Born On This Day- August 6th... Andy Warhol

I remember quite well, my parents shaking their heads & saying- " that is not art... it is a painting of a soup can!", when I expressed my appreciation for the work of Andy Warhol at a very young age. The point of the matter was, I really "got him", even at age 8... or especially at age 8. Andy Warhol was the subject of much scorn & derision from the critics, the public & my parents, but he was arguably the most important artist of the 20th century.

Andrew Warhola, sometimes referred to as the "Pope of Pop," embraced pop art, fascinated with the commercialism of popular icons in media & in everyday life. Warhol helped to shape pop culture & foresaw our fascination with the media to the extreme extent to which it is now accessible. Claiming that each individual would have his or her "15 minutes of fame," Warhol would certainly not be surprised by the popularity of such venues as YouTube, MP3 music downloads, American Idol, Facebook, The Real Housewives, or blogs.

A master & practitioner of multiple creative forms of expression, Warhol was a painter, writer, music producer, avant-garde filmmaker, magazine creator, sculptor, & photographer. Focusing on diverse & contrasting interests at once, he was fascinated with all forms of media, a blurring of gender identities, & the contrast between a sense of celebrity & privacy.

He was a ground breaker in the idea of self as product. He even set up his studio as "The Factory", overseeing a staff that turned out prints, silkscreens & products of his work. He was still a remarkable &

transcendent artist & a commanding craftsman. The Husband & I once saw an enchanting exhibit of his commercial drawings from the early 1950s, mostly of ladies shoes, produced for advertising. These works predated his huge fame, but the essence of what he was to bring was already there. I have allot of material by & about him, including the very readable Andy Warhol's Diaries where he writes about his relationships with several men. His long time lover was interior designer Jed Johnson.

Warhol died after successful gall bladder surgery from a heart arrythmia in 1987. Johnson died in the TWA flight 800 explosion off the coast of Long Island in 1996. Warhol remains my favorite artist.

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have."

The Husband's Art

The Husband calls them assemblages. He is an interior designer, a set designer, a book illustrator, but the work that he has given his heart & hand to are the constructions made of found objects, put together in the manner of one his idols- Joseph Cornell. His pieces speak of memory, nostalgia & loss. Click on an image & it will get better... magic!

Born On This Day-July 9th... Artist David Hockney

He was already a noted & accomplished painter in his native England, but David Hockney's style, point of view, & medium changedfrom oils to acrylics when he moved to L.A.,a city he had fantasized about, in 1963.

Hockney: "Within a week of arriving there in this strange big city, not knowing a soul, I'd passed the driving test, bought a car, driven to Las Vegas & won some money, got myself a studio, started painting, all within a week.& I thought, it's just how I imagined it would be."

The Hockney that I know best is the painter of sunny California skies, swimming pools, palm trees & boys. His work in this period seems to me to be a modernist slant on color Polaroids & snapshots from the life I was brushing up against when I attended college in L.A. from 1972-76. I actually attended an all-boy pool party at a famous producer's Beverly Hills estate & Hockney was one of the guests.

He is absolutely one of the Husband & my favorite artists, & though I would love to own his paintings (they sell in the millions), as a lowly working class gentleman, I am having to be content with my "coffee table" books & postcards of his work.

David Hockney is also notable as a draftsman, printmaker, stage designer & photographer (photo collage). His personal style,with his trademark round glasses & mop of blond hair, & spirited personality also engaged the Husband & I & we took to wearing his colorful horizontal striped ties & Izod shirts in the early 80s. Hockney has always been openly gay & has enjoyed a variety of relationships with men, describing himself as a "playboy".

He was so important to me that for a certain period in the 1980s, I emulated his style, wearing Izod shirts with knit striped ties & round glasses. In the new century he continues to inform my life by with his talent & style. I admire his talent & his bank account.

"The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty,
 you know you're an artist."

Born On This Day- July 5th... Over Achiever- Jean Cocteau

My husband is a hyphenate (most people in Portland are), as an artist-designer-set designer, but he is a bit of an underachiever, compared with poet-artist-playwright-actor-designer-photographer-filmmaker-boxing manager- Jean Cocteau. Cocteau published his 1st volume of poems when he was 19. He was a well regarded artist & popular man-about-town in Paris, with the success of several ballets & plays that he wrote in his late 20s. In the early 1920s, Cocteau's lover, writer Raymond Radiguet, died of typhoid fever; the despondent Cocteau escaped the pain of his loss with the help of opium. In 1930, Cocteau tried film making as the medium best suited for his artistic expression. His stylized, homoerotic films are taken from Cocteau's drawings: bold, simple strokes, accentuated eyes, minimalist outlines & profiles, & erotic, surrealistic portraits that dominate the sets of his films. In his later films, Cocteau included bits of his poetry written in his distinctive handwriting, samples of his drawings & paintings, narration, & cast himself in certain roles.

Cocteau’s work is marked by whimsical special effects & exotic landscapes & themes of narcissism, the Orpheus myth, mirrors, passages to secret worlds, fairy tales, flowers, & beautiful people in iconographic settings. In 1937, Cocteau met Jean Marais, the most famous of his lovers, & helped make his talented, handsome, & athletic protégé into one of France's most beloved movie stars. Cocteau made with Marais, such classics films as La belle et la bête & Orphée.

Cocteau by Modigliani

Cocteau encouraged artists to speak out against unjust political domination, & yet he was burdened by the open secrets of his opium use & homosexuality, which made him particularly vulnerable to attack by the right-wing government. During the Nazi Occupation, Cocteau's plays were banned & Cocteau was a victim of physical violence & homophobic insults. But still, Cocteau wrote, made films, traveled, & attracted famous friends, patrons, & protégés throughout the rest of his life. Cocteau was elected to the prestigious Académie Français. The artist died of a heart attack in 1963, just an hour after learning of singer Édith Piaf's death. He wrote more than 30 volumes of poetry, 7 novels, 24 plays, 11 ballets, 6 operas, 6 full length films, & 100s of drawings & photographs. He contributed to the worlds of publishing, graphic design, clothing design, & interior design. Jean Cocteau continues to this day as one of France's most famous, & most adored, cultural icons. A fascinating gay man of the 20th century. How about Adrien Brody in the title role of the film of his life story?

There Once Was An Old Queer Named Lear

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea green boat,

They took some honey, & plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

& sang to a small guitar,

'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?'

They sailed away, for a year & a day,

To the land where the Bong-tree grows

& there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'

So they took it away, & were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, & slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

& hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

It is as simple as ABC to take joy in a gay 19th century writer named as the notable innovator of nonsense.

Today marks the 199th birthday of Edward Lear, an important English illustrator & landscape painter, but more widely known as the writer of an original kind of nonsense verse & for his perfect limericks. His genius is clear in his nonsense poems, with a world of peculiar, phantasmagorical, preposterous creature in nonsense word, with a dash of deep underlying melancholy. Their quality is matched in the limerick & his pen &ink drawings.

Lear was a homosexual who suffered all his life from ill health & depression that he named- “The Morbids”.

He mostly lived abroad. Even though he was naturally timid, he was a constant & courageous traveler who explored: Italy, Greece, Albania, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, India & Ceylon. An indefatigable artist, he produced great number of pen & watercolor sketches of great topographical accuracy. He made his living from these pieces & large oil paintings.

After his nomadic life he lived with his celebrated cat –Foss in San Remo, on the Mediterranean coast, at a house he named "Villa Tennyson." For companions he counted on a circle of friends, correspondents, & his chef- Giorgis. Foss died in 1886 & was buried with some ceremony in a garden at Villa Tennyson. After a long decline in his health, Lear died at his villa in 1888. Lear's funeral was a sad, solitary affair; not one of Lear's many lifelong friends being able to attend.

In his lifetime, Lear published 3 volumes of bird & animal drawings, 7 illustrated travel books, 4 books of nonsense: The Book of Nonsense (1869), Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany & Alphabets (1871), More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, & Botany (1872), & Laughable Lyrics (1877), plus a posthumous release- Queery Leary Nonsense (1911).

There was an Old Man on a hill,
Who seldom, if ever, stood still;
He ran up & down,
In his Grandmother's gown,
Which adorned that Old Man on a hill.


The Post Apocalyptic Bohemian: Stephen
He liked men for no tangible reason
A frontal lobotomy
Cured him of sodomy
But ruined his plans for the season.

Born On This Day-May 8th... Tom Of Finland

The first time I saw a Tom of Finland drawing was in a downtown Spokane used book store near the bus station in the 1970. The image, buried at the back of a men’s physique magazine (this is pre-MEN’S HEALTH, but the same idea), was in a small ad for more “special” publications. It jumped out at me like a great big erection. It depicted a pair of muscular butch men with big chins & broad grins grabbing each other's bubble butts & straining packages while winking at the reader. I was startled & aroused. Tom of Finland's pornographic drawings of hunky, fuck-booted, big butted beefcakes banging the booty in charcoals, pencil, ink, & watercolors had my full attention, & remonded me that I would need to get to a gym.

Tom was born Touko Laaksonen in Kaarina, Finland, in 1920. His work is literally the masturbatory fantasies of a lonely young homosexual Finnish boy; he began drawing in his bedroom in the 1940s. Tom worked as an illustrator in the Finnish advertising business until the early 1970s, when he became a full time gay pornographer. He sold the idea of the male body as a pleased, pleasuring & pleasured thing decades before Calvin Klein thought of it.


Tom's greatest achievement was in drawing gay men who were masculine, happy & proud at a time when they were supposed to be effeminate, neurotic & shameful. This is certainly the reason why so many gay men are Tom of Finland fans. Today's gay porn is just a footnote to Tom of Finland, endless loops of a garage full of “regular guys” with huge cocks & massive pecs having spontaneous, shameless sex at the drop of the monkey wrench. His achievement was more than just making gay men feel good about themselves, or the feel of leather.

Tom had a profound influence on gay culture because, in a world that insisted gay men were sissies, Tom portrayed them as confident, macho & aggressive. Every drawing features a lumberjack, cop, construction worker, cowboy, biker, sailor or soldier. Not a florist, choreographer or dress designer in the bunch. He suggested something more than the masculinity in gay men. Tom turned it around on the straight world; you couldn't be masculine unless you were gay.

Before Tom, no one drew men like he did, unabashed sex objects & sex subjects, giving them exaggerated big chins, strong jaws, full lips, bubble butts, full bulges. His idea of masculinity & virility end up looking so... well, yummy. They seem to be seeking the attentions of the powerful Abercrombie & Fitch photographer Bruce Weber (a big Tom fan), or perhaps a Levi's commercial.

Tom's big break came in the 1950s from Physique Pictorial, semi-legal gay American magazine disguised as a straight men's bodybuilding magazine, which frequently put Tom's men on the cover. Half a century later, & 19 years after his death in 1991, the world has turned around & real men who look like Tom's drawings now appear on the cover of magazines like Men's Health. I was reading one while waiting to get my haircut at 7 Bucks A Whack (the perfect Tom of Finland business name) & the thing was full of advice on how straight men can turn themselves into something out of Tom of Finland.

The big question begs- is it art or is it porn? David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe & Andy Warhol were admirers & collectors of Tom's work. Not bad for a pornographer. He continues to have gallery shows & his work is in the permanent collections of 7 museums, including MOMA. While the debate goes on whether Tom's fuck machines constitute art, anyone can see that the macho men of Tom of Finland are hung… they're hung in museums.


* These were the most post-able images I could dig up.

Born On This Day- May 4th... American Artist Keith Haring

Someone stole my beloved Keith Haring Swatch watch. I think I know who it was, but when queried, they denied any possibility that they were responsible for it having gone missing. I saw the same one today on EBay for $1600. The Husband: “you couldn’t get $1600 for that watch. You loved that Swatch into a state of being 'very used'. I wish I had $1600, I would buy you a new one.”

For most of the 1980s, I had prints of Keith Haring drawings & paintings, torn from Interview Magazines & displayed on the fridge. Unbelievable, there is a Haring, held by a Warhol magnet on my 2010 stainless steel refrigerator this morning. Some things just don’t change. The display face on my cell phone is by Keith Haring.

Keith Allen Haring was born May 4, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania, & grew up in Kutztown, a small Pennsylvania Dutch farm community. As a child, he fervently drew cartoons & gradually progressing to more complex compositions. He saw a display of Andy Warhol's work when he was in his teens, & was impressed by that artist's flat lines, his use of pop icons & mundane objects, & Warhol’s concept of mass-produced art. Warhol's elevation of the commonplace into art would be the crux of Haring's art.

He moved to NYC in 1980, to be at the center of both the art world & the gay community. He began to create his own graffiti of ambiguous looking animals & a human figure on all 4s, in the city's subways. Haring was employed as an assistant to gallery owner Tony Shafrazi, who gave him his first major exhibition in 1982.

During the mid-1980s, Haring's work brought him wealth & celebrity. His fans included Yoko Ono, Dennis Hopper, & even Andy Warhol himself. Madonna, explains that his art had such a vast appeal because "there was a lot of innocence & a joy that was coupled with a brutal awareness of the world."

Haring was among the generation of gay men lost in the first wave of the AIDS epidemic. He was diagnosed in late 1988, but continued his art until the very end, when he could no longer hold a pencil or brush. Haring's bold lines & figures carry poignant messages of vitality & unity. His legacy made an impact on late 20th century art.

Until his death Keith Haring was devoted to creating cultural awareness about the disease & other gay rights issues. The Keith Haring Foundation was established in 1989 to assist AIDS related & children's charities, & still maintains the archives of his work. Haring generously contributed his talents to art workshops with children, created logos & posters for public service agencies, & produced murals, sculptures, & paintings to benefit health centers & disadvantaged communities. His foundation continues his legacy indefinitely. He leaves me a vision for the future.

The missing Swatch... where is it?

Haring by Annie Leibovitz

"My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man & the world. It lives through magic."

Keith Haring was 31 years old when he died in NYC in 1990. He would have been 53 years old today. I cried this morning thinking about writing this post. For Keith being gone too soon, too young. For my loss of innocence. For my missing Keith Haring Original Swatch.

Born On This Day- April 15th...Renaissance Man, Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

In his childhood, the Husband was so entranced by a book on the life of Leonardo da Vinci that he taught himself to write in "mirror", that can only be read by holding it up to a reflection, a skill practiced by the often secretive Leonardo. The Husband can still do the mirror writing to this day & is himself, a bit of a Renaissance man.

Self Portrait

Leonardo da Vinci was denied an education & a profession because he was born out of wedlock in 1452. One of the few professions for the son of a middle class notary & a peasant girl was art. Despite the stigma of being a bastard Leonardo mastered anatomy, architecture, botany, cartography, engineering, mathematics, music, poetry, science, sculpture, sketching, &… painting. He used to sleep 2 hours every day. A left-handed dyslexic, he tried to paint with both of his hands. He was a loner, but also adopted a child which he raised with extra care. He destroyed most of his work.

When he was 24, Leonardo & 3 young companions were arrested on the charge of sodomy. No witnesses appeared against them & eventually the charges were dropped. Although he was not convicted, the accusation may have tormented Leonardo throughout his life. It seems clear to me that Leonardo was homosexual. He kept his private life very private, but throughout his entire life, Leonardo surrounded himself with attractive men. His relationship with the beautiful curly haired Gian Giacomo de' Caprotti lasted 20 years. In the last 10 years of Leonardo's life, his companion was the much younger Francesco Melzi, who would later serve as the executor of Leonardo’s estate.


Leonardo possessed the greatest mind of the Italian Renaissance. He wanted to know the workings of what he saw in nature. his inventions & scientific studies were centuries ahead of his time. He was the first person to ingunuity, & intellectual inquiringness show him to be the epitome of the Renaissance spirit. 6 centuries later, the world is still in awe.

Born 536 Years Ago Today- Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

I am so very lucky indeed; I have actually seen his work, not just in Art History 101, but close up. In Italy.

Some of the most famous, poetry, sculpture, painting & architecture in the world was created by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, who spent most of his lengthy career creating colossal works of art for 7 consecutive Popes. Regarded as the greatest living artist of his day, he remains one of the impressive artists of all time. Among his creations: the Pieta, David, the Sistine Chapel, the Laurentian Library, the Last Judgment, St. Peter's Basilica. The Renaissance painter & sculptor whose frescoes adorn the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican was put in charge of the restoration of St. Peter’s by Pope Paul III in 1546, a job he held until his death in 1564. His greatest contribution to the basilica is its central dome or cupola, a universally acknowledged architectural triumph.

Michelangelo wrote 48 epigrams commemorating the adoration of his young lover Cecchino dei Bracci who died at age 16. The drawings, with legs spread wide & thighs for days, are of Tommaso De'Cavalieri, a handsome young nobleman, whom he met in 1532 when he was 57 & Tommaso 23. Michelangelo wrote 300 beautiful, astounding sonnets to him that became a much loved book after his death. Michelangelo wrote love letters & ardent poems to him & in 1533 sent him a series of erotic drawings, the most famous of which depicts Zeus disguised as an eagle abducting a young Ganymede. In Michelangelo's drawing, the eagle presses its body tightly against the back of the smiling, yielding Ganymede. The drawings, with legs spread wide & the thighs to die for, were likely in the image of Tommaso De'Cavalieri. The 2 men were lovers for over 30 years.

 Michelangelo's poems to Cavalieri were extravagant:


“Your name nourishes my heart & soul filing each with such sweetness
If my eyes had their share of you, only think how happy I would be.
Were I two slippers he could own &
use as base to his majestic weight,
I would enjoy two snowy feet at least.”


“If I must be defeated to be blessed,
Don't marvel that one, naked & alone,
should prove a prisoner of an armored knight.
The love I speak of aspires to the heights;
woman is too dissimilar, & it ill becomes
a wise & manly heart to burn for her.”


Michelangelo seems to have more inhibited about his sexuality than Leonardo da Vinci, but Leonardo lived in Florence & Michelangelo in Rome, a generation later, & the time & place were not as permissive.

& then there is that 13 foot hunk of rock hard man that I met one day at The Academia in Florence. We had such a hot time.

Gorey Story

"When I think of other things that attain cult status, they strike me as somewhat feebleminded. I mean, I suppose it's better being a cult object than nothing at all. But I don't see how anyone has time to be really famous. I might get people dropping by who are slightly... unhinged."

Early morning, & I am up to view some favorite blogs, look at the news & begin to formulate a post for my bloggy place on the Internet. I ran into the Husband, who had found his way out of our bed, as I started gathering items from our sizable collection of Edward Gorey materials. The Husband: “Hmmm… it must be Mr. Gorey’s birthday today!”

Edward Gorey- artist & author was the master of the comic macabre & has delighted me for my entire life. Indeed, the Husband & I discovered we were both big fans of Gorey’s work at the very start of our relationship 33 years ago.


To this day, I am enthralled & enchanted by his skilled spidery drawings & his stories poisonous & poetic stories of cursed children, fainting femmes, shadowy specters, threatening topiary & eccentric events in eerie Victorian gardens, woods & mansions.


Gorey’s works are witty, woeful, devious & delirious to the point of obsession. He was one of the most aptly named notables in American art & literature. In creating a large body of small works, he has made an indelible imprint on my outlook & taste.


Gorey wrote more than 100 books & illustrated more than 60 by other authors. He was also a designer of theater productions, including revues based on his own stories & Dracula with a young & very sexy Frank Langella, for which he did sets, costumes & lights. It was a Broadway hit that I saw twice in 1977. I was enthralled.


I saw him on occasion around Manhattan in the mid-1970s. He looked like one of his own creations, indeed his image lurks on the fringe of some of his drawings. Toweringly tall, with a wild white beard & hair, & a ring in each ear & on most of his fingers, when he lived in NYC, he went about town a raccoon coat. Gorey was known to be genial & gentle, & spoke in antiquated terms, using words like "jeepers", “swell”, & "zingy." He was known for his sweetness, good nature & fine spirit.


Gorey was passionate about the ballet, & for years he attended all performances of works by George Balanchine at the NYC Ballet. He invented stories about ballets & operas & designed sets, costumes & drop curtains for them. He lived for a long time in a cluttered UWS apartment, & after the ballet season he would retreat to his home on Cape Cod. After Balanchine's death in 1983, Gorey decided to leave NYC permanently.


In 1986 he moved into a 200 year old house that was said to have been haunted. In 1994, he told an interviewer of the strange disappearance of all the finials from his lamps along with his collection of tiny teddy bears.


Last week, my buddy- the Designer/Rapper Lil’Jake picked up, off the coffee table, our much loved copy of Elephant House: or The Home Of Edward Gorey, the engaging & engrossing picture book of Gorey’s Cape Cod home. The house was is a much larger version of Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, filled with esoteric objects like a toilet with a tabletop.He displayed none of his own art work. But, there was a definitive Gorey touch: poison ivy creeped inside through cracks in the wall.

Like me, Gorey packed his home with books, most of them Victorian, but he also watched soap operas & rented horror movies from the nearby video store He shared his life with a plethora of pussies. The many cats had the run of the house & furniture. If a stray showed up at his door, he would immediately welcome it in. After his death a friend moved into the house to take care of the many cats. Gorey liked to tell of the time that the cats were on a couch & suddenly: "everyone turned with eyes wide, as if someone, or something, unseen had entered the room.”


Edward St. John Gorey was born in Chicago on Feb. 22, 1925. Gorey: "I like to think of myself as a pale, pathetic, solitary child. But it was not true." He taught himself to read at 3, & by 5, he had read Dracula & Alice in Wonderland, a pair of books that were to have a profound effect on his life. He taught himself to draw & eventually took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. Gorey attended Harvard, where he majored in French literature & was roommates with my favorite poet- Frank O'Hara. He & O'Hara joined the Poets Theater in Cambridge, with Gorey as a designer, director & playwright.


After graduation he worked in the art department at Doubleday, staying late in the office to create his own books. When he could not find a publisher, he simply did it himself & founded- Fantod Press. Gorey sold his books directly to stores. His first book, The Unstrung Harp, was published in 1953.


His little books could be bizarre in the extreme. The Husband & I collect his alphabet books that chronicle the catastrophes of the doomed, deceived by fate. His earliest-The Gashlycrumb Tinies begins with: "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs" & ends with "Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin."


Gorey used his stunning crosshatched line drawings, done with pen & ink to create his world of barren back roads, relinquished railway stations & storm struck formal gardens where the moon is menacing, & no sun shines. A tiny face peers through the curtained window of a big black automobile. Frightful beasts are perched on a precipice & upstairs in the attic. Death is by drowning, dismemberment or being dropped by the Devil into a flaming pit. The Beastly Baby is a bulbous blob carried away by an eagle & exploding in midair.


My admiration extends to his poetry & prose. Gorey invented his own geography with place names: Nether Postlude, Backwater Hall in Mortshire, between West Elbow & Penetralia, & the Cycle Cemetery near Dingy Cruet, Blots. He also enjoyed anagramming his own name, as Edward Gorey became Ogdred Weary, Dogear Wryde & D. Awdrey-Gore.


My first Gorey book was a gift from my parents for my 5th birthday in 1959-The Doubtful Guest. This small tome tells of a strange, hook-nosed creature, wearing a long scarf & tennis shoes, who shows up uninvited at a dreary mansion & soon becomes a permanent member of the family, peering up flues in the fireplace, tearing up books & sleepwalking through the house, & after 17 years he showed no intention of going away.


Once when he was asked why he wrote so much about murder & other forms of violence, Gorey answered: "Well, I don't know. I guess I'm interested in real life." With the general morbidness of the Victorian era, Gorey channels a 19th century aesthetic that allows him to get away with more of this than if his style were modern.


A favorite-The Hapless Child is the tragic story of a little orphaned girl who runs away from the mistresses at her cruel boarding school, only to be kidnapped & sold to a brute who makes her his slave. She escapes, on the brink of death, but is then run down & killed in the street by a wagon driven by her father, who’s back from the war, the rumors of his demise greatly exaggerated.


Gorey is probably most famous for animating the timeless intro to PBS’ Mystery!. He never had any children of his own, though he drew plenty of them. Looking at his work today as I prepared this post, I reread The Gashleycrumb Tinies, a deliciously morbid, alphabetical catalog of 26 children’s deaths. I wish to share to some of Gorey’s most striking & sometimes shocking drawings involving children, many creepier than I had even remembered:

There are a great many Gorey books available, all his work is still in print, & there are also collectibles: greeting cards, T-shirts, & calendars (indeed there is a 2011 calendar on my desk as a write this, a birthday gift from The Husband. If you wish to know his work, start with Amphigorey (1972), & it’s 2 sequels- Amphigorey Too (1977), & Amphigorey Also (1981).

In 1994, at age 69, soon after he was told he had prostate cancer: "I thought, 'Oh gee, why haven't I burst into total screaming hysterics? I'm the opposite of hypochondriacally. I'm not entirely enamored of the idea of living forever."

Born On This Day- February 13th... American Artist Grant Wood

If you have been following this little blog thing, you will know that I have a passion for 20th century American Art. Grant Wood's work is quintessential 20th century American Art, I now we know there has always been a gay twist.

Grant Wood’s American Gothic is one of the most parodied & iconic American images. The work was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago after it was unveiled there to the public in 1930 to much scrutiny. Ever since, the painting has captured a certain resonance with the American public, but its historical reception has had somewhat of a turbulent ride. The painting is admonished & celebrated, dismissed & parodied. The work is a dour portrait of a farmer & a woman in front of a neo-gothic farmhouse in Iowa. The woman’s sullen look is echoed in the farmer’s direct but blank gaze, pitchfork in hand looking not the least bit amused. The Models were the artist's sister & dentist.


Last autumn, a biography of Grant Wood by Tripp Evans- Grant Wood, A Life, lifts the lid off many of the lies & secrets which have surrounded the artist’s life story & digs deeper than ever before into his complex personality. Evans acknowledges Wood’s homosexuality, which earlier biographers left out entirely.

Self Portrait by the Artist

There are some delicious ironies to the acknowledgement of Grant Wood being gay. For decades, Wood has been celebrated as a spokesman for the conservative values of the close-minded set. To me, the essence of our country's Constitution is a willingness to allow diversity, change & the supposed narrow mindedness of the Midwest is a bit of myth: Iowa, after all, was the 3rd state in the country to legalize gay marriage. Wood survived happily in small town Cedar Rapids, where local businessmen protected him from the consequences of his gayness.


Wood is often described as a sort of homespun American farmer who celebrated traditional American values. But in fact, his life as a farm boy ended at the age of 10, when his father died suddenly of a heart attack & Wood, his mother & his sister moved to Cedar Rapids. His values & choice of professions were not ones that were often endorsed in early 20th century Iowa. Wood’s father was a severe Quaker, who once insisted that he return a book of fairy tales: “We Quakers only read about true things.” He would surely have never approved of his son’s career as an artist, & he would have approved of the nagging secret of Wood’s life- he was a homosexual.


Evidence of Grant’s gayness has been hidden in plain sight for years. Grant’s mentor-Thomas Hart Benton, confided to many of his friends & students that he believed that Wood was gay, & it’s even part of Wood’s files at the University of Iowa, where 5 of Wood’s colleagues made the accusation during a nasty dispute pitting Wood, who had never been to college, against his better educated faculty colleagues. Indeed, the artist was fired from his position on the faculty when it was discovered that he was having an affair with his male private secretary. Evans is the first author of a bio of Wood to take this important fact into account. During Grant’s time homosexuality was a crime that could be punished by imprisonment or castration, & even rumors could end a career or make an artist a social outcast. Wood’s art is a strange mix of revelation & concealment.

Daughters Of Revolution

In Appraisal

Everything about Wood’s art carries some sort of double meaning & complexity. He was fascinated by changes of gender. In his Daughters of Revolution he pictures 3 founding fathers in drag, as members of the D.A.R. For In Appraisal, he transformed his friend Edward Rowan into a farm woman. Wood was fascinated by masks. Wood’s art has an element of “let’s pretend.” Wood's Gothic folk-art style is a way of suggesting that the work has some sort of double layer, a representation of something real & something else,with a big dash of wit. Wood was always vague & inconsistent when asked what his paintings represented, apparently because he sought to avoid criticism when his subjects or his neighbors were offended. On different occasions, he described the figures in American Gothic as city or country people, & as a man with his daughter or as a man with his wife.


Is America finally ready to embrace a gay Grant Wood? Or will Conservative Christian Right Wingers rise up to deny his gayness, or to denounce him as wicked? Since American Art History 101, American Gothic has always struck me as high camp & a little queer. I always saw the piece as satire rather than a celebration of The American Spirit. For many art lovers in the heartland, this new book & it’s well documented discovery of Wood's gayness will not be a terrible shock. Just possibly, America is finally ready for Grant Wood to come out of the closet.


Grant died of liver cancer in Iowa City, one day before his 51st birthday. In the end, Wood’s American Gothic stands next to masterpieces like Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa & Edvard Munch's Scream as truly recognizable & iconic across the world.