These nudes “give gay people their history,” Beard says. Working under his own name - and as his mythic alter ego, Bruce Sargeant - his oil paintings place his subjects, such as those standing heroically in “Group of Men on the Beach,” in a turn-of-the-century setting, before the Stonewall riots, when queer men couldn’t openly be out or portrayed freely in art, clothed or not. “I support these younger artists any way I can,” says Beard, 62, who invites private collectors to purchase his protégés’ originals, and whose own works are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. MacConnell and Williams met in 2016 at the artist Mark Beard’s drawing salon, which now attracts a rotating cast of about 30 gay artists. Like more established queer artists and their muses - Francis Bacon and George Dyer, Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz, Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont - these figure artists tend to sketch people they find attractive, often sharing the same models. (It’s perhaps not coincidental that Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, “ The Sparsholt Affair,” a gay retelling of Britain in the 20th century, includes a 1940s-era artist trying to pursue a classmate at Oxford by drawing his figure.)Īnd yet the burgeoning community that has gathered around these illustrators suggests that the distinction no longer has as much meaning as it once did. Indeed, criticism of works like Cadmus’s during an era in which homosexuality was still forbidden pushed many of these artists into the underground, from where they’re still being unearthed today. At the insistence of the Navy, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., pulled the painting from a planned 1934 exhibition (it wasn’t shown publicly until 1981). The pioneering Works Progress Administration painter Paul Cadmus was among the first to introduce an explicit male-on-male gaze into contemporary art, often at the expense of his own reputation: A retired admiral wrote a letter to the secretary of the United States Navy claiming Cadmus had a “sordid, depraved imagination,” after seeing an image of his satirical painting “The Fleet’s In!” (1934), in which crew members fraternize while on shore leave. classics professor Andrew Lear, 59, who now runs Oscar Wilde Tours, a company that offers excursions focused on implicitly gay art and history in major museums.īut while some old masters fetishized the male body in barely coded ways, the idea of an openly queer artist expressing his desires from a queer perspective was only born in the last century. The artist was playing “a little erotic game,” says the retired N.Y.U.
Over the next 2,000 years, capturing the naked male form became an essential artistic skill, one that reached its apotheosis in Western culture during the Italian Renaissance, when homosexual desire was subtly expressed in Donatello’s bronze “David” (circa 1440) and Caravaggio’s painting “The Musicians” (1597), wherein the traditional female muse is replaced with a band of boys, partially robed in togas, referencing a Greek and Roman period in which homoerotica was a part of society. marble sculpture of the mythical hero, once stood at Rome’s Baths of Caracalla. The male nude is, of course, one of the oldest artistic fixations: The Riace bronzes, Greek sculptures cast around 450 B.C., depict naked, bearded warriors as exemplars of masculine strength and beauty “Farnese Hercules,” a third-century B.C.
“It’s important for me to capture likeness and not just a body,” he said.
The 33-year-old MacConnell - boyish, equally fit - wore black jeans and a white T-shirt as he sketched on a letter-size sheet of paper with his blue ballpoint pen. “It’s liberating to be able to be comfortable in your body,” Williams said, barely moving his lips as he concentrated on holding still. LAST FALL, IN a tiny apartment in downtown New York, a 30-year-old gay physique model named Matthew Williams stood naked against a white backdrop in front of the gay artist John MacConnell.