Marko is a Slovenian in London who takes his own delectable photos. This series and others can be seen here. Via Kaiserin magazine.
Category: {gay}
Gay
Mark Beard’s artistic circle
The Fencing Team by Bruce Sargeant.
Artists in the 20th century used to be multifarious in their activities, often taking their work through different stages or periods of evolution; Picasso and Max Ernst are two good examples of this. In today’s inflated art market this is no longer a wise move. As Brian Eno has noted in the case of the polymathic Tom Phillips, the pressure is there to establish yourself as a person who does one thing only, to turn yourself into a brand.
American artist Mark Beard isn’t happy with that situation. In order to satisfy a desire to create in whatever styles he chooses, he’s developed a number of distinct artist personalities, each with their own detailed biographies and even photographs (below). This isn’t entirely unprecedented, Marcel Duchamp famously had a female alter-ego named Rrose Sélavy, and was photographed by Man Ray in feminine attire, but offhand I can’t think of another artist going as far as creating six distinct personas. The painting above is one of a homoerotic sports-themed series by artist Bruce Sargeant who died, we’re told, in 1938 as a result of a wrestling accident. Examples of Beard’s other influences follow. For the complete artist biographies, see the Mark Beard pages at the Carrie Haddad gallery.
The artists
top left: Mark Beard (b. 1956); right: Bruce Sargeant and model (1898-1938)
middle left: Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon (1849-1930); right: Brechtolt Steeruwitz (1890-1973)
bottom left: Edith Thayer Cromwell (1993-1962); right: Peter Coulter (b. 1948)
Their works
Ideology: The Politically Correct Disdain the Frivolous by Mark Beard (1989).
Avant la Fuite by Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon (1894).
Swimmer Drying Himself, Berlin Olympics (1936), Young Athlete by Bruce Sargeant.
On the Strand by Edith Thayer Cromwell.
Das Krakenhaus by Brechtolt Steeruwitz (At the Hospital) (1923).
Cabinet by Peter Coulter.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Herbert List revisited
Youth and Roman bust (1949).
A breathtaking photograph by Herbert List I hadn’t seen before. The model was the Swiss painter Rolf Duerig. Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy’s exemplary Flickr pages have a set of List’s elegant and occasionally erotic photos.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vintage/Vantage
• Herbert List’s Beautiful Young Men
• Herbert List
John Phillip Law, 1937–2008
Pygar the angel, Barbarella (1968).
John Phillip Law, who died on Tuesday, was featured here last year in a look at Mario Bava’s crazy live action fumetti, Danger Diabolik (below). Law made that film the same year as he played a blind angel in an equally crazy slab of Sixties’ decadence, Barbarella. In a more serious role, he played opposite the very formidable Rod Steiger in The Sergeant which was released the same year; together with Victim, this was one of the first films I remember watching that dealt with same-sex attraction (albeit in the usual angst-ridden mode), with Law’s character being the understandable object of Steiger’s doomed affection.
After those heights, things tended to be more down than up but I do have an affection for Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974). Law’s Sinbad was pretty good even if he spends much of the time fighting monsters while Tom Baker was great as the villainous Koura. And I always appreciated that screenwriter Brian Clemens made Lemuria the destination of the voyage, a lost continent mentioned by Madame Blavatsky and many of the Weird Tales writers, including HP Lovecraft in The Haunter of the Dark.
Danger Diabolik (1968).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• CQ
• Danger Diabolik
The recurrent pose 18
A photograph attributed to William von Gloeden which borrows the Flandrin pose as the photographer did with greater precision in his picture entitled Cain, included in the first post in this series. If there’s scepticism about the origin it’s only that many photographs attributed to von Gloeden are by his cousin Wilhelm von Plueschow. Wikimedia Commons now has a gallery of von Gloeden’s quasi-Classical studies of the boys (and occasionally, girls) of Taormina, Sicily, and there’s another gallery devoted to von Plueschow which includes his own less faithful Flandrin imitation.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive