The Art Newspaper has an interesting article on two books dealing with homosexual themes in art.
A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality is a newer one that I haven't seen in person yet - it should appear in the USA this month.
Mr Fernandez begins with something of a Gay Eden, or Olympus—a Greece where man-boy love was a crucial part of an instructional passage from youth to manhood, hence its regular depiction in sculpture and on vases. As cultures proscribed homosexuality, works of art reflected its enduring presence. The author savours biblical examples from Rembrandt, Orazio Gentileschi, and others. The broad range of Mr Fernandez’s enterprise calls to mind the discipline of systematic theology, from St Sebastian to St Genet.
We have the other one: Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art. It consists of four case histories of queer artists that were the targets of censorship for homoerotic content in their work: Andy Warhol, Paul Cadmus, Robert Mapplethorpe, and David Wojnarowicz.
I had the honor of meeting Paul Cadmus in person in June 1999, at the opening of a show at the Aldrich Museum. He was a beautiful, gentle, man (he was 95 at the time). I felt like I was meeting a saint, and in a way I was.
I love that the Navy's web site has a page on The Fleet's In.
