Born On This Day- July 25th... American Artist Thomas Eakins

self portrait by the artist 1902

I am quite enamored of late the 19th & 20th century American painters & Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins epitomizes everything I love about the American Realist Movement. Eakins was unsuccessful as an artist in his lifetime, but he is thought to be one of the most influential & important figures in American painting. His work is significant for its homoeroticism, & he is noted for his teaching methods, & for his insistence on teaching men & women together, which was ground breaking & controversial at the time.

 Eakins was raised & educated in Philadelphia. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, & he spent several years studying in Paris & Spain. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876, & became the director in 1882. His teaching methods were controversial at the time, especially his interest in instructing his students in all aspects of the human figure, including the nude. There were tensions between him & the Academy's board of directors throughout his teaching career, he was ultimately fired in 1886 for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present.

Deeply influenced by his dismissal, his later painting concentrated on portraiture, usually of friends & family. This work was realistic but with approach that went beyond just pure representation. He was influenced by early photographers & did many photographs as studies, including many nudes. I find this photographic work to exceptional also.

 

I have a large "coffee table" book of his work that has given me much pleasure. Along with John Singer Sargent & James Whistler his work has been very influential in defining my taste in painting & my passion for art.

photographic study for The Wrestlers

the painting

Born On This Day- July 17th... Photography Great Berenice Abbott

If you were to click on the label at the bottom of my posts you would discover that I have a very real passion for Photography, whether it is formal portraiture, commercial work, art photography, or found snapshots. I have a sizable & thought provoking collection of vintage photographs of men being affectionate, which I like to share with readers.

Abbott by Man Ray 1925

Abbott by Hank O'Neal 1979

My passion for photography + my keen interest in architecture brings me to today’s birthday- Berenice Abbott. Abbott was a celebrated photographer of NYC architecture. She shot using a Century Universal Camera which produced 8 x 10 inch negatives; this large format camera was the instrument that Abbott used to photographed NYC with diligence & attention to detail. Her work has provided an historical chronicle of many now destroyed buildings & neighborhoods of Manhattan.

During the Great Depression, Abbott was hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP) as a project supervisor for the Changing New York project. She would take the photographs of the city, but had assistants to help her both in the field & in the office. This arrangement allowed Abbott to devote all her time to producing, printing, & exhibiting her photographs. By the time she resigned from the FAP in 1939, she had produced 305 photographs that were added to the collection at the Museum of the City of New York.


When she 1st arrived in NYC, Abbott shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with writer Djuna Barnes, philosopher Kenneth Burke, & literary critic Malcolm Cowley. She pursued journalism, but soon became interested in theater & art, inspired by her friends Eugene O'Neill & Man Ray. Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923, when Man Ray, looking for somebody who knew nothing about photography & would do as he said, hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. Abbott: "I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else." Ray was impressed by her darkroom work & allowed her to use his studio to take her own photographs.

Self Portrait 1937

In 1935, Abbott fell in love & moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with the art critic- Elizabeth McCausland. They were a couple for 30+ years until McCausland's death in 1965. In the early 1960s Abbott & McCausland traveled US Highway # 1 from Florida to Maine, with Abbott shooting the small town & automobile-related architecture. The project resulted in more than 2,500 photographs. Not only was Abbott a photographer, but also an inventor & innovator. She developed the distortion easel, which created unusual effects on images developed in a darkroom, & the telescopic lighting pole, known today by photographers as an "autopole," to which lights can be attached at any level.

 

Shortly after McCausland’s death, Abbott underwent a lung operation. She was told she should move from NYC because of the air pollution. She bought a rundown house in Maine, remaining there until her death in 1991. Abbott continued to work after her move to Maine. Her last book was A Portrait of Maine in 1968.

A Few Of My Favorite Things At Post Apocalyptic Bohemia

This small cabinet was purchased in 1990, in Portland, when we were still living in our Seattle cottage. We preferred junking & hunting for architectural salvage in Portland & would visit several times a year. The cabinet was spotted at a flea market on Hayden Island, not far from where we live now. It was marked- "Red Cross Supply Cabinet". It was painted enamel white & the Husband stripped it this far & I decided I that I liked the way it looked in process & asked him to not take it further. It has glass on all 4 sides. The cabinet is filled with small items from boyhood: arrowheads, agates, fossils, Indian head nickles, campaign buttons... stretching into adulthood: dog tags, glass candies from our trip to Venice, police whistles from a London junk shop, late 19th century shards found while helping dig a community garden in Seattle's International District, & the bullet from when I was shot. The cabinet of my life's flotsam & jetsam sits at the end of my worktable. Like so many things in life, if you click on it, it will get bigger.

We collect dog pictures.

 The Husband believes in filling a small space with a lot of objects & art & leaving the larger spaces with more blank areas. Our one very small bathroom, the only room in the house that has yet to have an extensive makeover, is filled with collections. The top painting was found at the 12th Street Flea Market in NYC on our 20th anniversary. I love it beyond all reason. The bottom is from a Seattle junk shop in the Pike Place Market. We actually lived in the Market in the mid-1980s.

More from the Dog Pictures collection. On the left is a plate from a book that says- "Dog Of The Monastery" & on the right is a wood cut of a dog, a plate from a book of fables dated 1777. Above them hangs a Tramp Art terrier.

In the bathroom is a wall with some choice pieces from my vintage photographs of men.

19th Century ceramics surround the very first photograph of my collection, an opening night gift from a very cute young actor in his very early 20s (heck, I was only in my late 30s), I played his father... the pair of soldiers from WW1 are remarkable to me still, & a lovely memory of a time when I was working a lot as an actor & had young men buying me gifts. This piece started 25 years of collecting old photographs of men being affectionate.

Thank you for taking a look around. I have more if you are curious.

John & CC Have New Hats

As one of my pals professed: "I really like your blog, but I like the stuff about you... not the birthdays of dead gay people". I started to collect vintage (1860-1980) photographs of men together a decade ago. I have more than 100. I was sharing them with readers of Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, but I began to wander away to other subjects along the way.

I borrowed against my IRA to catch up on the bills & repairs. It has been an interesting experience to usually not have any cash for some fun. I long ago decided that a perfect day included going to a part town with which I am not familiar, some bucks in my jeans & no agenda. I earmarked a tiny portion of the cash flow to just such a plan. I took the Husband with me because... well, I sort of had to.

The Husband found some swell stuff to use in projects for his BOYS' FORT, & I found this photo, at the best salvage store that I have encountered: Old Portland Hardware & Architectural.

I find this photo to be one of the very finest I have added to the collection. It is certainly the sweetest of a sweet selection of snapshots & formal portraits of men in couples or groups from the past 150 years.

The names are written in pencil: John Fuller & CC Brown. The rest of the piece is a perfect embossed paper in a Victorian pattern. I love these 2 gentlemen. What is their story that led to this portrait?

Would you like to see more of the collection?

Born On This Day- February 18th... Photographer Duane Michals

"I'm politically against Same Sex Marriage. I want civil unions. I want all the political advantages, but marriage is a tired vestige of the heterosexual world. I don't know why gay people would want to get married. Of all things! It's a failed institution. It just doesn't make sense. Wedding cake? Oh please!"

Duane Michals' photography gives me an Art-On. Very much a favorite at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, Duane Michals is not just an amazing photographer, he is truly an original. We have a coffee table book of his photographs which I will get out & peruse, because today is his birthday. This will make for a lovely evening with a glass of whiskey. Michals also produced the art for The Police album Synchronicity in 1983, so that album can be the soundtrack for my viewing pleasure.

Michals became a photographer as a matter of need. All his best impulses grew out of the need to express something from the intangible. Largely self-taught, his work is noted for its innovation & artistry. His work is well known for its insistent, & often humorous, use of the narrative series. Many of his pieces works actually incorporate handwritten text right onto the images. Michals has a fascination with making tangible the intangible realm of love, death, dreams, & wishes. His works deal with human sexuality, both straight & gay, but always in a dreamy, droll, divine & rather decorous manner.

Michals: “The keyword is having something to express. When you look at my photographs you are looking into my mind.”

Michals: "I am not bothered by those pesky questions dealt with by most photographers- how can I get this model to smile without showing her teeth? Does this house look better with or without the little red wagon in front? So think hard, think deep & ask new questions. As a photographer, how can you present the nature of existence & the drama of the human condition? How will you define beauty & ugliness in visual terms? What is death & why is mankind fixated on rational explanations of the afterlife."

"When people ask me what I am, I tell them I'm the artist formally known as a photographer, I am an expressionist & by that I mean I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs."

Michals grew up in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. In 1953 he received a BA from the University of Denver. In 1956 he went on to study design at the Parsons School of Design with a plan to becoming a graphic designer. He did not complete his studies

In 1958 while on a trip in the USSR, he discovered his interest in photography. The photographs he made during this trip became his first exhibition held in 1963 at the Underground Gallery in NYC. Michals settled in the city in the late 1950s & became known as a commercial & fashion photographer, working for Esquire & Mademoiselle, & he covered the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Great Gatsby (1974) for Vogue. He worked for Dance Magazine & After Dark. In 1968 Michals was hired by the government of Mexico to photograph the 1968 Olympic Games. In 1970 his works were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

He does not have a studio. Instead, he takes photographs of people in their environment, which was a contrast to the method of other photographers of his time, Richard Avedon & Irving Penn.

Michals has been in a relationship with his partner, an architect he met at the gym, for 51 years. Though he has not been involved in gay civil rights, his photography has regularly addressed gay themes & quietly added to the pantheon of 20th century gay imagery.

Born On This Day- January 14th... Photographer Cecil Beaton

I have been reading 2 volumes of Cecil Beaton’s Diaries over the past year, in small little doses, choosing to read a few entries here & there. He knew & photographed everyone that mattered for most of the 20th century. As a gay man of his time, & a dandy like Quinton Crisp, he had to re-invent himself & discover a way to survive & thrive. I know that I have always been grateful to be a gay man because it meant that I was an outsider & not a straight, white, WASP male, but how much harder that must have been earlier in the century, when homosexuality was illegal.
 

 
Born in 1904 in London & coming of age at the peak of the 20s, Cecil Beaton was in love with the worlds of high society, theater, & glamour. Beauty, in his hands, was transformed into elegance, fantasy, romance & charm. His inspired artistic eye led to a following among fashionable society & eventually a full fledged career as the foremost fashion & portrait photographer of his day. He was so attuned to the changes of fashion that his career maintained its momentum for 5 decades; from the Bloomsbury crowd to the Rolling Stones. Beaton died in 1980.

Cecil Beaton will always be remembered for his huge influence on the world of photography & fashion. His incredible work personified elegance & grace, but his personal behavior was at times, anything but. He was not known to be a loyal friend, a humble talent or a genuine soul of any sort. In fact, his persona & image was fabricated to gain him access to the world that had always just beyond his reach. But, everybody loved Cecil, the photographer. He worked for Vogue for more that 30 years. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who worked for Harper’s Bazaar: "He was such a naughty man. You had to laugh at all the awful things he said about everybody, especially the people at Vogue.” In fact, Beaton laughed at everybody except himself, for whom he reserved much compassion & self-pity. His friend Truman Capote described Beaton as a “total self-creation”.

Clever, but not intellectual, good looking but not quite handsome, he just failed to make the grade in those things that he thought mattered the most. Beaton was vain, & he had his clothes made one size too small to flatter his already slim figure, but never glamorous, despite an international lifestyle that brought him into contact with everyone who was somebody for more than 50 years.

Garbo, who he almost married.

Shooting Keith Richards in LA.

He had a burning desire to be part of aristocratic privilege, still going strong in the 1920s & 1930s. Beaton was, what was known at the time, a pansy. With his ambition focused on the British upper classes & American celebrities, his gayness could have been a disadvantage, but he capitalised on it by aiming not at the men, but at their wives. He was a first rate photographer but he was always seemed too eager flatter & please .Having flattered his subjects' bodies & faces, he flattered their egos by placing them in settings reflecting the latest artistic movement, making them seem of the moment. He even managed to make Queen Elizabeth 2 & her family look beautiful & stylish!

Mick Jagger circa 1966

For the last 30 years before his death in 1980 he was at the center of the creative world: royal photographer, designer of sets & costumes for stage & screen, from Oscar Wilde’s comedies to My Fair Lady (for which he won an Oscar for the film version), a chronicler of showbiz figures from Audrey Hepburn to Mick Jagger,for who Beaton had a passion, (Jagger dubbed him “Rip-Van-With-it”). & he kept those diaries that I have been reading, noting everything & revealing the true Cecil Beaton, a mixture of insight, petulance & snobbery, much like the world in which he lived. They reveal the other thing that I suspect in his heart he never forgot: those who are born outsiders must always remain outsiders, after all, outsiders can see things most clearly.

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose & imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."

Born On This Day- Nevember 4th... Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe

The Husband said: “I have seen his work in the USA, but, to experience Robert Mapplethorpe in Venice was just too perfect. You should mention this in your post today”.

We arrived in Venice in October, 1991, & there were banners all over this amazing city for a retrospect of the American artist’s work.The exhibit was held at the Fortuney museum, fabulous in itself. How odd to consider this important gay American artist in another city, & another world, & really kind of perfect. Mapplethorpe’s work deserves a place with the great classic works of art. It was, at the time, the largest retrospect of his work at that time.

This summer I spent time with the very readable- Just Kids, a memoir of the artist/musician/ writer’s friendship, romance & time spent with the remarkable Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti Smith, along with her friend Mapplethorpe, lived a particular New York dream: the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, superstardom, to the fullest. I have posted so many times on my love of 20th century photography, & this man’s work & life still hold my full attention.

Ranging from graphic depictions of gay sex to portraits of flowers, Robert Mapplethorpe was all over the artistic map. His work is magnificent in its scope, frequently shocking, & ultimately very beautiful. The more extreme photographs have a tenderness to them, & the seemingly harmless photos generate an edginess that's hard to shake. Simultaneously devoted to a strict sense of formalism & composition & to forging a new iconography of homosexuality, it's easy to see why Mapplethorpe provoked so much controversy in his time.


Robert Mapplethorpe has become the essential “gay photographer.” His homoerotic photographs still disturb, but he made no concessions to the closeted: his work is not sneaky or abashed. He spreads a seductive & provocative version of his style throughout the world & the fashion world bounced his message back to the mainstream. His death from AIDS, in 1989, at the age of 42, gives his short life a special symbolic aura. His iconic position strongly influences how we see his photographs: he is both overrated & underrated. I feel that Mapplethorpe needs to be noted in history as Mapplethorpe- the artist, not just a gay artist, & to be placed in the great tradition of classical art.


The art world, & public funding for the arts in America, is completely different because of his work. His work has been accused of being obscene. So what? Mapplethorpe made & porn the same thing. That is his greatest contribution to American artistry. For me, the most erotic material he produced was his photographs of the sex organs of flowers. That work is startling. You can now google the word "Mapplethorpe" & view of the photographs that caused conservative activists who knew nothing about art, but knew what was moral, to successfully end public funding for the arts. The controversy seems overblown now, but a good look at Mapplethorpe's pictures is enough to verify that he is still cutting edge & still original.