Band of Thebes

Born July 9: David Hockney

Don’t let his placid English face fool you: David Hockney's art has been one revolution after another. However beautiful, most of what he’s done upends convention or expectation. As early as 1959-60 and 1961, with Erection and the Whitman-titled We Two Boys Together Clinging, he was boldly painting gay love. Once he saw southern California, he began to use color in more startling ways. He painted gay couples, such as Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, exactly as he depicted straight couples, in 1968, when the rest of the world certainly didn't see them that way. His photomontages, or “joiners” primarily from 1970-1986, virtually reinvented how one could use a polaroid. He created wild stage sets for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala, and the Met. And, in 2001, he proposed a shattering theory that the Old Masters did not paint freehand so much as follow images projected onto their canvas via camera obscura techniques. (This might solve the mystery of why details at the edges of their paintings are inexplicably blurry or out of focus.) Thirty years after his iconic A Bigger Splash, Hockney created A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 rectangular paintings fitted together to form one giant picture. Even more recent work has included painted installations illuminated with black light, as at the Smithsonian American Art  Museum. Jack Hazan’s documentary captures every angle of Hockney's intense romance with Peter Schlesinger, who appears nude in his most famous pool pictures. To celebrate his 70th birthday in 2007, Hockney showed his recent paintings of his native Yorskhire, like the one above, at the Tate Britain in London. A newer passion is the Brushes app on iPad, with which he has drawn three covers for The New Yorker. Now we have Christopher Simon Sykes' David Hockney: The Biography [Kindle] to complement Lawrence Weschler's True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney [Kindle].

Born June 12: Henry Scott Tuke

Born in York in 1858, Henry Scott Tuke grew up in Falmouth where he discovered the pleasures of nude swimming that become the core subject of his en plein air paintings until his death at 70 in 1929. Moving to London when he was sixteen to attend art school, he graduated six years later, then toured Italy and Paris. His friends and acquaintances of the time included Symonds, Wilde, and Sargent (whose many, secret paintings of male nudes were numerous enough to fill this book). But by 1886 Tuke was back near Falmouth, spending £40 to buy a two-masted sailboat which he converted to a floating studio and living quarters. Initially the only models he could get to pose were from London but before long he and the local youth had become friends for life, though many of them died in WWI. An avid traveler, in the 1890s Tuke returned to Italy, adding Corfu and Albania to his list and a new, vibrant light to his palette. Later he ventured to the Caribbean and Central America, further brightening his colors. Nervous critics over-emphasize the innocence of his art, stressing that if anything the depictions are sensual not sexual, and making obvious comparisons to Eakins. Among Tuke's big collectors is Elton John. His work fills many books like Catching the Light. Five more images after the jump

Fleet Week Image of the Day #8

   

Two favorite captains from New Bedford's Whaling Museum. Though none can touch Captain Wentworth from Persuasion.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #6

 

In honor of tonight's The Normal Heart, a re-purposed Leyendecker poster amid some original recruitment techniques. More shirtless thrusting after the jump.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #5

 

Because it's Saturday night.

Tom of Finland and Jean Cocteau. More in common than you might think. Hand placement.

Taschen's XXX The Complete Kake Comics includes episodes The Naval Visit and Pants down, Sailor.

  

Fleet Week Image of the Day #4

   

At left, Lord Hood of Avalon by Sidney Willis Hodges, circa 1860. After the jump, Matisse and Hockney.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #3

 

Albert Edelfelt (1857-1905)

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Henry Scott Tuke's perfectly positioned 'Sleeping Sailor' shows Harry Cleave posing on the mizzen boom of a derelict French barque the Mazatlan, moored in Falmouth harbor, in the summer of 1905. The painting sold for £15. 

Tuke used the old ship as a floating studio and did several paintings on board including 'The Mid-Day Rest (Sailors Yarning)' seen after the jump. 

For more images get Catching the Light: The Art and Life of Henry Scott Tuke.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #1

1,500 active servicemembers of the Marines, Coast Guard, and Navy arrive in NYC tomorrow for double duty during Fleet Week 2014, straining to make up for last year's sequester tease and ultimate no-show. Beyond these official events, Thebes will honor the seamen with a salty image a day. Starting with the best, none can surpass these watercolors, Farewell Voyage and Amor y Olas, from the amazing French-Mexican California-raised artist Felix D'Eon. See his gorgeous website, which could transfix you for hours with its gay mythological, historical, sporty, outdoorsy, and erotic drawings. Please support him by ordering a print from $12.50 to $60, an original for $850, or individual or boxed greeting cards.

Maurice Vellekoop

Citing inspiration from early gay giants like Drummer and Stroke's Harry Bush (Hard Boys), midcentury artist George Quaintance, and of course Tom of Finland, illustrator Maurice Vellekoop carries on their tradition of depicting handsome, self-assured, masculine men in lust and, crucially, with a sense of humor. Vellekoop uses a brighter, more cheerful palette to draw his joyful frolics and the results may give rise to, among other things, confusing questions. Can such flat, simple pictures be hot? Yes. Is it wrong? No. Frankly, some viewers can't / won't / don't want to be turned on without a frisson of guilt or shame. There's not a shadow of those in Vellekoop's magazine work -- which you've seen in The New Yorker, the NYT, Wallpaper, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Out, EW, et al -- nor in his gay books like his solo manly Pin-ups or his alpha-male (!) ABC Book: A Homoerotic Primer with XXX sex scenes for each letter.

 

Born May 18: Don Bachardy

Eighty today, Don Bachardy has one more thing to celebrate: He helped bring out last week's collection of love letters The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy [and Kindle]. Overshadowed and overlooked, he is a lovely artist of these nuanced, revealing sketches of their famous friends, and a daring painter, whose official gubernatorial portrait of Jerry Brown hangs in the California State Capitol. In the documentary Chris & Don. A Love Story he thoughtfully discusses his life in art and the complex power imbalances of a 30+ year relationship that began when he was southern California teenager and his new English bf in his late forties was already an international literary star.

Died May 17: Sandro Botticelli

With an unknown birthdate circa 1445 Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi was appreprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi in the early 1460s and within several years had his own workshop, from which he launched a stellar career that made him the quintessential Quattrocento artist of Florence -- very much including the charge of sodomy. Called Il Botticello (little barrel) he had a horror of marriage, never wed, dated young men, and -- with his priorities perfectly clear in his painting, as above -- was a favorite of Popes. Even more importantly, he was a favorite of Medicis, who commissioned many pieces including two of the most iconic works in Western art, The Birth of Venus and Primavera. After his death on May 17, 1510, he was forgotten and his work was ignored for 350 years. Of course, it took a gay man to rescue him from oblivion, Walter Pater in the 1870s. Get the oversized monograph with 200 color plates Botticelli: Likeness, Myth, Devotion or Ronald Lightbown's biography Botticelli: Life and Work. At left, a probable self-portrait and after the jump, more images.

Born May 8: Tom of Finland

In an era when merely entering a gay bar could mean jail time and the instant end of a career, Tom of Finland was boldly visualizing a world of healthy, happy, all-male sexual camaraderie that was hot and had a sense of humor. Then again, his fantasies of hyperidealized, turboerotic, uberbuilt masculinity guaranteed that reality would never measure up. For generations of gay men since the mid-1950s, his art has created an endless coupling of inspiration and insecurity. Born in Kaarina, Finland in 1920, Touko Laaksonen moved to Helsinki when he was nineteen and soon was drafted to fight in World War II. Afterward, he worked in an advertising agency while American physique magazines began to publish his drawings of rugged lumberjacks, cops, jocks, sailors, soldiers, prisoners, lifeguards, musclemen, and his enduring character Kake. In 1973, at the time of his first gallery show, in Hamburg, he was able to quit his job to draw fulltime. His second gallery exhibit, in Los Angeles, was not until 1978, followed by shows in San Franciso and New York, where he became friends with another artist whose work explored gay S&M, Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1981, Veli, his partner of twenty-eight years, died; Laaksonen survived him by ten years. The Finnish Culture Institute hosted an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1999, and in 2004 MoMA added several of his drawings to their permanent collection. Taschen's gigantic, oversized Tom of Finland XXL runs almost 700 pages, contains nearly 1,000 images, and includes essays by John Waters, Camille Paglia, Armistead Maupin, and Todd Oldham. Taschen also offers The Complete Kake. Later this year, Finland issues three stamps of his work.

Donatello Loves His David in The Medici Boy

After seventeen books of poems and fiction, John L'Heureux got a Guggenheim to write this, his eleventh novel, The Medici Boy [Kindle], about Donatello's crush on the model he used to sculpt David. The artist's sexual infatuation with, then love for, the young urchin / hustler Agnolo Mattei leads him to create the first freestanding bronze nude in more than a thousand years... and worse. Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee says it's a "gripping story of love, genius, and betrayal."

Stamps of Approval: Harvey Milk, Tom of Finland, Tove Jansson

 

The Harvey Milk stamp is now available for preorder online here. The statement says, "The U.S. Postal Service® is proud to honor the life of Harvey Milk, a visionary leader who became an iconic figure in the struggle for gay civil rights. In 1977, Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, making him one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States." The stamp will be released on May 22, his 84th birthday.

Finland announced three stamps depicting the art of Touko Laaksonen, Tom of Finland, come September or October. Their statement reads, "His emphatically masculine homoerotic drawings have attained iconic status in their genre and had an influence on, for instance, pop culture and fashion. The drawings on the stamp sheet represent strong and confident male figures typical of their designer." Anyone who just can't wait to lick and stick those should get Tom of Finland XXL or The Complete Kake Comics.

Finland's first new commerative of 2014 showed two photos of favorite novelist Tove Jansson. Read The Summer Book [Kindle] or The True Deceiver [Kindle]. Earlier, her Moomins got a stamp of their own.

Graphic Gay Erotica of Ancient Greece

Art by Adam Graphite from Greek Love

Dale Lazarov is a writer of vision. For his erotic gay graphic tales he researches and develops the story and creates the scenes that an artist draws without captions or dialogue. The results speak for themselves. Lest Thebes be forced to send a demigod to pound some sense into you: Yes, this is legitimate writing in the same way early silents or any film's extended montages are written -- a storyteller has plotted a narrative, deciding what events and details to slip in and when to pull out.

Samuel Delany is a fan. Of the brand new ancient adventure Greek Love featuring among others, Eros, Ares, and Herakles, Delany says, "Bluntly put, Dale Lazarov and his artists do beautiful books. I've loved them since the first one I saw--and this one is no different. Sensuous, sexy, hot as hell, it's rough and tender by turns, and if erotic art is your thing, you'll love this one too! It's a pleasure and honor for me to tell you just what a treat lies ahead for you. Buy it, read it, and read it again."

Enhancing his muscular action and rich characterizations, Adam Graphite's coloring is gorgeous. Follow Adam and see more of his work here and here.

Dale's earlier books are Sticky with Steve MacIssac, Manly with Amy Colburn, Nightlife with Bastian Jonsson, and Good Sports with Alessio Slonimsky. Digital editions are available via Selz.

See more art after the jump.

Born March 28: James Bidgood, Håkan Lindquist, Dirk Bogarde

Like so many true originals who create art ahead of their time, James Bidgood was in danger of being forgotten by a canon that favors the next generation he inspired, great artists very much of their time, in this case the dazzling gay duo Pierre et Gilles and the immensely successful commercial gay photog David LaChapelle. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Bidgood escaped to New York, attended Parsons, and worked as a window dresser where he would borrow fabric and props to use for his own photo shoots in his tiny Hell's Kitchen apartment. Like Georges Méliès he made enchantments from next to nothing: crinkled wax paper becomes a cave wall. In the over-the-top spirit of the Ziegfeld Follies, he celebrated lavish, luxurious eroticism -- without any money and without any girls. In the early and mid-1960s his homespun gay art was destined for the fringe. In that same cramped apartment, for seven years Bidgood filmed his wordless gay fantasy of a kept hustler's daydreams, Pink Narcissus, which was taken from him by investors, edited, and released without his consent in 1971. He removed his name. Bruce Benderson unraveled the story in the 90s, sparking a Bidgood revival, and the movie was finally re-released with his director credit in 2003. He's enjoyed solo or group shows nationwide and in Spain and Italy. Last year his work was the final image in Musée d'Orsay's Masculin / Masculin. You can still buy his vintage prints for $5000 or glorious big new C-prints for $1750. (To compare, a 1976 Pierre et Gilles print recently sold at Christie's for $215,888.) Eighty-one today, Bidgood is as sharp as ever: read his interview with Michael Kowalinski for Butt in which he says, "because of all that sissy scenery in that ‘Narcissus’ thing, I guess people expect me to be lounging around in a silk caftan, face powdered and rouged with twenty yards of orchid chiffon draped around my neck with my bong and a few boys by my pool! Very often guests like yourself think I only work in this slum dwelling, but I live here!." Get Taschen's big book James Bidgood.

Is it the mild gay content that prevents the international literary community from adding Håkan Lindquist to the working list of great living Nothernish writers like Gerbrand Bakker, Peter Stamm and Per Petterson (all of them indebted to the magnificent simplicity of lesbian Tove Jansson)? Or is it merely because only two of Håkan's six novels are available in English, and those two were long-distance efforts from a German publisher? His time will come. Until then, you can pride yourself on getting to know the dashing Swede (who splits his time between Stockholm and Berlin) before IMPAC Dublin discovers him. His short, domestic novels tackle eternal themes of family secrets, the nature of love, and the passage of time, with a fresh perspective and a modern, gay naturalism. My Brother and His Brother follows Jonas as he tracks down and uncovers surprising details about Paul, his older brother who died at sixteen the year before Jonas was born. On Collecting Stamps is a beautiful look back, from middle age, as Mattias reconsiders his unconventional friendship, starting at twelve, with a lonely

Born March 27: Denton Welch

One of the pantheon. Born in China to English parents, the young aesthete Denton Welch collected art objects as a child and intended to be a painter before, at twenty, a car struck him while he was cycling in Surrey and rendered him unfit for anything but the writing life. The injury and its complications left him in pain until his death at thirty-three. (He did manage to paint this self-portrait, which hangs in the National Gallery London.) His masterpiece is In Youth Is Pleasure, and a close second is A Voice Through a Cloud. Spoiler alert: Nothing happens. Artistic, sensitive Orvil Pym copes with athletic, bullying older brothers and spends his fifteenth summer, um, having feelings? Noticing things? Against all logic he makes it absolutely compelling. Even if you weren't part of the Shanghai scene in the 1920s, you'll feel like you're remembering and reliving it as you sink into the splendor of his fictionalized memoir Maiden Voyage. 

As proof of Welch's alchemist talents to transform empty days into gold, here's William S Burroughs, who often cited Welch as his "greatest literary influence," explaining, "Whenever a student tells me he has nothing to write about I refer him to Denton Welch. He makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes..." That magic is evident everywhere in Welch's collected stories; Bob Smith has said "At Thirteen" was his all-time favorite short fiction by a gay author. Long ago when Peter Cameron inscribed my copy of Andorra he wrote, "Read Denton Welch." One of the ten thousand enduring charms of Peter's marvelous novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [Kindle] is his teen protagonist's love of Welch's work.

Plan now. Next year is the Denton Welch centennial.

Slava Mogutin's New Food Chain, Old Photo Diary of Crimea

Who else would combine a lace doily with a half-stripped, bound and gagged tough - the obviousness being another slap to the viewer? Favorite anti-bougie angry gay artist Slava Mogutin is known here for his arresting photography but in Russia, prior to exile, he published seven books of fiction, poetry, and essays, winning the Andrei Bely Prize. Culled from his whole writing life, from teenhood to now, his English debut is a "part memoir, part political satire, part magic realism" mashup called Food Chain, out yesterday from novelist Christopher Stoddard's brand new ITNA Press. 

(ITNA is dedicated to releasing "literature deemed too provocative for the mainstream." Its other two titles are La JohnJoseph's farcical orgy/apocalypse fantasy Everything Must Go and Stoddard's own second novel Limiters [Kindle], about Kyle Mason, seen first as a lost 16 year-old raver then as a 26 year-old "sexually compulsive copywriter living in New York City, hyperactively riding the crests of a narcissistic and self-destructive personality.")

Slava has posted a brief text with his photos of Crimea from 2004, when he returned to find a more rundown resort that had, in his youth on visits from Siberia, seemed a Soviet Paradise. His strongest work is Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go.

Born March 23: Steven Saylor/Aaron Travis, J.C. Leyendecker

London's Sunday Times says Steven Saylor "evokes the ancient world more convincingly than any other writer of his generation," evident across the twelve novels and two story collections of his Roma Sub Rosa series about Gordianus the Finder, including two CWA Historical Dagger Award finalists, Last Seen in Massilia and The Judgment of Caesar, the Lammy nominee The Venus Throw, and the Lammy winner Catilina's Riddle. Saylor may be best known for his 1,200-year epics Roma and Empire, international bestsellers published in twenty-two languages. He has also written two novels of his native Texas, most notably A Twist at the End about O. Henry and a series of murders in Austin in the 1880s. Last month came his sixteenth novel, Raiders of the Nile, which USA Today calls "exuberantly entertaining." He and Rick Solomon, partners since 1976, divide their time between Austin and Berkeley. An essay about their long relationship appears in My Mother's Ghost.

Earlier, Saylor was the bestselling gay erotica writer Aaron Travis. Maybe you don't want academic approval of your taboo-busting porn, but you do want results: Michael Bronski says Slaves of the Empire [Kindle] is "a high point of gay male writing in the second half of the twentieth century" that has achieved "near-mythological status," and he calls Blue Light [Kindle only 99 cents] "a contemporary supernatural masterpiece as frightening as anything H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King ever wrote." Susie Bright agrees, saying it's "perhaps the most fantastic supernatural erotic thriller ever written." She selected his stories for at least two volumes of her mainly straight Best American Erotica series and to celebrate its tenth anniversary she asked readers to name their favorite piece from all ten volumes: The winner was The Hit [Kindle], which Saylor notes was inspired by the movies Carnival Story and Murder by Contract. William Burroughs' and John le Carré's work partially prompted Crown of Thorns about an American spy in Istanbul who submits to "a brutal Turkish stevedore." Other titles in the newly digitized Aaron Travis Erotic Library are Short, Brainy & Hot, Wild West, Wrestling Tales, Military Discipline, Eden and the horrifying Kudzu.

 

In the early 20th century when Arrow had 94% of market share, much of the shirtmaker's success could be laid with illustrator J.C. Leyendecker -- he used his chiseled boyfriend as the model for the archetypal Arrow Collar Man. Born in Germany in 1874, Leyendecker moved with his family to Chicago when he was eight. He and his brother enrolled at the city's Art Institute before studying art nouveau at the Académie Julian in Paris. They returned to Chicago early in 1899 and by May Leyendecker received his first commission for a cover of the era's most famous magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Throughout his career he would draw 321 more covers for them, creating the genre of "adorable" domestic chaos, stirring patriotism, family holidays, lovers' foibles, and youthful high spirits (with scrawny nudity) that today we associate with his Eve Harrington protege and successor Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker was slight and disliked confrontation; when his friends warned him Rockwell was stealing his style, he didn't protest. (Being a gay man and an immigrant in the early 20th century may also have amplified his instincts to avoid trouble.) One area in which he maintained preeminence was the blatant homoerotic. Leyendecker's men eternally give one another penetrating looks inside, outdoors, and on deck, and they're always thrusting elongated objects at happy angles from their bodies. He never met a muscle that didn't need to beef up, ripple, or glisten under his expert touch. As his biographers  explain, “Neighboring artists shared models with the brothers, which meant a seemingly endless train of attractive Greenwich Village lads parading through their chilly studio in the buff.” One was named Charles Beach. He was 17 and Leyendecker was 28. By all accounts Beach was both hot and not, given to self aggrandizing claims that he did Leyendecker's work (despite not being able to draw), along with the more typical fits of jealousy, insecurity, and tyranny. Margo Channing Norman Rockwell complained he never heard Beach say anything intelligent and called him "stupid." Nevertheless, Leyendecker and Beach moved into a New Rochelle mansion together and threw luxe parties attended by the jazz age set including Scott and Zelda. Inevitably, times changed, the commissions dwindled, and the money ran out. They had to dismiss their staff yet they stayed together a total of 49 years, until Leyendecker's death in 1951 when he instructed his private papers be destroyed. For more, read J.C. Leyendecker or, yes, J. C. Leyendecker.

Leyendecker's artist brother F.X. Leyendecker also had an eye for masculine muscle, as with this barechested blacksmith, and for strategically placed missiles between shirtless swabbies (compare below). He became addicted to drugs and killed himself at 47.