the mixing cups, and against Juno’s will, pours out Jove’s nectar.

The story of the myth centers on the characters of Zeus and a shepherd boy Ganymede, son of the ruler of Troy, Tros. Zeus, coming upon the boy was so taken by his beauty that he turned himself into an eagle, stole the boy to Mount Olympus whereupon he was made cupbearer and immortal.

Other accounts say that Zeus sent an eagle to abduct the youth and bring him up to Olympus.

Left: Anton Raphael Mengs, Jupiter Kissing Ganymede, fresco, 1758

Peter Paul Rubins, The Rape of Ganymede, detail, 1611

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Giorgio Giulio Clovio, Ganymede Carried Off by Jupiter, mid 16th century etching

Annibale Carracci, The Rape of Ganymede, 17th century

Tros was distraught over the abduction of his beloved son, so Zeus sent Hermes to Earth with two great horses that were so swift they could run across the surface of water. He was also to tell Tros that Ganymede was now immortal, and in a place of honor on Olympus.

Ganymede with Eagle, Roman copy from Greek source Right: Ganymed statue at B端rkliplatz, Z端rich Switzerland

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Peter Paul Rubins, The Abduction of Ganymede, oil on canvas, 1611-1612

Some versions say they were lovers, others tell of an unwilling partnership with the titles of many popular artworks of this story, The Rape of Ganymede. Hera, Zeus’ wife, being jealous of this rival of her husband’s affections, hated the boy.

To protect Ganymede from her vengeance, Zeus put Ganymede into the sky as the constellation Aquarius, which is located near the constellation Aquila—The Eagle.

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Girolamo da Carpi, The Rape of Ganymede, oil on canvas, 1501–1556

Christian Griepenkerl, The Theft of Fire by Prometheus from the Sleeping Zeus and Ganymede, oil on canvas, 1878 Left: Julien Pierre, Ganymede Pouring Nectar to Zeus Changed Into an Eagle, 1776-1778

In our modern age, Ganymede is the name of one of Jupiter’s moons—Jupiter being the Roman name for Zeus. This ancient tale of a homoerotic relationship has inspired artists for over centuries. Some show the youth Ganymede as a baby, others as a young virile man. In some, the relationship is one of domination and rape, others seem to indicate a mutually enjoyable pairing.

Some artists focus on the dramatic, others the erotic.

How one story can lead to so many different permutations is interesting and probably an indication of the changing morals throughout the ages.

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WADE REYNOLDS A Remembrance, An Appreciation

By Grady Harp ... the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependant on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives: to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain. ~JOSEPH CONRAD 1898 In the pantheon of memorable figurative artists whose courage extended into the realm of painting the nude male model, the name of Wade Reynolds will always remain honored. His death in October 2011 leaves a mark on his many admirers and collectors, but because of his selfless honesty in his paintings and drawings his work will likely grow in importance as the public becomes more aware, more appreciative of the male figure in art.

Charles Elwood Reynolds was born in Jasper, New York in 1929, an only child, with an active fantasy life, an analytical appreciation of nature, science, math, and a perceptual creativity. Drawing recognizable images by the age of three and filling blackboards with colored chalk renderings of people and places by the age of six, he was encouraged in his innate artistic Left: Reynolds, Male Torso, prismacolor on board, 30 x 22in. 1971

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ability by winning awards such as the one he received from the Arnot Museum in Elmira, New York in 1943, and the Scholastic Arts Contest for Western New York State in 1946. Yet being pragmatic in those times, he desired a career in electronics, so he joined the Navy hoping for experience in that scientific field as well as assurance of funding for his after-military schooling.

Once in New York City, he was drawn to the theater both as an actor and as a stage designer and changed his name to Wade Reynolds. Encouraged by his success in creating paintings for the original sets for Joshua Logan and David Merrick’s Broadway production of The World of Susie Wong, Wade Reynolds began painting in earnest. Entirely a self taught painter, his works were immediately popular in galleries in a time when traditional figurative painting was overpowered by Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism.

Longing for the frontiers of open space, places of promise, where one can be ‘gloriously alone, but not lonely,’ Wade moved to California, settling in San Francisco, and found a plethora of available models among the disenfranchised, lonely, troubled youth of the lost generation of the 60s. As with all young painters, comparisons are expected and Wade’s most frequently referenced colleague was Andrew Wyeth, a painter who was also creating paintings without backgrounds and, like Wade, was harkening back to roots in isolated Americana (Wyeth from Pennsylvania and Maine, Reynolds from Upstate New York).

Reynolds, The Cyclist, oil on canvas, 48 X 60 in. 1993

In technical terms his unique manner of painting is most related to Pointillism, a means by which the physical nature of color and the chromatic structure of light can be defined on a flat, painted surface. Developed in the late 1880s by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, Pointillism is in many ways the application of science to art and is based on the research into color and light by such minds as Chevral, von Helmholz, and Rood. This approach to painting demands facility with both brush and palette and while its execution is inordinately time consuming, the ultimate final effect is a glimmering

In 1967 he was honored in a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor and for this major exhibition he gained the courage to break the comparison to Wyeth: he painted richly detailed paintings that incorporated backgrounds as important adjuncts to the figures. His style was established.

Just what that style is, is a conundrum. Wade Reynolds was a Realist but his works also incorporated the Impressionists’ vocabulary.

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Reynolds, Equipale Chair, oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in. 2000.

he seemed to fight poetry while he created it. In selecting subject matter or models he was always able to find the subtleties that he intuitively found in the reaction between surfaces and shapes with light. He had little tolerance for the bogus, never pushing his compositions toward titillation. He simply, quietly, painted what he observed. At times his figures seem to be within their own world where he is the silent visitor; models seem to have an interior at work while their exterior is being painted and this brings the model to life.

which hovers over the surface without the usual need for layering of glazes to achieve this semblance of magic. In Reynolds’ hands, after the initial drawing on the prepared canvas, he began painting by placing layer upon layer of drybrush, alternating warm tones with cool tones until the final result was a luminous description of his subject, whether figure or object or landscape.

Wade Reynolds was a quiet man and an observer of such honesty that he avoided flowery, poetic interpretations or even pompous titles for his works:

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Reynolds, Mirror Image, a self portrait, oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in, 1995

play of geometric problems in battle—stools on checkerboard floors allow the included model to be an incidental yet equal element in the total composition.

Skin tones are galaxies of colors that merge and diverge as light sources mold them. While figures are most often a part of his work, light and composition are the most important unifying elements. At times he isolated the figure in space as though leaving out the expected atmosphere or locale would hamper the viewer’s ability to see the corpus as an isolated object of beauty. His paintings were always about truth and what is there. He appeared to enjoy the

Reynolds pushed the envelope of his powers of sculpting light and form with one of his final series of paintings where he had approached the nude male figure as landscape and as still life.

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In the Figures as Landscape (see Figures as Landscape 1, 6 and 10) there is no reliance on a physical support system, though it seems obvious that the models are reclining on a surface. Reynolds used his learned skills of stage design and lighting techniques to bathe the model in light and shadow until the focus of the composition is not about the individual model (the face is always averted) but simply the eloquent movement of light and color over the contours of the naked body. The series Figure as Still Life (see Figure as Still Life 2, Figure as Still Life 3, Equipale Chair, The Athlete) makes the model an integral but equal part of each composition with chair, stool, light and shadows treated with identical importance.

In his widely collected Portraits, whether prismacolor drawings (see Male Torso-Oval, Rory 1 and Male Torso, spanning 30 years of work) where line alone defines volumetric space, or his vibrant paintings (see Mirror Image, a self portrait), Reynolds prepared each composition with the finesse of a stage director, testing light, composition, color, sketches and the input of the model before committing to the final concept. Maintaining his painting technique described above he strove to recreate what he observed and the result is an unfettered rendering of the model. The likeness is uncanny because it has not been manipulated by superimposed emotional stigmata. The life of the model radiates from within, not simply as applied to the surface of the painting.

And though he insisted on declaring his commitment to the purity of ‘science’ in his approach to the canvas, the people who come to life with his brush are of fully warm flesh and blood. All the scientific dissection in the world at times blocks our individuality of response: the visceral response is more important than the cerebral in the arts.

Reynolds, Figure as Still Life 2, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. 2002

Reynolds, Racquetball Player, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in. 2001

They make you feel as though you have met someone you want to know and who wants to know you. And throughout his constant career Wade Reynolds maintained the brave stance of fearlessly painting nudity during art eras when artists have been under constant attack by public and critics alike who hold a strange fear or intimidation of frontal nudity.

‘It is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world’ (Annie Adams Fields diary after reading Henry James). Wade’s paintings are just revealing enough to make people feel familiar without stripping them of their mystery.

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Reynolds, The Athlete, oil on canvas, 30 x 36, 2001

Reynolds’ nudes are never sensationalized: he painted the nude as if in a return to Eden. Whether seated, standing, reclining, part of an interior or isolated from surrounding elements, his nudes are celebrations of humanity (see The Cyclist and The Racquetball Player). Observing the male nude with the sensitivity and respect with which he rendered them, Reynolds achieved the dignity of the works from the Renaissance.

In Rachel Carson’s words—It is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds grow. Pausing before one of his still lifes (see Tulips) may conjure th references to the masters of the medium from 17 th century Willem Kalf to late 19 century John Frederick Peto.

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Reynolds, Rory 1, prismacolor on toned board, 32 x 40, 2001

Reynolds, Tulips, oil on canvas, 36 x 40, 2006

Yet while the craftsmanship of execution is comparable, Reynolds’ unique sense of stillness and clarity opens windows of memory for the viewer. Avoiding the traditional allusions or symbols, he allowed familiar objects, arranged with care and with sensitive lighting, to simply be appreciated for what they are–frozen moments of time, of beauty.

Reynolds, Figure as Still Life 3, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in, 2002

The art of Wade Reynolds brings home evidence of a life of commitment to art, allegiance to the simple truth and honesty that reside not only in nature but also in each of us, his public. His art is indubitably and inimitably his own, able to stand with the finest work being created today. Wade Reynolds was unique, in his art, his stature, and in his vision. And he will be always remembered.

“He to whom Nature begins to reveal her open secret will feel irresistible yearning for her most worthy interpreter, Art.” ~Goethe Reynolds, Figure as Landscape 6, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. 2003

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Excerpts published from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Sebastian

The Influence of St. Sebastian In an apparition Sebastian told a Christian widow where they might find his body undefiled and bury it "at the catacombs by the apostles."

Saint Sebastian (died c. 288) was a Christian saint and martyr who is said to have been killed during the Roman emperor Diocletian's persecution of Christians. He is commonly depicted in art and literature tied to a post or tree and shot with arrows. This is the most common artistic depiction of Sebastian; however, he was rescued and healed

by Irene of Rome before later being clubbed to death for criticizing the emperor. He is venerated in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

In the Roman Catholic Church, Sebastian is commemorated by an optional memorial on the th 20 of January. In the Church of Greece, Sebastian's th feast day is on 18 of December.

Diocletian reproached Sebastian for his supposed betrayal, and he commanded him to be led to a field and there to be bound to a stake to be shot at. "And the archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin," The Legenda Aurea accounts, leaving him there for the dead. Miraculously, the arrows did not kill him. The widow of Castulus—Irene of Rome—went to retrieve his body to bury it, and found he was still alive. She brought him back to her house and nursed him back to health. The other residents of the house doubted he was a Christian.

One of them was a girl who was blind. Sebastian asked her "Do you wish to be with God?", and made the sign of the Cross on her head. "Yes", she replied, and immediately regained her sight. Sebastian then stood on a step and harangued Diocletian as he passed by; the emperor had him beaten to death and his body thrown into a privy.

Left: Bronzino Saint Sebastian 1533

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As a protector from the bubonic plague, Sebastian was formerly one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. The connection of the martyr shot with arrows with the plague is not an intuitive one, however. In GrecoRoman myth, Apollo, the archer god is the deliverer of pestilence; the figure of Sebastian Christianizes this folkloric association. The chronicler Paul the Deacon relates that, in 680, Rome was freed from a raging pestilence by him.

Sebastian was one of a class of military martyrs and soldier saints of the Early Christian Church whose cults originated in the 4th century and culminated at the end of the Middle Ages, in the 14th and 15th centuries both in the East and the West. Details of their martyrologies may provoke some skepticism among modern readers, but certain consistent patterns emerge that are revealing of Christian attitudes.

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Master of the Holy Kinship II, Altarpiece of St Sebastian, 1493

In Roman Catholicism, Sebastian is the patron saint of athletes as well as the patron saint of archers. He is commonly referred to as a homosexual icon, which remains an on-going controversial tie between the gay community and the Roman Catholic Church.

The earliest representation of Sebastian is a mosaic in the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo (Ravenna, Italy) dated between 527 and 565. The right lateral wall of the basilica contains large mosaics representing a procession of 26 martyrs, led by Saint Martin and including Sebastian. The martyrs are represented in Byzantine style, lacking any individuality, and have all identical expressions.

Left: Raphael, St. Sebastian, 1501

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Another early representation is in a mosaic in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli (Rome, Italy), probably made in the year 682. It shows a grown, bearded man in court dress but contains no trace of an arrow. The archers and arrows begin to appear by the year 1000, and ever since have been far more commonly shown than the actual moment of his death by clubbing, feeding the popular misconception that this is how he died.

The opportunity to show a semi-nude male, often in a contorted pose, also made Sebastian a favorite subject. His shooting with arrows was the subject of the largest engraving by “the Master of the Playing Cards� in the 1430s, when there were few other current subjects with male nudes other than Christ.

JosĂŠ de Ribera, St. Sebastian Attended by the Holy Women, 1635

Sebastian appears in many other prints and paintings, although this was also due to his popularity with the faithful. Among many others, Botticelli, Perugino, Titian, Pollaiuolo, Giovanni Bellini, Guido Reni (who painted the subject seven times), Mantegna (three times), Hans Memling, Gerrit van Honthorst, Luca Signorelli, El Greco, HonorĂŠ Daumier, John Singer Sargent, and Louise Bourgeois all painted Saint Sebastians. The saint is ordinarily depicted as a handsome youth pierced by arrows.

Sebastian tended by St Irene, painted by Georges de La Tour, Trophime Bigot (four times), Jusepe de Ribera, Hendrick ter Brugghen, and others. This may have been a deliberate attempt by the Church to get away from the single nude subject, which is already recorded in Vasari as sometimes arousing inappropriate thoughts among female churchgoers.

The Baroque artists usually treated it as a nocturnal chiaroscuro scene, illuminated by a single candle, torch, or lantern, in the style fashionable in the first half of the 17th century.

A mainly 17th-century subject, though found in predella scenes as early as the 15th century, was St.

Right: Renieri Niccolo Regnier Nicolas, St. Sebastian, 1620

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Guido Reni, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, oil on canvas, 1616

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Gerrit van Honthorst, Saint Sebastian, 1623

Francois Guillaume Menageot, St. Sebastiano, ~1800.

During Salvador DalĂ­'s "Lorca (Federico GarcĂ­a Lorca) Period," he painted Sebastian several times, most notably in his "Neo-Cubist Academy". For reasons unknown, the left vein of Sebastian is always exposed.

In his novella Death in Venice, Thomas Mann hails the "Sebastian-Figure" as the supreme emblem of Apollonian beauty, that is, the artistry of differentiated forms, beauty as measured by discipline, proportion, and luminous distinctions.

El Greco, Saint Sebastian, 1578

In 1976, the British director Derek Jarman made a film, Sebastiane, which caused controversy in its treatment of the martyr as a homosexual icon.

However, as several critics have noted, this has been a subtext of the imagery since the Renaissance.

Article compiled from excerpts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Sebastian

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Excerpts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo

The Influence of Apollo According to myth, Apollo’s birth was not a welcome one. When Zeus' wife Hera discovered that Leto was pregnant and that Zeus was the father, she banned Leto from giving birth on "terra firma." In her wanderings, Leto found the newly created floating island of Delos, which was neither mainland nor a real island. She gave birth there.

Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in ancient Greek and Roman religion, Greek and Roman mythology, and Greco– Roman Neopaganism. The ideal of the Kouros (a beardless, athletic youth), Apollo has been variously recognized as a god of light and the sun, truth and prophecy, healing, plague, music, poetry, and more.

Apollo is the son of Zeus and Leto, and has a twin sister, the chaste huntress Artemis. Apollo is known in Greek-influenced Etruscan mythology as Apulu.

As the patron of Delphi, Apollo was an oracular god—the prophetic deity of the Delphic Oracle.

Medicine and healing are associated with Apollo, whether through the god himself or mediated through his son Asclepius, yet Apollo was also seen as a god who could bring ill-health and deadly plague. Amongst the god's custodial charges, Apollo became associated with dominion over colonists, and as the patron defender of herds and flocks. As the leader of the Muses and director of their choir, Apollo functioned as the patron god of music and poetry. Hermes created the lyre for him, and the instrument became a common attribute of Apollo.

Left: Head of Apollo recalling the Apollo Belvedere Marble Roman copy of ca 120-140 AD after a Hellenistic original Unknown Artist

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Kouros, Apollo of Milani, 540 BC

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Diego Velรกzquez, The Forge of Vulcan, oil on canvas, 223 x 290 cm. 1630

Four days after his birth, Apollo killed the chthonic dragon Python, which lived in Delphi beside the Castalian Spring. This was the spring which emitted vapors that caused the oracle at Delphi to give her prophecies. Hera sent the serpent to hunt Leto to her death across the world. To protect his mother, Apollo begged Hephaestus for a bow and arrows.

After receiving them, Apollo cornered Python in the sacred cave at Delphi. Apollo killed Python but had to be punished for it, since Python was a child of Gaia.

Left: Apollo with Celestial Sphere, 1748 Women-Asmus bell fountain Rondell Sanssouci

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Carriera Rosalba, Apollo, oil on canvas, 1740

Hendrick Goltzius, Apollo Engraving, 347 x 263 mm. 1588

There are many stories attributed to Apollo, one of the more famous is that he aided Paris in the killing of Achilles by guiding the arrow of his bow into Achilles' heel. One interpretation of his motive is that it was in revenge for Achilles' sacrilege in murdering Troilus, the god's own son by Hecuba, on the very altar of the god's own temple.

he found a tortoise and killed it, then removed the insides. He used one of the cow's intestines and the tortoise shell to make the first lyre.

Apollo complained to Maia that her son had stolen his cattle, but Hermes had already replaced himself in the blankets she had wrapped him in, so Maia refused to believe Apollo's claim. Zeus intervened, claiming to have seen the events, sided with Apollo.

Hermes then began to play music on his new lyre to sooth Apollo’s wrath. The god of music fell in love with the instrument and offered to allow exchange of the cattle for the lyre. Apollo then became the master of the lyre.

Apollo is often shown with a lyre in classical works of art, but the invention of the lyre is attributed to Hermes. The story is that the mother of Hermes, Maia, had been secretly impregnated by Zeus. Maia wrapped the infant in blankets but Hermes escaped while she was asleep.

Hermes—the newborn—ran to Thessaly, where Apollo was grazing his cattle. Hermes stole a number of his cows and took them to a cave in the woods near Pylos, covering their tracks. In the cave,

Right: Apollo Kaitharoidos, Marble Ludovisi Collection, late first century

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Love affairs ascribed to Apollo are a late development in Greek mythology. Their vivid anecdotal qualities have made some of them favorites of painters since the Renaissance, so that they stand out more prominently in the modern imagination. Wikipedia lists nearly one hundred female lovers of Apollo, but some significant male lovers as well.

Hyacinth or Hyacinthus was one of Apollo's male lovers. He was a Spartan prince, beautiful and athletic. The pair was practicing throwing the discus when a discus thrown by Apollo was blown off course by the jealous Zephyrus and struck Hyacinthus in the head, killing him instantly. Apollo is said to be filled with grief: out of Hyacinthus' blood, Apollo created a flower named after him as a memorial to his death, and his tears stained the flower petals. The Festival of Hyacinthus was a celebration of Sparta.

Another male lover was Cyparissus, a descendant of Heracles. Apollo gave him a tame deer as a companion but Cyparissus accidentally killed it with a javelin as it lay asleep in the undergrowth.

Cyparissus asked Apollo to let his tears fall forever.

Apollo granted the request by turning him into the Cypress named after him, which was said to be a sad tree because the sap forms droplets like tears on the trunk.

G. Moreau, Apollo Vanquishing the Serpent Python, 1885

Some other male lovers of Apollo include: Admetus—one of the Argonauts, Atymnius— otherwise known as a beloved of Sarpedon, Branchus—a son of Apollo, Carnus—son of Zeus, Hymenaios—a god of marriage ceremonies, Iapix— given the ability of healing by Apollo as a lover’s gift, Leucates—who threw himself off a rock when Apollo attempted to carry him off, and Phorbas— the son of Triopas.

José de Ribera , Apollo Flaying Marsyas, oil, 1637 Left Page, top left, clockwise: G. Battista, Apollo and the Continents, Fresco, 1753 Apollonius, Roman, Apollo, first century BC Belvedere Apollo Copy after Leochares, 130BC Pietro Perugino, Apollo and Marsyas, 1495

Excerpts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo

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WILLIAM BLAKE: Madman or Visionary

By Grady Harp “darkness very darkness is sectional” ~Gertrude Stein The darkness both within and without the life of William Blake has been a conundrum among artists, historians, poets, writers and psychologists for years. For many his name brings to mind the illustrations he created for Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Poem in Ten Books or his own Songs of Innocence and of Experience. For others the strangely disturbing paintings of characters and stories from the Bible or his odd Prophetic Books that have disappeared almost without trace come to mind.

But for a man whose images and poems—such as The Tyger—continue to puzzle audiences and critics alike, his life deserves study. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language".

William Blake was born in 1757 in the Soho district of London to a family known to be Dissenters from

Left: Blake, Antaeus Setting Down Dante and Virgil in the Last Circle of Hell, 1824

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the Church of England, basing their opinions on reason and the Bible rather than on appeals to tradition and authority. They rejected doctrines such as the Trinity and original sin, arguing that they were irrational. Rational Dissenters believed that Christianity and faith could be dissected and evaluated using the newly emerging discipline of science, and that a stronger belief in God would be the result. While all this may seem peripheral to the life of William Blake the artist, following these concepts gives rise to some interesting insights into the content of his art. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and would remain a source of inspiration throughout his life.

Blake attended school only long enough to learn reading and writing, leaving at the age of ten to enroll in drawing classes. When Blake was about nine years old, he told his parents he had seen “a tree filled with angels” on one of his walks, and later reported a similar vision of “angelic figures walking” in a field among workers as they gathered hay.

These early evidences of his visions can be traced to his later paintings of the rather bizarre but artistically fascinating paintings and engravings that represent his legacy. We know that he was an avid reader, especially of the works of Edmund Spenser and Ben Johnson. His artistic career began as an engraver, copying drawings of Greek antiquities before becoming obsessed with the progressive representation of the human form in the works of Raphael, Michelangelo and Dürer.

Above: Blake, Jerusalem, 1804

Blake married Catherine Boucher in 1782 and was employed as an engraver. Perhaps because of his wife’s inability to have children Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue. At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house. His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduced love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and he decried jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws. In many ways Blake was a precursor to the movement of Free Love: he thought jealousy separates man from the divine unity, condemning him to a frozen death. How deeply Blake embraced his own concept that sexual freedom was commensurate with his interpretation of Christian ideas can only be studied by his depiction of passion

Right: Blake, frontispiece to Milton from Paradise Lost, 1818

in his allegorical and visionary paintings of stories from the Bible–from the many Adam and Eve paintings through the circles of Milton’s Paradise Lost. His use of symbolism and allegory was complex and elusive.

Blake’s contemporaries include such famous painters as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste Ingres, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West—painters who defined the Neoclassical School of painting. And many of his contemporaries considered Blake to be mad, not only for his bizarre philosophy, but also for his public behavior. In 1803 Blake was tried for sedition—for uttering words aimed at upsetting the established order. He had found a soldier relieving himself in his garden, and was charged with making seditious remarks about the King and the army. In the event, he was acquitted, principally on the unreliability of the testimony of the soldier.

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Above: Blake, God Judging Adam, 1795

Right: Blake, Penseroso and L’Allegro, 1816-1820

Yet despite the tenor of the times, Blake remained productive. In 1805, after being acquitted on the charges of sedition, Blake began his illustrations for the Book of Revelations. At the same time, he was working on illustrations Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales, Robert John Thornton’s Virgil and Milton’s Paradise Lost. And in his illustrations for the Book of Revelations, we find The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

illustrations and for his own individual paintings, are sensuous and full of sexual overtones: oddly his nude male figures rarely reveal the genitalia. Not that he covered the privacy of his figures with draping the way many others avoided sexuality, but instead he leaves the groin images ‘unfinished’—a fact that leaves much more to the imagination of the viewer. The paintings and drawings and prints were admired for their ‘mad creativity’ but an exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy in 1809 failed to attract any significant interest and he sank into obscurity. Blake continued to produce poetry, paintings and engravings but he rarely found customers for his work. It is only with the passage of time that Blake’s unique style of infusing passion

Blake’s depictions of the human form suggest that his attention was rather focused on the massively muscular male figure. His figures, both for the book

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Blake, Eliahu Teaches Job, 1805

and raw sexuality and imaginative visions in his paintings that he now is considered part of both the Romantic movement and Pre-Romantic visual language that first appeared in the 18th century.

Many contemporary critics now, years later, describe him as far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced.

was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his artistic works, which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by those same Archangels. Blake viewed the world in the light of a ‘visionary gleam’ and he did not outgrow these visions as he grew: he continued to receive them and they inspired him to new artistic heights.

Blake claimed to experience visions throughout his life. They were often associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery, and may have inspired him further with spiritual works and pursuits. Certainly, religious concepts and imagery figure centrally in Blake's works. He believed that he

In observing examples of his works as presented here it is well to remember that they are the product of what some may call madness, others may term visionary, while most of us will now see as precursors to the passion of the Romantic

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Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, 1805-1810

Blake, Glad Day, printed 1895

movement, an investigation into the physical and spiritual aspects of the human form as an extension of a creator whose broad spectrum of acceptance included free love, conversations with angels and devils, and a use of line and color and space that provided the seed for today’s’ wildly creative expressionistic painters. Madness or creativity–they are so often blended in the creation of great art.

self-deluded. Whatever our view on Blake’s madness, we must surely concur with Wordsworth: “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.”

When William Blake died in London in 1827, he was already a forgotten man. His engraved and handpainted Songs of Innocence and of Experience had sold fewer than 20 copies in 30 years. His Prophetic Books had disappeared almost without trace. A single mysterious poem, The Tyger, had reached the anthologies. He was dismissed as "a man of great, but undoubtedly insane genius". Blake was a lovable, minor eccentric: unworldly, self-taught and

“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” ~Isaac Newton

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Blake, Illustration from A Critical Essay page 291, 1868

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Blake, Satin Smiting Job with Sore Boils, 1826

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Excerpts from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracles

Hercules /Heracles, was a divine hero in Greek mythology, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, foster son of Amphitryon, and great-grandson—and halfbrother—of Perseus.

from his labors and played a great deal with children. By conquering dangerous archaic forces he is said to have "made the world safe for mankind" and to be its benefactor.

He was the greatest of the Greek heroes, a paragon of masculinity, the ancestor of royal clans who claimed to be Heracleidae, and a champion of the Olympian order against chthonic monsters. In Rome and the modern West, he is known as Hercules, with whom the later Roman Emperors, in particular Commodus and Maximian, often identified themselves. The Romans adopted the Greek version of his life and works essentially unchanged, but added anecdotal detail of their own, some of it linking the hero with the geography of the Central Mediterranean.

Hercules was an extremely passionate and emotional individual, capable of doing both great deeds for his friends; such as wrestling with Thanatos on behalf of Prince Admetus, who had regaled Hercules with his hospitality, or restoring his friend Tyndareus to the throne of Sparta after he was overthrown, and being a terrible enemy who would wreak horrible vengeance on those who crossed him, as Augeas, Neleus and Laomedon all found out to their cost.

Extraordinary strength, courage, ingenuity, and sexual prowess with both males and females were among his characteristic attributes. Hercules used his wits on several occasions when his strength did not suffice, such as when laboring for the king Augeas of Elis, wrestling the giant Antaeus, or tricking Atlas into taking the sky back onto his shoulders. Together with Hermes he was the patron and protector of gymnasiums and sports arenas. His iconographic attributes are the lion skin and the club. These qualities did not prevent him from being regarded as a playful figure who used games to relax

Left: Bearded Hercules, Metropolitan Museum, Roman, 68-98 CE

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A major factor in the well-known tragedies surrounding Hercules is the hatred that the goddess Hera, wife of Zeus, had for him. Hercules was the son of the affair Zeus had with the mortal woman Alcmene. Zeus made love to her after disguising himself as her husband, Amphitryon, home early from war. Amphitryon did return later the same night, and Alcmene became pregnant with his son at the same time. Thus, Hercules' very existence proved at least one of Zeus' many illicit affairs, and Hera often conspired against Zeus' mortal offspring as revenge for her husband's infidelities. His twin mortal brother, son of Amphitryon, was Iphicles, father of Hercules’ charioteer Iolaus.

Hercules and Iolaus Fountain, mosaic from the Anzio Nymphaeum, Rome

On the night the twins Hercules and Iphicles were to be born, Hera, knowing of her husband Zeus' adultery, persuaded Zeus to swear an oath that the child born that night to a member of the House of Perseus would become High King. Hera did this knowing that while Hercules was to be born a descendant of Perseus, so too was Eurystheus. Once the oath was sworn, Hera hurried to Alcmene's dwelling and slowed the birth of the twins Hercules and Iphicles by forcing Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, to sit crosslegged with her clothing tied in knots, thereby causing the twins to be trapped in the womb. Meanwhile, Hera caused Eurystheus to be born prematurely, making him High King in place of Hercules. She would have permanently delayed

Hercules' birth had she not been fooled by Galanthis, Alcmene's servant, who lied to Ilithyia, saying that Alcmene had already delivered the baby. Upon hearing this, she jumped in surprise, loosing the knots and inadvertently allowing Alcmene to give birth to Hercules and Iphicles.

Fear of Hera's revenge led Alcmene to expose the infant Hercules, but he was taken up and brought to Hera by his half-sister Athena, who played an important role as protectress of heroes. Hera did not recognize Hercules and nursed him out of pity.

Hercules suckled so strongly that he caused Hera pain, and she pushed him away. Her milk sprayed across the heavens and there formed the Milky Way.

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Lord Frederick Leighton, Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis, oil on canvas, 265 x 132 cm. 1870

With this divine milk, Hercules had acquired supernatural powers. Athena brought the infant back to his mother, and he was subsequently raised by his parents.

When he and his twin were just eight months old, Hera sent two giant snakes into the children's chamber. Iphicles cried from fear, but his brother grabbed a snake in each hand and strangled them.

He was found by his nurse playing with them on his cot as if they were toys. Astonished, Amphitryon sent for the seer Tiresias, who prophesied an unusual future for the boy, saying he would vanquish numerous monsters.

Hercules as a Boy Strangling a Snake, Roman, 200 CE

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Ancient Roman Marble Statue of a Youthful Hercules, early Imperial Flavian, AD 68–98

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As symbol of masculinity and warriorship, Hercules also had a number of male lovers. Plutarch, in his Eroticos, maintains that Hercules’ male lovers were beyond counting. Of these, the one most closely linked to Hercules is the Theban Iolaus. According to a myth thought to be of ancient origins, Iolaus was Hercules' charioteer and squire. Hercules in the end helped Iolaus find a wife. Plutarch reports that down to his own time, male couples would go to Iolaus's tomb in Thebes to swear an oath of loyalty to the hero and to each other.

Another of Hercules' male lovers, and one represented in ancient as well as modern art, is Hylas. Though it is of more recent vintage—dated to the 3rd century—than that with Iolaus, it had themes of mentoring in the ways of a warrior and help finding a wife in the end.

Another reputed male lover of Hercules is Elacatas, who was honored in Sparta with a sanctuary and yearly games, Elacatea. The myth of their love is an ancient one.

Guido Reni, Hercules on his Pyre, c. 1620

Abdera's eponymous hero, Abderus, was another of Hercules' lovers. He was said to have been entrusted with—and slain by—the carnivorous mares of Thracian Diomedes. Hercules founded the city of Abdera in Thrace in his memory, where he was honored with athletic games.

Another story is the one of his love for Nireus, who was "the most beautiful man who came beneath Ilion" (Iliad, 673). But Ptolemy adds that certain authors made Nireus out to be a son of Hercules.

Pausanias makes mention of Sostratus, a youth of Dyme, Achaea, as a lover of Hercules. Sostratus was said to have died young and to have been buried by Hercules outside the city. The tomb was still there in historical times, and the inhabitants of Dyme honored Sostratus as a hero.

Paul Cézanne, The Abduction—Hercules and Alcestis, 1867

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Hercules and Cacus by Baccio Bandinelli c. 1530

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Pavel Semenovich Sorokin, Hercules and Lichas, 1849 Hercules Resting after the fight with the Lion deNemee Andrea Mantegna, 1500

A scholiast on Argonautica lists the following male lovers of Hercules: "Hylas, Philoctetes, Diomus, Perithoas, and Phrix, after whom a city in Libya was named." Diomus is also mentioned by Stephanus of Byzantium as the eponym of the deme Diomeia of the Attic phyle Aegeis: Hercules is said to have fallen in love with Diomus when he was received as guest

by Diomus' father Collytus.

For more information and research, please visit: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracles Antonio del Pollaiolo, Hercules and the Hydra, 1475 cropped

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EUGENE JANSSON: THE BLUE PAINTER and BEYOND

By Grady Harp A significant figure in the history of art is only now becoming recognized outside of Europe for not only the impact he had on atmospheric painting of the th latter part of the 19 century in Sweden but also for making a courageous career change at the turn of the century. Eugene Jansson elected to focus on images of the nude male and stepped into the art world as a homosexual man, proud of his gender and identity. He became one of the first emancipated gay artists of the new century.

Eugène Frederik Jansson was born March 18, 1862 in Stockholm, the first son of parents who, while of modest means, hoped that their son would become a musician, His father Frederik worked as a postal messenger but was a talented amateur flautist and his mother Eugenia dreamed of being a professional singer. She was also adept at painting still lifes. His parents assured that Eugène and his younger brother Adrian (born in 1871) would receive outstanding educations. While Eugène was a superior student at the prestigious German School in Stockholm, excelling in academic subjects as well as drawing, his performance in music instruction was his low point.

Above: Jansson, Self- portrait, oil on board, 27X21cm. c.1900, Leicester Galleries, London, England Courtesy Peter Nahum Left: Jansson, Athletes, oil canvas, 171 X 111 cm. 1912 © Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, courtesy Göran Söderlund

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Eugène’s childhood was complicated by illness. In 1874 he suffered a detached retina and was diagnosed with a severe heart condition which would affect his life in both positive and negative ways. He would frequently require medical attention and was informed that he likely would not live past the age of twenty. Eugene became committed to rigorous physical exercise, an activity that would place him in the company of young athletic men throughout his life and in turn would encourage his later preoccupation of painting the male figure in different forms of strenuous physical sports. The year following his cardiac diagnosis he contracted scarlet fever, a disease that in those days resulted in chronic kidney problems and hearing loss (Eugène would become deaf around the turn of the century).

Thus his physical problems affected his general health adversely while at the same time reinforced his interest and participation with athletic activities, setting the stage for the works of his latter years— the gymnasts and swimmers—that would bring him enduring fame.

Despite his illnesses, in 1879 Eugène turned to his passion for the visual arts and studied arts and design at the Stockholm’s Technical School, beginning his artistic career painting still lifes and family portraits. He soon came to the attention of the influential teacher Edvard Perséus who encouraged the young gifted painter, shared his impressive ability to teach anatomy and figurative painting, and sponsored Eugène’s admission to

Above: Jansson, Badsump, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. 1911 Leicester Galleries, London, England Courtesy Peter Nahum

The Royal Academy of Fine Arts where Eugène was successful in gaining the praise of the faculty for his still life paintings. He remained in the Academy from 1881 to 1883 when he decided to leave the rigid teaching without gaining a degree, a rather chancy decision since Academy credentials were seen as a necessary step for all serious artists. But Eugène was from the working-class and a Socialist and never felt comfortable in the elitist atmosphere of the politically, socially, and artistically conservative Academy. Apparently, despite his gifts as a young artist, he suffered ridicule for his unsophisticated clothes, his physical defects of diminished hearing, cardiac problems, and his apparent shy, wary nature.

Yet again, in what could have been an adverse decision, Eugène not only survived but was given a position in the prestigious workshop of his mentor Jansson, Pushing Weights with Two Arms Number 2, oil on canvas, 238.2 x 198 cm. 1913, Courtesy Peter Nahum 168

Jansson, Flottans Badhus, oil on canvas, 340 x 517 cm. 1907 © Thielska Galleriet

Edvard Perséus. Here, he not only flourished making income from his art, but also was encouraged by Perséus to become a member of the Opponents, a group of radical artists whose goal it was to revolutionize the cultural life of Sweden. By 1885 Eugène Jansson had become a committed member of the Opponents and became a founding member of the Artists' Union, a group of artists providing a legitimate alternative to the Academy and creating aesthetically advanced and socially conscious art in Sweden.

Encouraged by Perséus and his fellow opponents and union artists, namely Carl Larsson, Ernst Josephson, Karl Nordström, Nils Kreuger, and Richard Bergh, he broadened his spectrum of themes and developed his potential as a painter of both contemporary figurative subjects and of urban scenes. An example, the 1884 painting, Boys going for a Swim, is also important as a step in Eugène’s painting history in that the central

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figure is a nude lad diving into the water while his companions are removing their clothes to join him—a theme that is one of the seeds of inspiration that led to the later preoccupation with male bathhouse scenes.

In 1891 Eugène’s father died and the artist, mother, and his younger brother Adrian were forced to move to a slum area of Stockholm for financial reasons. Yet again, Eugène turned this change of venues to his advantage: his home may have been poor and the streets dreary, but the young artist found inspiration in the beauty of the views across Riddarfjärden Bay. This was the beginning of his night paintings, an obsession that encouraged history to label him as the ‘Blue Painter,’ a fine example of which moniker is the 1899 painting Dawn over Riddarfjärden Bay. His paintings during the mid to later 1890s, those of melancholy

and mysterious moods of many cityscapes of Stockholm as viewed from his apartment, rendered in deep blue and grey tones, not only dominated his palette during this era, but also slowly gave rise to his popularity.

During this period the artist developed a new and unique technique of handling of paint. He first covered the canvas with very thin layers of irregularly applied paint strokes. Above these, he built up thick layers of heavily textured brushstrokes of vigorously expressive power.

Finally, he scraped off scattered segments of the upper layers of paint with a palette knife—thus exposing the canvas weave, a concept that contributes significantly to the textural richness of the completed painting. Historians have cited his affinity to the work of Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. This newly developed technique would lead him to render the sculpted figures of male nudes that would become a major part of his legacy as an avant-garde painter of his time.

By the turn of the century another major step would occur in the art of Eugène Jansson. He had achieved critical and financial success as the ‘Blue Painter,’ expressing the poetry of Nordic light better than any of his contemporaries. He also enjoyed the patronage of the wealthy banker Ernest Thiel, one of the most perceptive and generous European patrons of the era, consistently supporting the efforts of avantgarde writers and artists. It became obvious that Thiel's patronage contributed to Eugène’s altering his relatively simple lifestyle. In the early 1900s, Jansson became an active participant in the sophisticated nightlife of the Stockholm. He traveled to several European countries, attended the Venice Biennale—three of his paintings were included—and the Universal Exposition in Paris,

Above: Jansson, Gymnasts, oil on canvas, 198 X 113 cm. 1914 © Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, courtesy Göran Söderlund

Right: Photograph of Jansson’s models provided by Leicester Galleries, London, UK Courtesy Peter Nahum

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but he returned to his native Stockholm with a new outward appearance–his usual somber Socialist inspired dress he replaced with the look of the elegant white suit and shirt and sandals (see ‘Self Portrait 1910’).

Yet by 1904 he made a significant change in his subject matter as well as in his personal life.

Perhaps it was due to his continued medically indicated swimming and exercise routines that exposed him on a nearly daily basis to the gyms and bathhouses of Stockholm that his sexual preference for men blossomed. Forsaking his now famous blue nocturnes of Stockholm’s cityscapes, he instead began to produce his paintings depicting young workers, sailors, and athletes—usually shown nude.

Eugène’s powerful paintings of male nudes suggest a strong repartee with his models. His tastes were for young muscular men and he enjoyed close relationships with them. One of these models, Knut Nyman, with whom Jansson had become acquainted at the Flottans badhus (Naval Bathhouse), enjoying nude sunbathing and swimming, was depicted numerous times but most notably in the 1907 painting Young Man Standing in a Doorway. Knut became his companion and they lived together from 1907 to 1913. Nyman also appears in Athletes, 1912 and other large paintings. Jansson’s two paintings of this significant meeting place of gay men–Flottans badhus, 1907 and Badsump, 1911 are among the artist’s most famous. The manner in which the artist composed these paintings suggests the private rapport between the men as they actively and passively captured the gaze of their comrades–a safe place to plan assignations later, adding the sense of homoeroticism to the works.

Of note, during this time of Eugène Jansson’s new emphasis on the male nude as subject matter there was a movement in Sweden, Open Air Vitalism, which was a positivistic movement and enjoyed a predominant force in Swedish social and cultural life between 1904 and 1910. Those who adhered to this movement encouraged nudity as a means to

Jansson, Self Portrait, oil, 203 X 110 cm. 1910 Collection of the National Museum of Sweden courtesy of Göran Söderlund, PrinsEugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm

Jansson, Dawn over Riddarfjärden Bay, oil, 150 X 201 cm. 1899 © Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, courtesy Göran Söderlund

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Jansson, Young Man Standing in a Doorway, oil, 144 X 90 cm. 1907 © Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, courtesy Göran Söderlund

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intensify contact with the rejuvenating forces of the sun and natural forces. Another Swedish artist Johan Axel Gustav Acke (1859–1924) belonged to this movement and also painted the male nude (see Östrasalt by J.A.G. Acke painted outside the island Ornö 1906), but unlike Jansson, his nudes were more a part of their particular environments, inside and outside. Jansson’s nudes were noted for their naked anatomy and muscular beauty and included frank depiction of their genitalia. Some art critics have remarked on his ability to paint muscular men so well as though they provided the precision of écorché, a figure painted showing the muscles of the body without skin!

One of Eugène Jansson’s most famous works, the Flottans Badhus (Naval Bathhouse), 1907 represents the artist at his peak in using his painterly technique and sophisticated compositional gifts to celebrate the beauty of the nude male figures both in active sport and in camaraderie. It is in this painting that the impact of Jansson’s sexuality is most apparent.

This painting along with his many other paintings of men in the gymnasium–on the rings, lifting weights, or practicing acrobatic exercises and feats of perfect physical control–suggest that the artist had become completely at home with his sexuality, even publically, despite the fact that homosexuality was illegal in Sweden until 1944! Even as early as 1903 there were articles about the promenades that Eugène and his homosexual brother Adrian routinely made that year at Sandhamn (then an elegant "summer colony" of Stockholm) with their younger live-in companions, referred to only by their nicknames, Stomatol and Azymol.

Despite the current appreciation of the late paintings of Eugène Jansson, still considered some of the finest paintings of the male nude, the critics and public during his last years were not accepting, negating their importance by labeling them ‘sensationalist’ or focused merely on material beauty without concern to express higher spiritual ideals. Indeed, the public and critical response of

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disdain for these paintings is likely the reason for his gradual disappearance from the public view. It is only now that these compelling works are gaining the respect they deserve; in recent years they have been included in museums exhibitions at the Musée d'Orsay, The National Museum of Sweden, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, as well as the Thielska Galleriet, Galleri Claes Moser, Leicester Galleries, London and throughout Europe.

In early 1915, Jansson suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, leaving him paralyzed on one side. For the remainder of his life he was under the close care of wrestler/nurse Rudolf Rydström. On June 15, 1915, Jansson died after suffering another cerebral hemorrhage. Sadly, at the time of his death, his brother Adrian destroyed his diaries and all of his apparently sexually explicit drawings. We can only surmise the importance of that body of work and information to the development of sexual identity acceptance that only now is following the lead set

by Eugène Jansson. But what is held now in important collections are the many facets of this gifted artist–the early still lifes, the sumptuous nocturnal paintings of the skyline and water’s edge of Stockholm from his Blue Painter period, and the large collection of nude male gymnasts and swimmers and men at healthy repose, enjoying the brilliance Eugène Jansson so carefully and lovingly conveyed in the new brilliant sunlight that bathed his final works. Always a man familiar with challenges he accepted potential barriers and rose above them to become a world renowned, individualist artist. He opened many doors for changes in society’s views and in the art world’s movement toward Modernism. As Henri Loyrette , the director of the Louvre has stated, ‘He put his homosexuality on clear display, and always took brave positions, but above all he was revolutionary in his approach to painting.’

Special thanks to Peter Nahum, Leicester Galleries, London; Göran Söderlund, Prins-Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm; The National Museum of Sweden, Thielska Galleriet, Galleri Claes Moser, and Fredrik Strömblad

Jansson, Boys going for a Swim, oil and canvas, 52 x 87 cm. 1884 Courtesy of Fredrik Strömblad

J.A.G. ACKE, O¨strasalt Orno Island, 20 X 30cm. 1906 Courtesy Galleri Claes Moser Right Page, top left, counter-clockwise: All from Leicester Galleries, London, Courtesy Peter Nahum Jansson, Ring Gymnast Number 1, oil, 178 x 175 cm. 1911 Jansson, Ring Gymnast Number 2, oil, 178 x 175 cm. 1911 Jansson, Lifting Weights with One Arm, number 2, oil, 138 x 198 cm. 1914 Jansson, Two Models, oil, 199 X 89 cm. 1908

Jansson, Seated Nude on White Chair, oil, 82 x 65 cm. 1912

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