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

A Single Man... Don Bachardy On His Birthday

3 films come to mind today as I consider Don Bachrdy on this birthday: Cabaret, A Single Man & the unexpectedly uncommon documentry- Chris & Don: A Love Story.

Christopher Isherwood has been one of my favorite writers starting in high school when I learned the Cabaret connection. It was a revelation to read at the start of the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s, of Isherwood leaving England & traveling to Berlin in 1929 to meet boys. His enthusiasm for the boy bars & cabarets gives unfading allure to his look at bankrupt Germany entertaining itself during Hitler’s rise to power. As a gay man, Isherwood identified with the crushed, the criminal, the cast-off, he had to hide aspects of his personal life; defying convention to find love.

By the time Goodbye to Berlin ( the basis for the play & screenplay of Cabaret) was published, Isherwood was living in the USA.  In 1939, Isherwood had published 4 novels, 3 plays, a memoir & a travel when he landed in NYC in 1939 with his lifelong friend-  poet W. H. Auden. Auden settled in Manhattan & Isherwood went to Hollywood. He had been a movie fan since childhood & he soon became a well paid screenwriter.

Isherwood had many friends & lovers in his new country, many of them famous. He met 18 year old Don Bachardy at the Will Rogers State Beach in October 1952. Bachardy began visiting the Santa Monica beach in the late 1940s with his older brother, Ted. Bachardy: “At first Chris was attracted to Ted. But Ted was a manic-depressive schizophrenic. During his 3rd breakdown, I was distressed to realise I could no longer rely on him. Chris felt sorry for me & he was so successful in cheering me up that we formed a special bond.”

By Valentine’s Day, they had initiated an intimate relationship that lasted until Isherwood's death in 1986. They were a high profile, openly gay couple during the era of McCarthyism, when homosexuals were being driven out of the government & the film world.

A portrait of the pair by David Hockney

Isherwood & Bachardy seemed to live an enviably enchanted existence in their hillside Santa Monica home, where they entertained the leading figures of the world of arts, literature, & the movie stars that Bachardy once sought out for autographs. Yet the documentary- Chris & Don: A Love Story reveals that the couple worked hard & long to achieve their bliss.

From the start, the men's relationship was challenging: Bachardy was 30 years younger than Isherwood & was so boyishly handsome he seemed underage. A student of theatre at UCLA when they met, Bachardy soon felt overwhelmed by Isherwood's vast array of famous friends. Isherwood encouraged Bachardy's talent for drawing & eventually Bachardy did become an internationally acclaimed visual artist. Bachardy: “I was 18, Chris was 48. He had to move out of his home because the owners, close friends, were very uncomfortable about the age gap, blatantly accentuated by my callow appearance. Chris had other friends who disapproved, too, & he broke with them because of me"

Teaching Bachardy gave Isherwood sizable satisfaction. Bachardy: “We were intensely close while I went to college & then art school. I decided I wanted to be a painter, & Chris encouraged me right from the beginning.”

In a 1960 entry in his diary Isherwood wrote: “Don matters more than any of the others. He imposes himself more, demands more, cares more, about everything he does & encounters. He is so desperately alive.”

Isherwood’s success, & his affairs with Stravinsky, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote & others, his experience & his demanding nature made their relationship troublesome to Bachardy:  “I needed to establish my own identity. Some of Chris’s friends were kind, but mostly they treated me as the young boyfriend or even just a bit of fluff.”

\Bachardy moved to London to study painting. His first shows in London & NYC attracted all kinds of admirers & good reviews, plus he was talented, together, & temptingly young.  Bachardy: “Chris had always had sex friends outside our relationship, & he had been frank with me about his sexual adventures in the years before he knew me. Since I had very little sex experience before Chris, I began to feel deprived. I told him it was unfair to deny me the freedom he had enjoyed. I was usually discreet about my adventures, but I know he was tormented. We had a couple of really difficult years & in 1963 I considered leaving him. We did split up for a few months.”

Self Portrait

In his misery Isherwood wrote A Single Man; the theme of emotional loss reflected Isherwood’s fear that Bachardy would leave & that he would die alone. Ironically, Bachardy thought up the title A Single Man. He has a cameo in the film, & is credited as a creative consultant.

Bachardy & Isherwood survived the 1963 break-up. Bachardy: “Chris allowed me the freedom to have sex with other men, & the comparison favored Chris. I saw more clearly what a great treasure I had in him.” They were together for 33 years. Chris & Don: A Love Story, ends with a several scenes of Isherwood, dying of cancer, sitting for a series of portraits by his partner.  Bachardy:“Chris was in a lot of pain towards the end. But he had sat for me so often over the years, & I knew this was something we could still do together. Each day, I could be with him intensely for hours on end.”

The last of the series was completed when Isherwood was already dead. Bachardy remained alone with the body, producing some of his finest works when he himself was newly a single man.

Bachardy still lives in Isherwood's Santa Monica home, his residence for over 50 years, where he paints portraits. Bachardy did indeed become an esteemed artist in his own right. He has painted portraits of most famous folks of the past 50 years including: Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, & Montgomery Clift. He works every day, for hours at a time, with the passion & perseverance of someone much younger. He's one of the only portrait artists in the world who only paints live, he never uses photographs or even work from memory. Once the model has left the room, he puts down his brush.

"What is exciting is to work with the person and get all the input, all the vibration & the aura of a living personality, how can you do that with a photograph?”

One of Bachardy's most notable works is the official gubernatorial portrait of Governor Jerry Brown hanging in the California State Capitol. The California state official biography page for Jerry Brown features a photograph of the painting. I think highly of his work & I have a nice coffee table book of his portraits, now on loan to Lil' Jake, the hip-hop artist/designer.

Governor of California- Jerry Brown

Still strikingly handsome at 77, Bachardy can be spotted riding his bicycle around LA. He remains a prolific artist. Bachardy is fond of saying that he is completely Isherwood's creation, but Isherwood's writing also was shaped through the openness of their relationship. I rather love him.

Recent self portrait

I Want To Be Rich When I Am Dead

I admire the way dead celebrities continue to make more money than ever. Elvis Presley was one of the highest paid entertainers of 2010, & he has been gone for 24 years, yet he made $60 million last year.

Andy Warhol knew that he would one day be the stuff of legend. Warhol: “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.”

Last week, another dead celebrity was the toast of NYC. At Phillips de Pury & Company, Elizabeth Taylor stole the show. The 1963 painting, one of 13 made of Elizabeth Taylor in various colors, was titled-Liz #5 (Early Colored Liz), & it sold to the bidder for $24 million, or $26.9 million including Phillips fees.

The price was not far off the $23.5 million that the actor Hugh Grant got for his turquoise Liz at Christie’s in 2007.

How much can I get for my old jockstrap?

Born On This Day- March 23rd... American Illustrator J.C. Leyendecker

The Husband & I have a lovely J.C. Leyendecker coffee table book that has provided a great deal of viewing enjoyment. We had a framed print of one his advertisements for Ivory Soap. This print portrays an improbably handsome jazz age man preparing for his bath (the picture is now in owned by my dear friend Lil'Jake, the Portland designer & rapper). This piece is virile & All-American, yet homoerotic & stirring. Leyendecker was the most famous American illustrators during the first half of the 20th century, the Golden Age of American commercial illustration.

Leyendecker was responsible over 400 covers for leading magazines of the era, including The Saturday Evening Post. He created powerful advertising images like the Arrow Collar Man, an icon of masculinity, & the first male sex symbol & the first male advertising star. Ironic… Leyendecker was a homosexual & the model for the Arrow Collar Man was his lover. Leyendecker was drawn to depicting men in locker rooms, clubhouses, & workshops, extraordinarily handsome young men exchanging inexplicable glances. Few images are more overtly homoerotic than advertisements for Gillette in which scantily clad men teach each other how to use disposable razors.

Joe Leyendecker was born in Germany in 1874; his parents immigrated to America when he was very young. He grew up in Chicago. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago & spent several months in Paris in the 1890s with his younger brother Frank, also gay & also an artist. The brothers eventually moved to New York as they started to get more commissions.

In 1903, a striking young man appeared at their Greenwich Village studio.. His name was Charles A. Beach. Frank immediately hired him in Joe's absence. When Joe returned, Frank graciously allowed his brother the use of his model. Joe & Charles Beach were inseparable, both personally & professionally, for the next 48 years. Joe was 29 & Charles was 17 years old.

In 1914, the Leyendeckers brothers, & Beach, moved into a large home that served as their art studio in New Rochelle, New York, where they would reside for the rest of their lives. They hosted large parties attended by notables from all walks of life including F. Scott & Zelda. Frank died in 1924 of drug addiction. In the 1930s Leyendecker’s commissions began to dry up. Norman Rockwell, who was obsessed with Leyendecker & was very much influenced by him, replaced him as the best known illustrator in America.

Leyendecker, who was always very shy, would spend the last years of his life secluded in the house he had built in New Rochelle. He died in 1951. Charles Beach destroyed all of Leyendecker’s papers & unseen works on his death. Beach died a few weeks later.

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- February 13th... American Artist Grant Wood

If you have been following this little blog thing, you will know that I have a passion for 20th century American Art. Grant Wood's work is quintessential 20th century American Art, I now we know there has always been a gay twist.

Grant Wood’s American Gothic is one of the most parodied & iconic American images. The work was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago after it was unveiled there to the public in 1930 to much scrutiny. Ever since, the painting has captured a certain resonance with the American public, but its historical reception has had somewhat of a turbulent ride. The painting is admonished & celebrated, dismissed & parodied. The work is a dour portrait of a farmer & a woman in front of a neo-gothic farmhouse in Iowa. The woman’s sullen look is echoed in the farmer’s direct but blank gaze, pitchfork in hand looking not the least bit amused. The Models were the artist's sister & dentist.


Last autumn, a biography of Grant Wood by Tripp Evans- Grant Wood, A Life, lifts the lid off many of the lies & secrets which have surrounded the artist’s life story & digs deeper than ever before into his complex personality. Evans acknowledges Wood’s homosexuality, which earlier biographers left out entirely.

Self Portrait by the Artist

There are some delicious ironies to the acknowledgement of Grant Wood being gay. For decades, Wood has been celebrated as a spokesman for the conservative values of the close-minded set. To me, the essence of our country's Constitution is a willingness to allow diversity, change & the supposed narrow mindedness of the Midwest is a bit of myth: Iowa, after all, was the 3rd state in the country to legalize gay marriage. Wood survived happily in small town Cedar Rapids, where local businessmen protected him from the consequences of his gayness.


Wood is often described as a sort of homespun American farmer who celebrated traditional American values. But in fact, his life as a farm boy ended at the age of 10, when his father died suddenly of a heart attack & Wood, his mother & his sister moved to Cedar Rapids. His values & choice of professions were not ones that were often endorsed in early 20th century Iowa. Wood’s father was a severe Quaker, who once insisted that he return a book of fairy tales: “We Quakers only read about true things.” He would surely have never approved of his son’s career as an artist, & he would have approved of the nagging secret of Wood’s life- he was a homosexual.


Evidence of Grant’s gayness has been hidden in plain sight for years. Grant’s mentor-Thomas Hart Benton, confided to many of his friends & students that he believed that Wood was gay, & it’s even part of Wood’s files at the University of Iowa, where 5 of Wood’s colleagues made the accusation during a nasty dispute pitting Wood, who had never been to college, against his better educated faculty colleagues. Indeed, the artist was fired from his position on the faculty when it was discovered that he was having an affair with his male private secretary. Evans is the first author of a bio of Wood to take this important fact into account. During Grant’s time homosexuality was a crime that could be punished by imprisonment or castration, & even rumors could end a career or make an artist a social outcast. Wood’s art is a strange mix of revelation & concealment.

Daughters Of Revolution

In Appraisal

Everything about Wood’s art carries some sort of double meaning & complexity. He was fascinated by changes of gender. In his Daughters of Revolution he pictures 3 founding fathers in drag, as members of the D.A.R. For In Appraisal, he transformed his friend Edward Rowan into a farm woman. Wood was fascinated by masks. Wood’s art has an element of “let’s pretend.” Wood's Gothic folk-art style is a way of suggesting that the work has some sort of double layer, a representation of something real & something else,with a big dash of wit. Wood was always vague & inconsistent when asked what his paintings represented, apparently because he sought to avoid criticism when his subjects or his neighbors were offended. On different occasions, he described the figures in American Gothic as city or country people, & as a man with his daughter or as a man with his wife.


Is America finally ready to embrace a gay Grant Wood? Or will Conservative Christian Right Wingers rise up to deny his gayness, or to denounce him as wicked? Since American Art History 101, American Gothic has always struck me as high camp & a little queer. I always saw the piece as satire rather than a celebration of The American Spirit. For many art lovers in the heartland, this new book & it’s well documented discovery of Wood's gayness will not be a terrible shock. Just possibly, America is finally ready for Grant Wood to come out of the closet.


Grant died of liver cancer in Iowa City, one day before his 51st birthday. In the end, Wood’s American Gothic stands next to masterpieces like Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa & Edvard Munch's Scream as truly recognizable & iconic across the world.

Born On This Day- January 4th... American Painter Mardsen Hartley

He is one of my favorite artists from one of my favorite periods. Mardsen Hartley is one of the great artists & most intriguing figures in the art world. Tall, awkward, driven, he arrived in New York in 1899 at age 22. He was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877. Hartley later settled in Cleveland to study art, already seasoned by solitude & a sense that he was gay. He survived a childhood of Dickensian proportions: the early death of his mother, abandonded by his father & a life of poverty that forced him to leave school at 15 & go to work in a shoe factory. Hartley: ''My childhood was vast with terror and surprise.”



In true Dickensian style, he would be rescued as a young adult by sponsors & patrons attracted to his obvious talent & charisma. He enjoyed summer retreats in Maine, where he started a lifelong interest in literature & religious thought: Emerson, Thoreau, Henry James & Walt Whitman. They paid for him to study at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan. For several years he studied in New York & painted in Maine, where landscape was his first & last great subject. In 1909 he met Alfred Stieglitz, who immediately gave him an exhibition and made him a prominent member of the select circle of American Modern Artists.


Most of his life he never lived anywhere for more than 2 years, his restlessness taking him to most cultural capitals nearly every Modernist circle or salon, including those centered on Gertrude Stein. He had little critical recognition & never made money from his work; he never had a longtime partner, & never really had a family. The young German soldier that he loved was killed in WW I; the virile, attractive & masculine sons of the fishing family he stayed with 2 summers in Nova Scotia were tragically drowned.

Hartley was an artist with a great love of great paintings who wanted to make his own & have them be viewed as great. He succeeded because he embraced life, painful as it was.


The seminude portraits of swimmers & wrestlers that he made in Maine in the late 1930's are among the most powerfully sexual images of men ever painted. Hartley was also an accomplished poet & essayist. It could not have been easy to face the difficulties of being a gay artist in an era when public admission was taboo & costly. His work is featured in the Hide/Seek exhibit at the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, as is his portrait by his friend George Platt Lynes.

Photograph by George Platt Lynes

''I want to paint the livingness of appearances.”

On This Day In Gay History & A Birthday

This morning marks the signing of the repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, the 17-year-old policy banning on homosexuals serving openly in the United States military, was signed into law by President Barack Obama. I never dreamed...

A gay, 20th Century artist is right up my alley. Gay history, art history, NYC in the 1970s, all my interests intersect with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Born on this day in middle class Brooklyn. His father, an accountant, was Haitian & his mother was Puerto Rican. As a teenager, he left home to live in lower Manhattan, selling hand painted tee shirts & postcards on the street. His work began to attract attention in the early 1980s after a group of underground artists held a public exhibition-The Times Square Show.

Basquiat's unique visual vocabulary of graffiti symbols & urban rage challenged accepted notions of art. His vivid paintings incorporated such diverse images as African masks, quotes from Leonardo di Vinci & Grey's Anatomy, Egyptian murals, pop culture, & jazz. Critics called his work childlike & menacing & neo-primitive.

 Basquiat associated with other artists whose work drew from popular culture: Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, & Keith Haring. Haring: "Basquiat’s stuff I saw on the walls was more poetry than graffiti. They were sort of philosophical poems . . . . On the surface they seemed really simple, but the minute I saw them I knew that they were more than that. From the beginning he was my favorite artist."


Embraced by the art world, Basquiat soared to international fame. In 1982 his work was exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Rotterdam & Zurich. He was the youngest artist ever to be included in the prestigious German exhibition, Documenta 7. In 1985, he appeared on the cover of The NY Times Magazine. After Warhol died on February 22, 1987, Basquiat became increasingly isolated, and his heroin addiction and depression became more severe. After an attempt at sobriety during a trip to Maui, Hawaii, Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in his art studio on Great Jones Street in New York City's NoHo neighborhood on August 12, 1988, at the age of 27.

Several major museum retrospective exhibitions of Basquiat's works have been held since his death. The first was the "Jean-Michel Basquiat" exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1993. It subsequently traveled to museums in Texas, Iowa, & Alabama. Another major & influential exhibition was the "Basquiat" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005.

Until 2002, the highest price paid for an original work of Basquiat's was 3 million + at Christie's. in 2003, Basquiat's large piece- Profit I, owned by drummer Lars Ulrich of the heavy metal band Metallica, was set for auction again at Christie's. It sold $6 million.
In  2008, at another auction at Christie's, Ulrich sold a 1982 Basquiat piece, Untitled (Boxer), for $13,522,500 to an anonymous telephone bidder. The record price for a Basquiat painting was madein 2007, when an untitled Basquiat work from 1981 sold at Sotheby's in New York for $14.6 million.If you are interested in him. & you should be, try the 1996 film- Basquiat, directed by Julian Schnabel, with actor Jeffrey Wright playing Basquiat & David Bowie as Andy Warhol. Or try the2009 documentary Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.

Born On This Day... Paul Cadmus

My favorite book of 2010 is not a novel, a collection of essays, or a memoir, but rather the catalogue for unprecidented exhibit at The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, now showing through Februaury 2011. Hide/Seek: Difference & Desire in American Portraiture, surveys the presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture through a seductive selection of more than 140 full-color illustrations, drawings, & portraits from leading American artists. Starting at the end of the turn of 19th century, to Stonewall & the gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, & on to to the new century, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed & ignored, even by the most progressive members of our society: the influence of gay & lesbian artists in creating important American modern art.

Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists  Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe,  Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, & many of my other favorites & introductions to artists unfamiliar to me. Gay artists were frequently not fully a part of the society they portrayed, often occupying a place on the outskirts, & from that vantage point they crafted innovative & revolutionary ways of doing portraits.

One of the artists featured is Paul Cadmus, a long time favorite artist of the Husband & mine. We have a “coffee table” book of his work that has had a great deal of attention & perusing. We have been thrilled at seeing many of his works in museums. I am hard pressed to choose a favorite.

Paul Cadmus' life spanned the 20th century, beginning with his birth on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1904, & ending, after taking his daily walk down his country road, & getting into bed with his partner of 35 years- singer Jon Anderson, where he died peacefully in his sleep, with no apparent illness, on December 12, 1999, 5 days before his 95th birthday & 11 days after 300 friends had gathered to celebrate. In between, his combination of meticulousness, classicism, & exuberance made him one of America's greatest artists--a "magic realist" in more ways than one. In the 1920s, he traveled through Europe with his lover- painter Jared Smith. When they returned to Manhattan, they formed an informal group of gay artists including photographer George Platt Lynnes, for whom Camus was a frequent model, & Lincoln Kirstein, who founded New York City Ballet.

He became an unlikely cause celebre in 1934, when the U.S. Navy went berserk over The Fleet's In! a truly glorious epic scene of uniformed sailors that included prostitutes & a homosexual pickup, & led Secretary of the Navy-Henry Latrobe Roosevelt to remove it from a WPA showing. Because of that controversy, his first show, at Corcoran Galleries in Manhattan, attracted more than 7,000 visitors. "I owe that admiral a very large sum," Cadmus remarked 6 decades later. 
 
 

The Fleet's In! (1934)

 
With a beautiful posture, a life long lovely full head of hair & piercing blue eyes, Camus was as luminous as his paintings. From everything I have read about Camus, he sincerely cared about other people, which may sound like a small thing, but is actually quite rare among artists of his caliber. "He had a remarkable memory," says openly gay Josef Asteinza, an architect who lived down the road from Cadmus in Connecticut. "We brought scores of people there & he always enjoyed meeting them & he never forgot a name. Edith Sitwell said, `A gentleman is never unintentionally rude,' but Paul said, `I don't think a gentleman should ever be rude under any circumstances.” I can’t help but wonder how amazing it would have been to have been a member of his circle.
 
 

Jon Anderson, his last partner

 

The handsome artist in the late 1990s

 
Some things never change. A full month into the exhibition of Hide/Seek, one video, by the late David Wojnarowicz, was removed from the exhibit. Crazy Conservative Christians called the video, with ants crawling over a crucified, bleeding man, sacrilegious. It’s meant to symbolize the suffering of AIDS, the disease that eventually claimed the artist.



The Portrait Gallery Spokesperson Bethany Bentley: "The video is being removed because the publicity is distracting from the themes of the exhibition. We wanted the larger themes to be able to stay in place. "Nothing else will be removed from the exhibition." Asked if that would still hold even if somebody has an objection over another piece of art, Bentley replied, "Nope, this is it."