LIVING HISTORIES

Queer Views and Old Masters

Foreword by Hanya Yanagihara

With contributions by Jonathan Anderson, Jessica Bell Brown, Jenna Gribbon, Doron Langberg, Christopher Y. Lew, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Jason Reynolds, Legacy Russell, Salman Toor, and Russell Tovey

Ask You the Same (cat. 1) and Hans Holbein their most powerful because it underscores just how profoundly divergent contemporary figurative painting is from its history. ~

Naked from the waist up, the young man bares his black briefs and thigh, just visible along the bottom edge of the picture. Lamplight cascades across his chest. It is a light that the painter, Doron Langberg, achieves by leaving the primed canvas open, untouched—a nod to twentieth-century figurative painters like Alice Neel. His shoulder, arm, and hands are in shadow, illuminated only by the ambient light of the bedroom, with little more than a wash of umber, orange, and fuchsia. His pink nipple glows erotically. When Xavier Salomon asked Langberg to make a painting in response to the portrait of Sir Thomas More (see fig. 16 ) by Hans Holbein the Younger, and to present it adjacent to the actual painting, the artist knew immediately that the work he would produce “had to be located at the center of [his] practice.” Langberg painted a portrait of a young man (someone who was very close to him) and gave it a title he often uses: Lover.

In his permanent Frick home, More stares, eternally dour, at Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell (see fig. 10), who seems to glower back. The temporary reinstallation of the two works at the brutalist Breuer building (the historical site of the Whitney Museum, for which the building was designed) keeps them together in the same sheetrock-walled gallery under the building’s iconic cast-concrete grid ceiling. Henry Clay Frick acquired these two portraits and paired them intentionally. He made efforts to reunite amorous couples or, in this case, enemies. It was the unprecedented loan of the Cromwell portrait to the Holbein survey at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles that allowed for the presentation of the Living Histories project at all. The More portrait would later travel to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. In Cromwell’s place, Langberg allows Lover (cat. 2) to regard More in a similar way; Lover, too, faces More, albeit more distantly. While More stares off into the future or to a higher power (the way politicians often do), posing for the official portrait that would define his legacy, Langberg’s subject looks down, intently reading and seeming to ignore the fact that he is being painted at all (fig. 2). He is unnamed; we don’t know who he is now, and he will bear no identity in the future. More was nearly fifty at the time the portrait was painted, whereas Langberg’s subject is young and virile, perhaps in his thirties. He is marked by the kind of permanent