The artist Patrick Angus said he didn't have the happiest day of his life until he was on his deathbed, succumbing to aids at thirty-eight in 1992. It was then that he saw the proofs of Strip Show, a book of forty-seven color reproductions of his paintings, and could finally believe that his art would not be completely forgotten. He had worked in obscurity, defeated by early humiliations from galleries that caustically rejected his depictions of sexual loneliness and the "bad" gay culture of hustlers, tricks, and low clubs. Worn down by his failures, Angus gave up hope of exhibiting his paintings, until Robert Patrick wrote an essay about him in Christopher Street. David Hockney bought five of Angus's paintings, and in 1992 three galleries held solo shows, yet without new work the momentum was lost. He is included in overviews like Emmanuel Cooper's The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West
re PATRICK ANGUS also
STRIP SHOW: PAINTINGS BY PATRICK ANGUS, by D.B.Turnbaugh, editions aubrey walter, London 1992;
PATRICK ANGUS: LOS ANGELES DRAWINGS, by D.B.Turnbaugh, Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, New York City and Schwules Museum, Berlin 2003;
MALE DESIRE: THE HOMOEROTIC IN AMERICAN ART, by Jonathan Weinberg, Abrams, 2004;
THE ARENA OF MASCULINITY, by Brian Pronger, St. Martin's Press, 1990;
TREASURES OF GAY ART FROM THE LESLIE/LOHMAN GAY ART FOUNDATION, by Peter Weiermair, All Saint's Press, 2008;
GOOD BYE TO BERLIN: 100 JAHRE SCHWULENBEWEGUNG, by Andreas Sternweiler, Karl-Heinz Steinle, et al, Schwules Museum/Akademie der Kunst, Berlin, 1997;
LGBTQ AMERICA TODAY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA, ed. John Hawley, Greenwood/Heinemann, 2009
Posted by: Douglas Blair Turnbaugh | May 04, 2011 at 06:14 AM