A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Gay
Feathers maketh the man, extra points if they’re peacock feathers. I’ve been unable to find a photographer or model credit for this picture, unfortunately (if anyone knows, please leave a comment), but it comes from He Said, He Said via Fabulon. The winged boy below is creditable, however, being one Lyle Lodwick photographed by Tyler Riggs for Contributing Editor.
Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.
“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.”
So says a character in The Music on the Hill, one of the slightly more serious stories from Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis (1911). Saki’s Pan is a youthful spirit closer to a faun than the goatish creature of legend. But being a gay writer whose tales regularly feature naked young men (surprisingly so, given the time they were written) I’m sure Saki would have appreciated the Roman statue above. There’s nothing chaste about this Pan with his “token erect of thorny thigh” as Aleister Crowley put it in his lascivious 1929 Hymn to Pan, a poem which caused a scandal when read aloud at his funeral some years later. The Roman statue was for a long while an exhibit in the restricted collection of the Naples National Archaeological Museum where all the more scurrilous and priapic artefacts unearthed at Pompeii were kept safely away from women, children and the great unwashed. These are now on public display and include the notorious statue of a goat being penetrated by a satyr.
If Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would Shriek | A centenary retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jerry (1931).
A few weeks too early for Bloomsday, this painting by Paul Cadmus was in the news this week after being acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art. The subject is Jerry French, one of the artist’s regular models and also his lover during this period. I hadn’t seen this picture before and wonder whether this is the first painted representation of Joyce’s Ulysses, a book which at the time was still banned in the USA. The ban was overturned in 1933 following some enlightened deliberation by Judge John M Woolsey.
Jerry takes its place as part of the Toledo Museum’s permanent collection next month. Via Towleroad.
• Paul Cadmus gallery at Ten Dreams
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Paul Cadmus, 1904–1999
“For A Definition Of The Nude”.
After yesterday’s post I can’t resist repeating something seen at Fabulon, Thombeau and I both being cock fanatics (so to speak). Dimitris Yeros is a Greek artist and photographer whose site features a series of studies of male and female nudes juxtaposed with a variety of animals. This isn’t the only peacock photo, there’s also a female portrait and, in one of the other sections, that recurrent object of obsession, a naked man with a sword. As well as photography, Yeros presents examples of his very distinctive paintings.
While we’re on the subject of masculine eye candy, I’ve been enjoying some of the discoveries at Homotography (“Photography with homosexual tendencies”) not least their recent interview with Exterface, French masters of luscious homoerotica.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exterface