Arts & Entertainment
The Life in Art - A Visual History
Pictures and Passions:
A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts
review by Ernie McLeod
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Pictures and Passions |
I can think of a number of people for whom James Saslow’s Pictures and Passions would make an ideal gift: Jesse Helms, Charlton Heston, all the folks who have been testifying the past few months about how homosexuality is an unnatural choice lacking historical tradition.
Jesse could learn that the penis had a time-honored place in art history long before he passed dick pics by Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz around the Senate. Homophobe Charlton could learn that Michelangelo’s “pictures and poetry remain the romantic as well as artistic high point of early modern homosexual self expression,” a point clearly lacking in his portrayal of the artist in The Agony and the Ecstasy. Vermont’s more outspoken bigots could learn that one of the most compelling arguments for the naturalness of same-sex love lies in the fact that it has been portrayed in the visual arts since the dawn of time.
Such knowledge is probably wasted on these people, however, so instead I’ll highly recommend Saslow’s amazingly ambitious and comprehensive book to all of you.
While Pictures and Passions is not the first book to look at artists and art history from a queer perspective, it is the first overview of homosexuality in the arts from the Stone Age to Stonewall, from pederastic pottery and the androgynous aesthetic to the AIDS quilt, Diva magazine and Gay Games T-shirts. Saslow, who’s written several books about the Renaissance and was a cofounder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York, is a perfect match for such an exhaustively broad undertaking.
Saslow’s writing is neither dry nor drenched with academic jargon. He looks at positive and negative portrayals of homosexuality, high and low culture, private lives and public outings. Rarely does he appear to be pushing an agenda, straining to “queer” his subject matter (as sometimes seems the case with such scholarship). On the other hand, he doesn’t shy away from queer lingo (a classical Greek sculpture is described as a “handsome hunk,” for example) or amusingly knowing descriptions of queer sex. In other words, he doesn’t clean it up for the masses.
Saslow introduces the book by asking what gay and lesbian art is exactly, and how it can be understood through the ages. While some of the images in the book (there are 150 photographs, 32 of them color plates) are bluntly sexual, he points out that if “homosexuality is more than sex, then homosexual art is more than images of sex.” Much of the work of the art scholar is putting the artworks in historical context, and Saslow goes to great lengths to discuss the images in relation to the societal pressures in which they were created and viewed.
Not surprisingly, representations of homosexuality in the arts have often been discouraged (to put it mildly), suppressed, and denied throughout history. If depictions of male-male sexuality were rarely seen during certain time periods, depictions of female-female sexuality were all but invisible.
For me, one of the most positive things about this book is that, unlike so many scholarly studies by gay men, it doesn’t ignore lesbians. Granted, Saslow has limited material to work with, since, after Sappho, nearly all known art and literature was the product of men. The lesbian imagery that does exist was created by men for men (a continuing phenomenon, of course) until the 19th century, when, finally, French animal painter Rosa Bonheur portrayed lesbian life from the inside. Things pick up by 1900, when Paris is described as “Lesbian Heaven.”
Saslow covers not only gay men and lesbians, and all time periods, but various world cultures as well. He has a chapter on Asia and Islam that includes discussion of the Kama Sutra, rampant male prostitution during the Song dynasty, Japanese “pillow books,” and the proliferation of erotica during the late Ming period. Saslow admits that he’s barely scratched the surface there, that more “fossils remain to be excavated.”
The need for further excavation is evident throughout the book; considering he covers three millennia in three hundred pages, there’s not much room for in-depth discussion of any one artist or period (though he does provide a good “further reading” list). The closer he gets to the present ÷ when film, magazines, television, comics, advertisements etc. enter the mix ÷ the more scattered things become. Transitions get a bit awkward when Julia Morgan, who designed San Simeon for William Randolph Hearst, appears within paragraphs of the “Arrow Collar Man” and a Nazi traveling exhibit. Likewise, Tom of Finland segues dizzyingly into David Hockney into Andy Warhol into Philip Johnson into the founding of the “Advocate.” But these are quibbles.
In these days when history is being made right here in Vermont, and when, because the gay movement has changed so much in the past 30 years, Stonewall can seem like the ancient past, it’s refreshing to place ourselves and our art within a much larger framework. Considering that the United States’ first real contribution to male sexuality in art, Thomas Eakins’s “The Swimming Hole,” didn’t come until the 1880s, to say there’s a world out there beyond us is ludicrous understatement. Pictures and Passions goes a long way toward reclaiming the images that many have tried to keep buried, the images that, together, form the picture of who we are today.