Art and Homosexuality: A History of IdeasOxford University Press, 2011 M05 26 - 304 pages This bold, globe-spanning survey is the first book to thoroughly explore the radical, long-standing interdependence between art and homosexuality. It draws examples from the full range of the Western tradition, including classical, Renaissance, and contemporary art, with special focus on the modern era. It was in the modern period, when arguments about homosexuality and the avant-garde were especially public, that our current conception of the artist and the homosexual began to take shape, and almost as quickly to overlap. Not a chronology of gay or lesbian artists, the book is a fascinating and sophisticated account of the ways two conspicuous identities have fundamentally informed one another. Art and Homosexuality discusses many of modernism's canonical figures--painters like Courbet, Picasso, and Pollock; writers like Whitman and Stein--and issues, such as the rise of abstraction, the avant-garde's relationship to its patrons and the political exploitation of art. It shows that many of the core ideas that define modernism are nearly indecipherable without an understanding of the paired identities of artist and homosexual. Illustrated with over 175 b/w and color images that range from high to popular culture and from Ancient Greece to contemporary America, Art and Homosexuality punctures the platitudes surrounding discussions of both aesthetics and sexual identity and takes our understanding of each in stimulating new directions. |
Contents
1 | |
CHAPTER 1 VARIETIES OF HOMOSEXUALITY VARIETIES OF ART | 11 |
CHAPTER 2 BEFORE MODERNISM | 37 |
ART AND SEXUAL IDENTITY IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY | 69 |
CHAPTER 4 SECRETS AND SUBCULTURES 19001940 | 105 |
CHAPTER 5 THE SHORT TRIUMPH OF THE MODERN 194065 | 149 |
CHAPTER 6 THE AVANTGARDE AND ACTIVISM 196582 | 179 |
CHAPTER 7 THE AIDS DECADE 198292 | 207 |
CHAPTER 8 QUEER AND BEYOND | 229 |
257 | |
281 | |
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abstract activist aesthetic Aestheticism AIDS American androgyny Andy Warhol art and homosexuality art and sexual art world artists associated audiences avant-garde Barney’s beauty behavior berdache career challenge claims codes conventional created critics David Hockney David Wojnarowicz Day’s Demuth depicted described discussed in chapter Duchamp erotic eroticism exhibition Extended Sensibilities female feminine feminist Figure Gallery gay and lesbian gender George Platt Lynes Gertrude Stein Greek Hartley’s heterosexual historians Hockney Hockney’s homo homoerotic homoeroticism homosexual identity homosexuality ideas illustrations imagery images individual Leighton lesbian lesbian identity male nudes Mapplethorpe’s masculine men’s Michelangelo modernist Moreau’s Museum nineteenth century norms oil on canvas Oscar Wilde painter paintings Paris photographs physique magazines political popular portraits postmodernism queer quoted Rauschenberg reflected relationship Renaissance Robert Mapplethorpe Sambia sculpture sexual identity social sodomy Stein style subculture suggests Symonds term texts tions ukiyo-e viewers Warhol Wilde Wilde’s woman women York