Review: ‘Louise Bourgeois: Late Works’ at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 24th November 2012 – 11th March 2013

Louise Bourgeois & Australian Artists
13 October 2012 – 14 April 2013

Louise Bourgeois: Late Works installation view
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Photograph: John Gollings 2012

Tough Love

This is a tough, stimulating exhibition of late works by Louise Bourgeois at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. All the main themes of the artist’s work explored over many years are represented in these late works: memory, emotion, anxiety, family, relationships, childhood, pain, desire and eroticism are all present as are female subjectivity and sexuality, expressed through the body. As the quotation above by Bourgeois states, her body became her sculpture.

I am no expert on the work of the artist. But what I will try and enunciate are my feelings when viewing the exhibition. Firstly, I thought the drawings by Louise Bourgeois in Heide II were the most magical thing that I saw all day; they seemed to be the well spring of her creativity, the initial thought sketched quickly and imperiously. Secondly, series such as Dawn (2007, below) and The Waiting Hours (2007), assemblages of cut fragments of her dresses and other textiles used to create spiral three-dimensional realities, were the most beautiful, peaceful Zen based works in the exhibition possessing as they did a calm, resolved, mandala-like presence. Lastly, the main group of sculptures were, for me, hard to look at. A series of severed heads, dismembered bodies, tapestry fragments, spiders, bones, an orrery-like planetarium, pendulous objects stuck with needles, kitchen implements and the house brought back memories of my own childhood.

I was born in the late 1950’s to a mother who didn’t really want to have children, to a mother who was already being beaten up by an abusive husband before she was even married, who lived on a remote, isolated farm in the middle of nowhere. I can’t imagine what my mother went through in those early years raising two children – with no hope of help or escape, with no women’s refuge to flee to, stuck there doing her best to protect her children and herself from a violent, mentally ill man. You cannot imagine the torment I went through for the first 18 years of my life, trying to protect my mother when I was old enough, creating my own worlds to escape the reality of the present (which is why I probably became an artist, to still create my own worlds). There were good times at Christmas and bonfire night, but the best part was growing up on the land, learning the rhythms of nature, learning to drive on a tractor and combine harvester, but always in the back of your mind was the instant of abuse lurking around the corner, the inherent violence of life. It is only now, as I have grown older, that I can truly appreciate the dire predicament that my mother was in and acknowledge a profound sense of gratitude towards her protection of me as a baby and child.

That is why this exhibition is, for me, tough love. The emotions of Bourgeois’ sculptures are close to the bone. As Jason Smith observes, “Bourgeois saw her mother as rational, patient and stoic in her nurturing, in contrast to the temperament of her father whom she regarded as irrationally emotional, unreasonable and capable of psychological cruelty. Bourgeois became aware at an early age that she was living in a time and social environment in which women and their identities were subordinate to men.”As Bourgeois says of the spider (her mother), “she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and as useful as a spider. She could also defend herself, and me.” This is what my mother did as well, at great cost to herself.

Bourgeois’ work gives me an overall feeling of immersion in a world view, one that transcends the pain and speaks truth to power. Bourgeois confronted the emotion, memory or barrier to communication that generated her mood and the work. She observed, “My art is an exorcism. My sculpture allows me to re-experience fear, to give it a physicality, so that I am able to hack away at it.” By weaving, stitching and sewing Bourgeois threaded the past through the present and enacted, through artistic performance, a process of repair and reconstruction, giving meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. I have not been so lucky. My mother refuses to discuss the past, will not even come close to the subject for the pain is so great for her. I am left with a heaviness of heart, dealing with the demons of the past that constantly lurk in the memory of childhood, that insistently impinge on the man I am today. Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures brought it all flooding back as the work of only a great artist can, forcing me to become an ethical witness to her past, my past. A must see exhibition this summer in Melbourne.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to curator and Director Jason Smith and Heide Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“What counts, our whole purpose, is to try to understand what we are about, to scrutinise ourselves… Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.”

“The fears of the past were connected with the functions of the body, they reappear through the body. For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.”

Louise Bourgeois

“What images can art find for depicting femaleness from within, as distinct from the familiar male conventions of looking at it from the outside, from the eye-line of another gender?” Hughes questioned in a commentary that implied no precedents. “… [Her] influence on young artists has been enormous.”

Robert Hughes quoted by Annemarie Kiely on the Vogue Living Blog [Online] Cited 28/02/2013 no longer available online

“Yes, there are the oft-told stories of the father and the mistress, but it is Bourgeois’s intense love of her mother and her [mother’s] death that completely transformed her life… The art ultimately became about her never-ending grief… and her continuing desire as a woman. It’s still so potent; not just as a memory, but as a constant.”

Jason Smith, Curator, Director and CEO of Heide quoted by Annemarie Kiely on the Vogue Living Blog [Online] Cited 28/02/2013 no longer available online

Louise Bourgeois: Late Works installation view
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Photograph: John Gollings 2012

“The friend (the spider – why the spider?) because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and as useful as a spider. She could also defend herself, and me.”

Louise Bourgeois, from Ode to my Mother, 1995

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Spider (detail)
1997
Steel, tapestry, wood, glass, fabric, rubber, silver, gold, bone
449.6 × 665.5 × 518.2cm
The Easton Foundation, New York, NY
Photograph: John Gollings 2012

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Dawn (detail)
2007
Fabric book, 12 pages
12 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches each

Around 1996, aged 85, Bourgeois began to mine her closets for the garments and textiles that she had worn, collected and stored over a lifetime, and use them to make sculpture and ‘fabric drawings’, continuing her lifelong recall and articulations of familial dysfunction, desire and fear, anger and remorse, isolation and connectedness. In the recycling and reconstruction of her clothing and collected textiles Bourgeois intensified her work’s expression of the human body and of life’s episodes (those as daughter, wife, mother, woman, artist). The materiality of these works testifies to the impression of Bourgeois’ past on her psyche and on reparative acts of making through which her past was reconciled in her present. The beauty of the past for Bourgeois resided in the nurturing, repairing, fortifying and protective tendencies of her mother, which she aligned with the processes of stitching and assembling.

Blue Days (1996) is one of a number of works in which Bourgeois suspended, stuffed and shaped her dresses and shirts, sometimes adding abstract sculptural elements like the red glass sphere that operates here like a nucleus around which the new sculptural bodies circulate. With its intimate relation to the skin and contours of the body, to time and seasons, clothing was used for its power to summon memory: ‘You can retell your life … by the shape, weight, colour and smell of those clothes in your closet. They are like the weather, the ocean, changing all the time.’

In other works Bourgeois’ fragmented figures and anatomical parts give physical form to anxieties rising from unfulfilled desire, acts of betrayal, losses or thwarted communication. Couple IV embodies the dark confusion of the child happening upon the sexual embrace of the adults. The copulating, decapitated lovers appear as an encased ‘archaeological specimen’ and signal Bourgeois’ fraught obsession not only with the infidelities of her father, but also with sex itself. For Bourgeois there is ‘a fatal attraction not towards one or the other, but to the phenomena of copulation … I am exasperated by the vision of the copulating couple, and it makes me so furious … that I chop their heads [off]. This is it … I turn violent. The sewing is a defence. I am so afraid of the things I might do. The defence is to do the opposite of what you want to do.’

Louise Bourgeois’ practice was an elaborate articulation of an existence in which the sculpting world and the living world were one. Her late works summoned the past and confronted the present, and the passage of time, by using the very garments in which the experiences of her life, loves and longings resided.

Jason Smith, Curator, Director and CEO, Heide Museum of Modern Art. “Louise Bourgeois,” on The Melbourne Review website, November 2012 [Online] Cited 26/02/2013 no longer available online

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Blue Days
1996
cloth, steel, glass
292.1 × 205.7 × 241.3cm
Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
© Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, New York / Viscopy, Sydney

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Femme Maison
2001
fabric, steel
35.6 × 38.1 × 66cm
Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
© Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, New York / Viscopy, Sydney

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Femme Maison (detail)
2001
fabric, steel
35.6 × 38.1 × 66cm
Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
© Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, New York / Viscopy, Sydney

Note that Femme Maison and other artworks are encased in ‘cells’. In one sense, the cell encases and protects the artwork; however, Louise Bourgeois’ intention was to use the cell also as a way of containing the memory held within the work.

The hybrid form of Femme Maison – with its dual translations to ‘woman house’ or housewife – appeared in drawings, paintings and sculpture, and in degrees of abstraction and figuration, from the mid 1940s onwards. In this key late work the textured fabric affirms the central relationship of woman with the domestic space. Stories of the house and the home defined Bourgeois’ identity. The architectural house and its contents – especially the table, bed and chair – and the familial home and its occupants, were the structures that shaped Bourgeois’ unstable sense of self, and her relationships with others. This work plays on the house literally growing out of the woman’s body (the nurturing mother) or, conversely, pinning her dismembered body to the ground, registering the paralysing power of fear, and recalling a painful childhood.

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Knife Figure
2002
fabric, steel, wood
22.2 × 76.2 × 19.1cm
Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
© Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, New York / Viscopy, Sydney

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Untitled
2002
Tapestry and aluminium
43.2 x 30.5 x 30.5cm
Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
© Louise Bourgeois Trust
Photo: Christopher Burke

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Couple IV
1997
fabric, leather, stainless steel, plastic
50.8 × 165.1 × 77.5cm
Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
© Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, New York / Viscopy, Sydney

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Untitled
2002
Tapestry, aluminium
43.2 x 30.5 x 30.5cm
The Easton Foundation, New York, NY.

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Cinq
2007
fabric, stainless steel
61 × 35.6 × 35.6cm
Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
© Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, New York / Viscopy, Sydney

Heide Museum of Modern Art is proud to present two major exhibitions featuring the work of Louise Bourgeois. The first, Louise Bourgeois: Late Works includes over twenty, key works direct from the late artist’s studio in New York. The second exhibition, Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists presents a selection of works by contemporary Australian artists who have been inspired by Bourgeois alongside prints and drawings from her vast graphic oeuvre. Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was one of the most inventive, provocative and influential artists of the twentieth century. Although her work has been exhibited extensively overseas, it has rarely been seen in Australia, and only once in significant depth, at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1995 in an exhibition curated by then NGV curator Jason Smith. Louise Bourgeois: Late Works focuses on Bourgeois’s use of fabric in sculpture and what she termed ‘fabric drawings’. A preoccupation with memory and time, human relationships, fear and its annihilation, sexuality and the erotic body, are all emphases of Bourgeois’ final works.

Louise Bourgeois: Late Works is the first exhibition in Australia to survey the work of this profoundly important artist since her death in 2010 and has been curated by Jason Smith, now Heide Director & CEO – in close collaboration with the Bourgeois studio, New York – as a follow up to the 1995 exhibition at the NGV. Focusing on the final fifteen years of Bourgeois’ career, the exhibition examines the use of fabric in her works, and includes 18 sculptures, two suites of ‘fabric drawings’, watercolours, embroidered texts and lithographs never before seen in Australia. In the fabric works the processes of deconstructing and reconstructing, are applied to the contents of Bourgeois’ closets. The recycling of her garments, collected textiles and tapestry fragments intensifies her work’s expression of self-portraiture, and the profound personal experiences that defined her life and art.

Fabric was important to Louise Bourgeois, who grew up in her parents’ tapestry making business. In 1996, in her mid-eighties, Bourgeois began to transform the garments and textiles that she had worn, collected and stored over a lifetime into sculptures and ‘fabric drawings’. For her, sewing was an act of healing or reparation, linked to memories of her mother who ‘would sit out in the sun and repair a tapestry or a petit point’, an image of calm amid more distressing family dynamics.

Central to the exhibition is Spider, 1997 one of the Bourgeois’ Cells sculptures which is dominated, enclosed and protected by a gargantuan spider – a recurring and powerful motif in the artist’s work. Bourgeois created her spider sculptures partly in tribute to her mother, saying: ‘Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. Spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother’. The female body and female subjectivity are concentrations in the exhibition.

The familial, biographical stories that provided life-long fuel for Bourgeois’ art are well known: her parents’ tapestry workshop in which she learnt the value of art as a form of reparation; her father’s public infidelity; her mother’s betrayal and early death; her complex sense of abandonment; her constant analysis of self; her belief in art a form of exorcism and as a potential reconciliation with the past.

Another highlight of the exhibition is the haunting Couple IV 1997, depicting a pair of copulating, and decapitated, lovers. The embracing figures are cast in the black of mourning, and appear as an encased ‘archaeological specimen’ in the vitrine. The work signals Bourgeois’ fraught obsession with the past, the infidelities of her father, and with sex itself.

Surrealism and pathos combine in Bourgeois’ smaller, intimate works like Knife figure 2002 and Untitled 2002. Here we see a dark side of the domestic with the knife and the whisk looming threateningly large in relation to the prone, dismembered bodies. In their colouration and homely material qualities they inspire tenderness and protection, yet as with so many of Bourgeois’ bodies, each remains cut off from the world and isolated to deal with its fate.”

Press release from the Heide Museum of Modern Art website

Louise Bourgeois & Australian Artists

This exhibition looks at relationships, both real and imagined, between the art of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and that of ten Australian artists, in the rare context of a solo Bourgeois exhibition at Heide. Some pay direct homage to Bourgeois’ work or consider similar themes, while the connection of others registers more instinctually, on the level of a shared psychological intensity. Many of the works are rooted in memory and emotion, with a core that remains indecipherable – they do not illustrate or explain.

Forged regardless of fashion or fortune, Bourgeois’ oeuvre gave several artists in this exhibition the impetus to use personal subject matter as a creative source in the late 1980s and 1990s, an era when a cool, detached conceptualism dominated. Many share Bourgeois’ subjective focus and use the human body as a vehicle for self-expression, while for others her work’s formal precision and constant reinvention inspire. All respond to the exemplary fusion in Bourgeois’ art between inner compulsion and formal discipline, instinct and intelligence.

The Australian artists are Del Kathryn Barton, Pat Brassington, Janet Burchill, Carolyn Eskdale, Brent Harris, Joy Hester, Kate Just, Patricia Piccinini, Heather B. Swann.

Statement from the from the Heide Museum of Modern Art website

Janet Burchill (Australian, b. 1955)
Following the Blind Leading the Blind
1997
Synthetic polymer and enamel paint on wood
144.6 × 142.6 × 29.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1999

“The grid is a very peaceful thing, because nothing can go wrong … everything is complete. There is no room for anxiety … everything has a place. Everything is welcome.”

Louise Bourgeois

I had a weak-at-the-knees, tingle-all-over moment when I saw Louise Bourgeois’ work for the first time about fifteen years ago in Los Angeles. Yes I am a CRAZY fan. And, yes, it’s true I lay under her big spider in Tokyo and cried…

These are the releases I hope for in our vast world of art. Encounters when the artwork is somehow so inexplicably intimate, so beyond, so seemingly effortless that there can be no defence. In these moments there is an opening-up within the body, the mind, within all the senses … an experience of recognition, relief and awe that informs one’s deeper creative makeup.

Del Kathryn Barton

Del Kathryn Barton (Australian, b. 1972)
no other side
2012
(one part of nine)
Dupion silk and embroidery cotton
9 parts, each 42 × 45cm
In collaboration with Karen Barton
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

“I guess every artist has other practices that they aspire to. Louise Bourgeois’ practice – by which I mean the combination of the works, the way that they were made, the artist and the way that she conducted herself – is such a practice for me. The way that she worked for so long, and continued to develop her work in good times and bad, as well as the way that her works are so much of their times but at the same time not quite in sync with them inspires me. The fact that I hardly know the work she made prior to her fifties demonstrates the truth of the idea that art is a lifetime project that can continue to evolve as an artist matures. And then, of course, there is the work itself.”

Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965)
The Uprising
2008
Bronze

Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965)
The Uprising (detail)
2008
Bronze

“The massive aorta-like The Uprising, with its labyrinthine musculature, is a much stranger work. It establishes a bridge between the Vespa stags and the transgenic creatures, while being simultaneously amorphous and representational. Corporeal and mechanical, it suggests the plastic, porous, and uncertain world of the new nature that is at the core of the figurative works. For this reason it is physically sited at the boundary between natural history and art history…”

Juliana Engberg

Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965)
Nectar
2012
Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, refrigerator edition 1/6
83 × 48 × 51cm
Courtesy of the artist, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, and Haunch of Venison, London and New York

“Taking her cue from the vague boundaries of the biotech world, ‘where it is difficult to figure exactly where the good becomes tainted and the bad becomes justifiable’, Piccinini considers her own hybrid creations, however abject or grotesque, as lovable, associated with fecundity, growth and optimism. Like Bourgeois, she presents strange couplings of the animal and the human, that despite their de-formations always convey intimacy and warmth. Here the title Nectar suggests that there may be something nourishing in what might otherwise appear as a failed experiment.”

Text from educational pdf

Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
House guest #2
2007

Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
The Guardian
2009
Pigment print on paper edition 6/8
112 × 87.5cm
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Purchased with funds from the Robert Salzer Foundation 2009

Louise Bourgeois at Heide Museum

A behind-the-scenes look at how the works of Louise Bourgeois, including her famous Spider were installed at Heide Museum.

Heide Museum of Modern Art
7, Templestowe Road
Bulleen, Victoria 3105

Opening hours:
(Heide II and Heide III)
Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday, 10am – 5pm
Thursday – Saturday, 10am – 8pm

Heide Museum of Modern Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Carine Thévenau: Return To Huldra’s Wood’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 13th February – 9th March 2013

Carine Thévenau (Mauritian/Australian)
Ulda. The Arctic Fairy
2013
Archival Pigment Print
80 x 60cm
Edition of 10 + 2 AP

Sometimes I just want to surround myself with objects that are beautiful, that give me pleasure in the act of looking. I just want to look at a photograph that is beautiful, just because it is that. This exhibition is one such case. In the small, darkened gallery at Edmund Pearce in Melbourne these photographs radiate beauty. Despite a too regular hang and photographs of bouquets of flowers that don’t really move the work forward, the overall feeling of the ensemble is one of serenity and contained ecstasy. As was said of Catherine Opie’s work recently, “these lyrical visions evoke formal classicism, [are] beautifully elegant compositions that immerse and seduce the eye.”

The exhibition is rather let down by one of the worst sentences in a media release that I have not had the pleasure of reading in a long time: “Carine’s pictures sway from using over exposed lighting techniques, hinting at the sublime, to implementing a dimly lit chiaroscuro effect whereby an undeniable darkness is evident, all the while remaining beautiful.”

Who writes this stuff? The sentence makes no sense at all.

Carine’s pictures “sway” (?) … overexposure techniques hint at the sublime (!), a dimly lit chiaroscuro effect (what?), an undeniable darkness (!?) – and guess what, using light and dark lets the image “remain beautiful” = the massacre of the English language!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Carine Thévenau (Mauritian/Australian)
Deep Inside Lillomarka
2013
Archival Pigment Print
80 x 60cm
Edition of 10 + 2 AP

Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952)
Lucille, Dakota Sioux
1907

Carine Thévenau (Mauritian/Australian)
Tryst East of Morskogen
2013
Archival Pigment Print
80 x 60cm
Edition of 8 + 2 AP

Return To Huldra’s Wood is a visual exploration into Scandinavian Folklore. A Huldra is a mythical character who lives deep in the forests of Sweden and Finland. Also known as Pine tree Mary or Skogsfu (in Norway) this secret woodland dweller lures her prey into the darkness of night and underneath the heavy branches she is known to do unspeakable things. The Huldra appears in many fairy tales written by Peter Christen Asbjornsen. The origins of the tales stem from Christianity, whereby old stories of Eve forgetting to wash all her children prior to a visit from God forced her to hide the dirty ones. As a result God decreed these children to be hidden and forbidden from contact with the rest of mankind. These children are said to have been named Huldrer. The Huldra represents a deep fear of the wild, of sexuality and of otherness.

Huldra’s Wood

When early springtime’s night winds sing
around the steaming cattle byre,
and smoke curls high through wicker slats
above the dancing Great Hall fire;
Old women pull the children near,
with knowing looks well understood;
Tonight only a fool would stray
within the groves of Huldra’s Wood.

As daylight leaves the greening fields
and sunset paints the pale sky gold,
As far horizons fade to blue
and nightingales sing shrill and cold;
The adder in his hide curls safe
from those who seek his serpent’s blood,
he sleeps within the old stone cairn
that marks the edge of Huldra’s Wood.

Above us rides the scar-faced Moon
amongst the stars in wanton haste,
whilst in the trees the tawny owls
cry shuddering across the waste
that separates our steading from
the Elfhane Host in cap and hood;
they frolic now, unbidden, deep
within the groves of Huldra’s Wood.

~ Alan Hodgson

Recently a speaker at the International Design Conference, AGIdeas and previously nominated by industry leader, Capture Magazine, for the Emerging Editorial Photographer of the Year Award, Carine Thevenau’s photographic work has appeared in such publications as Rollingstone, iD Magazine, Vogue, Smith Journal and is a Senior Photographer at Frankie Magazine.

Carine’s pictures sway from using over exposed lighting techniques, hinting at the sublime, to implementing a dimly lit chiaroscuro effect whereby an undeniable darkness is evident, all the while remaining beautiful.”

Press release from the Edmund Pearce website

Carine Thévenau (Mauritian/Australian)
Skogsra (Forest Spirit)
2013
Archival Pigment Print
80 x 60cm
Edition of 10 + 2 AP

Carine Thévenau (Mauritian/Australian)
Huldra of The Norse
2013
Archival Pigment Print
80 x 60cm
Edition of 10 + 2 AP

Carine Thévenau (Mauritian/Australian)
Witness in Bymarka
2013
Archival Pigment Print
80 x 60cm
Edition of 10 + 2 AP

Carine Thévenau (Mauritian/Australian)
Pine Tree Mary
2013
Archival Pigment Print
100 x 75cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP

Edmund Pearce Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

Carine Thevenau website

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Exhibition: ‘South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Exhibition dates: 1st December 2012 – 5th March 2013

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
A student who said he was going to fetch his textbook is pulled in. To prove he was still in school he showed his fountain pen and ink-stained fingers. But that was not enough; in long pants he looked older than sixteen
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
8 11/16 x 12 5/8 in. (22 cm x 32cm)
Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

It is the work of Billy Monk that is most impressive in this posting. Photographed in the rowdy Cape Town nightclub The Catacombs in the 1960s, Monk’s photographs of the racially mixed clientele portray them in extraordinary intimacy in all their states of joy and sadness. While his protagonists take centre stage within his photographs there is a wonderful spatial openness to Monk’s 35mm flash images photographed with a slightly wide angle 35mm lens. Monk does not fill the pictorial frame; he allows his images to breathe. Witness (and that is what he did) the moment of stasis before kiss of The Catacombs, 30 September 1967 (below), the intensity of the man’s passionate embrace, gaze, the sublime distance between bottle at right and bottle top, the image replete with blank, contextless wall behind. There is passion and hilarity here coupled with a feeling of infinite sadness – the squashed faces of The Catacombs, 31 July 1967, the convivial happiness of the couple in The Catacombs, 5 February 1968 (he with his stained trouser leg) counterbalanced by the desolate looking man behind them and the mute expression on the trapped go-go dancers face in The Balalaika, December 1969 as the man reaches his hand through the bars towards her.

Observe the masterpiece that is The Catacombs, 21 November 1967 (below). The cheap Formica bench top and empty Coca-Cola bottle with straw, a half smoked cigarette pointing out of the photograph at bottom right. If the cigarette wasn’t there the image would fall away in that corner: it HAS to be there, and Monk’s eye knew it. The women, standing, singing? holding two bottles of liquor in her out thrust arms, her eyes and hair mimicking the patterns of the painted Medusa behind her. And the young man dressed in jacket and time, one arm outstretched and resting on the bench, the other resting curled up next to his mouth and cheek. It’s his look that gets you – she, declamatory; he, lost in melancholic reverie, with the troubles of the world on his shoulders totally oblivious to her performance. The emotional distance between the two, as the distance between his resting hand and the empty Coke bottle, is enormous, insurmountable. Such a profound and troubling image of a society in hedonistic denial. His look is the look of loneliness, anguish and despair.

These photographs that are the eye of Billy Monk, these slivers of possibility, should not be regarded as a “what if he had lived” sliver, but the silver possibility of what he did see when he was alive. They are a celebration of his informed eye and a recognition of his undoubted talent. I am moved by their pathos and humanity.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“We were insiders, all three of us: Ernest Cole, Billy Monk, and me. We each photographed from the inside what we most intimately knew.

Cole was born Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole in 1940, to a working-class Black family in a Black township outside the city of Pretoria. Growing into that society he came to know, with a depth of understanding that only belonging could bring, both its richness and the hardship and humiliation imposed by apartheid. As a boy he photographed people in the township for a shilling a time. By the age of eighteen he had begun to work as a photojournalist, and within a few years he was deeply committed to his essay on what it meant to be Black under apartheid. At age twenty-six, to escape the Security Police and to publish his seminal book, House of Bondage, he went into bitter and destructive exile. Cancer killed him in 1990. Apartheid destroyed him.

Billy Monk’s photographs have the frank and warm intimacy that comes to someone who was completely trusted by his subjects. They are of a tiny splinter of another way of being: a place in apartheid South Africa of neither Black nor White but of somewhere not quite in between. Not quite, because while Blacks would not have gained participatory entrance to the Catacombs nightclub, people “of colour” did, and mixed there freely with Whites. It was a question of bending the law – within limits. Here you were judged not by your conformity with the pathological rigidities of Calvinism gone mad, but by your immersion in the conviviality of brandy and Coke. We will never know what might have become of the eye of Billy Monk, for in 1982 he died at age forty-five in a brawl while on his way to the first exhibition of his work. He has left us what the photographer Paul Graham might describe as a sliver of possibility.

My series In Boksburg tells of what it meant to be White in a middle-class South African community during the years of apartheid. It was a place of quiet respectability such as might be found in innumerable towns around the world. Except that Blacks were not of it. They were the largest component of its population; they served it, traded with it, received charity from it, and were ruled, rewarded, and punished by its precepts. Some, on occasion, were its privileged guests. But all who went there did so by permit or invitation, never by right. White and Black: locked into a system of manic control and profound immorality. Simply to draw breath was to be complicit. Heroism or emigration seemed to offer the only escape.

That’s how it was and is no longer.”

David Goldblatt

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
After processing they wait at railroad station for transportation to mine. Identity tag on wrist shows shipment of labor to which man is assigned
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
8 11/16 x 12 5/8 in. (22 x 32cm)
Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Africans throng Johannesburg station platform during late afternoon rush
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
8 11/16 x 12 5/8 in. (22 x 32cm)
Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Every African must show his pass before being allowed to go about his business. Sometimes check broadens into search of a man’s person and belongings
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
8 11/16 x 12 5/8 in. (22 x 32cm)
Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Untitled [White Washroom]
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
12 5/8 x 8 11/16 in. (32 x 22cm)
Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Newspapers are her carpet, fruit crates her chairs and table
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
12 5/8 x 8 11/16 in. (32 x 22cm)
Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

From December 1, 2012, through March 5, 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk, featuring work by three photographers that illuminates a rich and diverse photographic tradition as well as a vital, difficult, and contested period in the history of South Africa. The exhibition continues the museum’s longstanding commitment to documentary photography, showcasing the greatest breadth of each artist’s work ever shown in San Francisco, and in the U.S. for Cole and Monk. Organised by Sandra S. Phillips, SFMOMA’s senior curator of photography, South Africa in Apartheid and After brings together more than 120 photographs.

“South Africa is proving to be a very fertile and active area for contemporary photography, to which David Goldblatt’s contributions and longstanding concerns have contributed significantly,” notes Phillips. “With this show we hope to show some of this rich and varied activity.”

The internationally recognised artist David Goldblatt (1930-2018) has created an immense and powerful body of work depicting his native South Africa for a half century. The exhibition features photographs from Goldblatt’s early project In Boksburg (1982), which portrays a suburban white community near Johannesburg shaped by what the artist calls “white dreams and white proprieties.” Losing its distinctiveness in the accelerated growth of development, Boksburg could almost be mistaken for American suburbia in Goldblatt’s pictures, made in 1979 and 1980. In them, the quaintness of small-town life in South Africa is startlingly set against the increasing entrenchment of racial inequality in the country under apartheid.

Offering multiple perspectives on South Africa during this period, the work of Ernest Cole and Billy Monk are presented in the exhibition at Goldblatt’s suggestion. Adding an important dimension to Goldblatt’s Boksburg project is the work of Cole (1940-1990), a black South African photographer who documented the other side of the racial divide until he was forced to leave his country in 1966. The following year, his project was published in the United States as the book, House of Bondage, and immediately banned in South Africa; this major critique of apartheid has hardly been seen in his own country. In 2006, Goldblatt received the Hasselblad Award and became aware of Cole’s original, uncropped prints. Goldblatt was instrumental in helping bring Cole’s work to international prominence, assisting in organising a retrospective tour of the work, and championing an accompanying book project, Ernest Cole Photographer (2010). Selected works from the publication are included in the SFMOMA exhibition, featuring pictures that are eloquent, tragic, and deeply humane without a trace of sensationalism. Billy Monk (1937-1982) was a gregarious self-taught photographer who worked as a bouncer in the rowdy Cape Town nightclub The Catacombs in the 1960s. His work, recovered and reprinted posthumously by South African photographer Jac de Villiers, exists as a raw and beautiful record of the port city’s racially mixed population. These three groups of pictures are complemented by a selection of Goldblatt’s post-apartheid photographs, including large colour triptychs of beautiful and sober yet hopeful records of an imperfect, still evolving democracy.

The work of all three photographers are also featured in the exhibition Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life at the International Center of Photography, New York (September 14, 2012 – January 6, 2013), and Goldblatt and Cole are included in Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s at Barbican Art Gallery, London (September 13, 2012 – January 13, 2013).

David Goldblatt

Born in Randfontein, South Africa, Goldblatt first started photographing his native country in 1948, the same year the National Party came to power and instituted the policy of apartheid. Since then, he has devoted himself to documenting the South African people, landscape, and cities. Goldblatt photographed exclusively in black and white until the late 1990s. Following the end of apartheid and South Africa’s democratic elections in 1994, he looked for new expressive possibilities for his work and turned to colour and digital photography. This transition only took place after developments in scanning and printing technology allowed Goldblatt to achieve the same sense of depth in his colour work as in his black and white photographs.

In 1989 Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg with “the object of teaching visual literacy and photographic skills to young people, with particular emphasis on those disadvantaged by apartheid,” he has said. In 1998 he was the first South African to be given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. That year, the retrospective David Goldblatt, Fifty-one Years began its international tour, traveling to New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels, Munich, and Johannesburg. He was also one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. In addition to numerous other solo and group exhibitions, Goldblatt was featured recently in solo shows at the New Museum (2009), the Jewish Museum (2010) in New York – which also traveled to the South African Jewish Museum – and the Victoria and Albert Museum (2011).

Ernest Cole

Cole left school at 16 as the Bantu education for black South Africans during apartheid prepared them only for menial jobs. Essentially self taught, Cole worked early on as a layout and darkroom assistant for Drum Magazine, a publication loosely inspired by Life magazine and directed toward the native African population. Cole was relatively mobile due to his racial reclassification as “coloured,” the designation for mixed race, that likely stemmed from his ability to speak Afrikaans, the language of Afrikaners. However, Cole was closely surveilled and had to photograph covertly, so he always worked at the risk of being arrested and jailed. He believed passionately in his mission to tell the world in photographs what it was like and what it meant to be black under apartheid, and identified intimately with his own people in photographs. With imaginative daring, courage, and compassion, he portrayed the full range of experience of black people as they negotiated their lives through apartheid.

In 1966, Cole decided to leave South Africa with a dream of making a book; House of Bondage was eventually published in the U.S. in 1967. The book, and Cole himself, were immediately banned in South Africa, and Cole passed away after more than 23 years of painful exile, never returning to his home country and leaving no known negatives and few prints of his monumental work. Tio fotografer, an association of Swedish photographers with whom Cole worked from 1970 to 1975 while living in Stockholm, received a collection of his prints, and these were later donated to the Hasselblad Foundation in Sweden.When David Goldblatt received the Hasselblad award in 2006, he viewed the works and then collaborated with the foundation to bring Cole’s work to light. Many of the prints were shown publicly for the first time in the traveling 2010 retrospective Ernest Cole Photographer, which offered new insights to the complex interaction between Cole’s unflinching revelations of apartheid at work and the power, yet subtlety and even elegance, of his photographic perspective. Ernest Cole Photographer has only been seen in South Africa and Sweden. Approximately one-third of Cole’s photographs on view in the SFMOMA exhibition have never been shown before.

Billy Monk

Using a Pentax camera with 35mm lens, Monk photographed the nightclub revellers of The Catacombs and sold the prints to his subjects. His close friendships with many of the people in the pictures allowed him to photograph them with extraordinary intimacy in all their states of joy and sadness. His pictures of nightlife seem carefree and far away from the scars and segregation of apartheid that fractured this society in the daylight.

In 1969, Monk stopped taking photographs at the club. A decade later his contact sheets and negatives were discovered in a studio by photographer Jac de Villiers, who recognised the significance of his work and arranged the first exhibition of Monk’s work in 1982 at the Market Gallery in Johannesburg. Monk could not attend the opening, and two weeks later, en route to seeing the exhibition, he was tragically shot dead in a fight. From 2010 to 2011, De Villiers revisited Monk’s contact sheets and curated an exhibition at the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town, including works that had never been shown before, accompanied by a publication.

Press release from the SFMOMA website

Billy Monk (South African, 1937-1982)
The Catacombs, 30 September 1967
1967, printed 2011
Gelatin silver print
10 1/16 x 14 15/16 in. (25.56 x 37.94cm)
Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase
© Estate of Billy Monk

Billy Monk (South African, 1937-1982)
The Catacombs, 31 July 1967
1967, printed 2011
Gelatin silver print; 11 x 16 in. (27.94 x 40.64cm)
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
© Estate of Billy Monk

Billy Monk (South African, 1937-1982)
The Catacombs, 5 February 1968
1968, printed 2011
Gelatin silver print
11 x 16 in. (27.94 x 40.64cm)
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
© Estate of Billy Monk

Billy Monk (South African, 1937-1982)
The Catacombs, 1968
1968, printed 2011
Gelatin silver print
11 x 16 in. (27.94 x 40.64cm)
Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase
© Estate of Billy Monk

Billy Monk (South African, 1937-1982)
The Balalaika, December 1969
1969, printed 2011
Gelatin silver print
16 x 11 in. (40.64 x 27.94cm)
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
© Estate of Billy Monk

Billy Monk (South African, 1937-1982)
The Catacombs, 21 November 1967
1967, printed 2011
Gelatin silver print
15 x 10 in. (38.1 x 25.4cm)
Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase
© Estate of Billy Monk

David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018)
At a meeting of Voortrekkers in the suburb of Witfield
1979-1980
Gelatin silver print
14 9/16 x 14 9/16 in. (37 x 37cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery, South Africa
© David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018)
Eyesight testing at the Vosloorus Eye Clinic of the Boksburg Lions Club
1980
Gelatin silver print
19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (50 x 50cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery, South Africa
© David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018)
Saturday afternoon in Sunward Park
1979
Gelatin silver print
6 7/8 x 6 7/8 in. (17.5 x 17.5cm)
Collection SFMOMA, purchase through a gift of Mark McCain and the Accessions Committee Fund
© David Goldblatt

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Opening hours:
Monday – Tuesday: 10am – 5pm
Wednesday: Closed
Thursday: 1 – 8pm
Fri – Sun: 10am – 5pm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art website

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Winner of the 2013 Montalto Sculpture Prize: ‘Abundance’ by Fredrick White

Exhibition dates: 17th February – 28th April 2013

Fredrick White (Australian)
Abundance
2013
Aluminium pipe
440 x 80 x 70cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Congratulations to Fredrick White on winning the 2013 Montalto Sculpture Prize. Well done!

Marcus

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Fredrick White (Australian)
Abundance (detail)
2013
Aluminium pipe
440 x 80 x 70cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Description of Abundance by the artist Fredrick White

Montalto Sculpture website

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Exhibition: ‘nude men: from 1800 to the present day’ at the Leopold Museum, Vienna

Exhibition dates: 19th October 2012 – 4th March 2013

Curators: Tobias G. Natter and Elisabeth Leopold

Warning: this posting contains art work of naked male bodies.

Martin Ferdinand Quadal (Moravian-Austrian, 1736-1811)
Nude Life Class at the Vienna Art Academy in the St.-Anna-Gebäude
1787
© Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

“When we stop and think about it, we all are naked underneath our clothes.”

(Heinrich Heine, Travel Pictures, 1826)

A great posting. I used to have a print of Querelle by Andy Warhol on my wall when I was at university in London aged 17 years old – that and We Two Boys Together Clinging by David Hockney. My favourite in this posting is the painting Seated Youth (morning) by Austrian expressionist painter Anton Kolig. Such vivacity, life and colour, perhaps a post-coital glow (was he straight, bisexual, gay? who cares, it is a magnificent painting).

There is very little information on Kolig on the web. Upon recommendation by Gustav Klimt and Carl Moll Kolig received a 1912 scholarship for a stay in Paris, where Kolig studied modern painting at the Louvre. He enlisted in the First World War in 1916 and survived, continuing to work in paint, tapestries and mosaic during the postwar years and the 1920s. He received two offers for professorships in Prague and Stuttgart, he opted for the Württemberg Academy in Stuttgart, where he trained a number of important painters. In addition, his work was also shown internationally at numerous exhibitions.

He was persecuted by the Nazis and his art destroyed because it was thought to be “degenerate” art. Kolig, who was essentially apolitical, remained until the fall of 1943 in Stuttgart, where he felt less and less well, however, and eventually returned to Nötsch. On 17 December 1944 Kolig was buried with his family in a bomb attack and seriously injured. Much of his work was destroyed there. He died in 1950.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx for the Leopold Museum, Vienna for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Joseph-Désiré Court (French, 1797-1865)
Death of Hippolytus
1825
© Musée Fabre de Montpellier Agglomération

François-Léon Benouville (French, 1821-1859)
Achills Zorn
1847
© Musée Fabre de Montpellier

Anonymous maker
Anonymous Youth of Magdalensberg
16th Century casting after Roman Original
© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Antiquities

Anonymous maker
Anonymous standing figure of the court official Snofrunefer
Egypt, Old Kingdom, late 5th Dynasty, around 2400 BC
© Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna with MVK and ÖTM, Egyptian and Near Eastern Collection

Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917)
The Age of Bronze
1875/76
© Kunsthaus Zurich

Anton Kolig (Austrian, 1886-1950)
Seated Youth (morning)
1919
© Leopold Museum, Wien, Inv. 406

Previous exhibitions on the theme of nudity have mostly been limited to female nudes. With the presentation “naked men” in the autumn of 2012 the Leopold Museum will be showing a long overdue exhibition on the diverse and changing depictions of naked men from 1800 to the present.

Thanks to loans from all over Europe, the exhibition “naked men” will offer an unprecedented overview of the depiction of male nudes. Starting with the period of Enlightenment in the 18th century, the presentation will focus mainly on the time around 1800, on tendencies of Salon Art, as well as on art around 1900 and after 1945. At the same time, the exhibition will also feature important reference works from ancient Egypt, examples of Greek vase painting and works from the Renaissance. Spanning two centuries, the presentation will show different artistic approaches to the subject, competing ideas of the ideal male model as well as changes in the concept of beauty, body image and values.

The exhibition, curated by Tobias G. Natter and Elisabeth Leopold, traces this theme over a long period and draws a continuous arc from the late 18th century to the present. Altogether, the showing brings together around 300 individual works by nearly 100 female and male artists from Europe and the USA. The objective of the two curators Tobias G. Natter and Elisabeth Leopold was “to clearly show the differing artistic approaches, competing models of masculinity, the transformation of ideas about the body, beauty and values, the political dimension of the body, and last but not least the breaking of conventions.”

“Over the past few years, portrayals of nude males have achieved a hitherto unseen public presence,” says Elisabeth Leopold. To which Tobias G. Natter adds, “At the same time, this exhibition is our way of reacting to the fact that categories which had previously seemed established, such as ‘masculinity’, ‘body’ and ‘nakedness’, have today become unstable for a broad swath of society.”

Diversity and abundance: showing for what “nude men” could stand

Elisabeth Leopold remarks that, “In the run-up to our project, we were very surprised to note that some commentators expected a ‘delicate’ exhibition. But in fact, we had no intention of treating the theme in such a way – with reserve, with tact, or in any other way delicately. And we did not understand this topic to be at all delicate in terms of an exhibition on art history somehow requiring a degree of discretion.” A project like nude men would be entirely unthinkable without the experiences and impulses of feminist art as well as cultural history, cultural studies and gender studies. With the exhibition nude men, the Leopold Museum seeks to react to the circumstance that societal categories commonly thought to be firmly established – such as “masculinity”, “body” and “nakedness” – are currently undergoing major changes.

By seizing on these developments, we understand the museum to be an institution which is relevant to today’s society – that is to say, a place for both the present and the future. Tobias G. Natter: “Our objective is to show the diversity and transformation of the portrayal of nude men in light of clearly defined thematic focuses. With fresh curiosity, without traditional scholarly prejudices, and with fascination for an inexhaustibly rich field, we use this exhibition to draw an arc spanning over 200 years which, not least, make a theme of the long shadow cast by the fig leaf.”

The exhibition

The exhibition traces its theme from the late 18th century to the present day. It has three key historical themes: the classical era and the Age of Enlightenment around 1800, classical modernism around 1900, and post-1945 art. These three themes are introduced by a prologue.

Prologue

The exhibition’s three focuses are preceded by a prologue. Using five outstanding sculptures from European art history, the prologue illuminates this theme’s long tradition. It runs from the “oldest nude in town” – a larger-than-life freestanding figure from ancient Egypt – and the statue known as the Jüngling vom Magdalensberg to Auguste Rodin and Fritz Wotruba, and on to a display window mannequin which Heimo Zobernig reworked to create a nude self-portrait.

Tobias G. Natter: “The curatorial intention behind prologue was to have the audience stroll through nearly five millennia of Western sculptural art in just a few steps. This is meant both to communicate both the long tradition of such images and to highlight the degree to which nude men were taken for granted to be the foundation of our art. These five thousand years form the exhibition’s outer referential frame. Strictly speaking, the showing begins in earnest with the Age of Enlightenment and the period around 1800.”

Theme 1: Classicism and the Power of Reason

In the 18th century and beginning in France, the emancipation of the bourgeois class and the swan song of the Ancien Régime occasioned a renegotiation of concepts of masculinity with both societal and aesthetic implications. The naked male hero was defined anew as a cultural pattern. It became the embodiment of the new ideals.

Theme 2: Classical Modernism

A new and independent pictorial world arose in the late 19th century with the casual depiction of naked men bathing in natural, outdoor settings. The various ways in which artists dealt with this topic can be viewed together as a particularly sensitive gauge of societal moods. In the exhibition, the genre is represented with prominent examples by Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Max Liebermann, Ernst Ludwig

Kirchner and others. Classical modernism’s quest for a new artistic foundation also had its impact on the topics of nakedness and masculinity. But what happened when the painter’s gaze wandered on from the naked other to the naked self? A principle witness with regard to this phenomenon in turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna is Egon Schiele. With his taboo-breaking self-reflections, he radicalised artists’ self-understanding in a way that nobody had before him. Elisabeth Leopold: “The shift of the painter’s gaze from the naked opposite to the exposed self gave rise to the nude self-portrait – a shining beacon of modernism.”

Theme 3: Post-1945 Developments

In light of the abundance of interesting works from which to choose, the exhibition’s third theme comprises three specific focuses. Common to all three is the way in which the political potential of the naked body is explored. The first of these focuses concentrates on the battle fought by women for legal and social equality during the 20th century.

Outstanding examples of the intense way in which feminist artists have dealt with their own bodies as foils for the projection of gender roles can be found in the output of Maria Lassnig and Louise Bourgeois, whose works are included in the exhibition alongside others by younger woman artists. It was pioneers such as Lassnig and Bourgeois who set in motion the process which, today, underlies feminist art’s steadily increasing presence in terms of interpretation, resources, norms, power, and participation in the art business. The second area introduces artistic works that interlock nude self-portraits and the culture of protest, which bears great similarities to feminist criticism – the naked self between normativity and revolt.

The one issue is the nude self-portrait as a field for experimentation and a phenomenon which questions artistic and societal identities. The other issue has to do with substantive contributions to the gender debate, as well as with artists who take the crisis of obsolete male images as an opportunity to put forth self-defined identities. The third focus, finally, lies in the shift in roles in which the man goes from being the subject to being the object, in fact becoming an erotically charged object – perhaps one of the most fundamental shifts in terms of the forms via which nude men have been portrayed from 1800 to the present. Gay emancipation, in particular, served to radically cast doubt upon normative concepts of masculinity, which it opposed with its own alternative models. In this exhibition, these are represented above all in paintings that feature intimate closeness and male couples.

As the opening of this exhibition neared, a frequently-asked question was that of why the project is being undertaken. Tobias G. Natter’s response: “There are many reasons. But most importantly: because it is overdue.”

Press release from the Leopold Museum website

Three out of five characters from the Prologue “naked men”

Anonymous maker
Freestanding figure of the court official Snofrunefer
c. 2400 B.C.
© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917)
The Age of Bronze
1875/1876
© Kunsthaus Zürich

Heimo Zobernig (Austrian, b. 1958)
Untitled
2011
© VBK, Vienna, 2012

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906)
Seven Bathers
c. 1900
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944)
Bathing Men
1915
Munch Museum, Oslo
© The Munch Museum/The Munch Ellingsen Group/VBK, Vienna 2012

Wilhelm von Gloeden (German, 1856-1931)
Flute Concert
1905
Verlag Adolph Engel, private collection

Richard Gerstl (Austrian, 1883-1908)
Nude Self-portrait with Palette
1908
© Leopold Museum, Wien

Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890-1918)
‘”Prediger” (Selbstakt mit blaugrünem Hemd)’ [“Preacher” (Nude with teal shirt)]
1913
© Leopold Museum, Wien, Inv. 2365

Bruce Nauman (American, b. 1941)
Untitled (Five Marching Men)
1985
© Friedrich Christian Flick Collection / VBK Wien 2012

Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, British born Italy, b. 1943 and George Passmore, British, b. 1942)
Spit Law
1997
© Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris / Salzburg

Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen Danish, b. 1961 and Ingar Dragset Norwegian, b. 1969)
Shepherd Boy (Tank Top)
2009
Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner
© Courtesy Galleri Nocolai Wallner / VBK Wien 2012

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
nudes vg 02
2000
Ed. 3/5
© Private collection Cofalka, Austria/with the kind support of agpro – austrian gay professionals
© VBK, Wien 2012

Jean Cocteau (French, 1889-1963)
Male Couple
Illustration for Jean Genet’s ‘Querelle de Brest’
1947
© Private collection © VBK, Wien 2012

Louise Bourgeois (French, 1911-2010)
Fillette (Sweeter Version)
1968, cast 1999
© Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland © VBK, Wien 2012

Pierre & Gilles (Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard)
Vive la France [Long live France]
2006
© Private collection, Courtesy Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Querelle
c. 1982
© Privatsammlung/ VBK, Wien 2012

Leopold Museum
Museums Quartier, Museumsplatz 1
1070 Vienna, Austria

Opening hours:
Daily except Tuesday: 10am – 6pm

Leopolod Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour’ at Somerset House, London

Exhibition dates: 8th November 2012 – 27th January 2013

Curator: William E. Ewing

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Harlem, New York, 1947
1947
Gelatin silver print / printed 1970s
Image: 29.1 x 19.6cm
Paper: 30.4 x 25.4cm
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, Courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

They may be channelling the master, but none does it like Cartier-Bresson. There is a spareness and spatial intensity to Cartier-Bresson’s work that is absolutely his own. Look at the photograph directly above (Harlem, New York, 1947). A railing leads the eye in bottom right, echoed by the bottom jamb of the window. The opening is set for the old man to perform complete with curtains, talking stage right. The jamb zig zags above a trilby-wearing, cigarette-smoking man’s head leading to a wire mesh fence that takes the eye out of the frame on the left. The two men, lower than the old man in the framed window, look in a completely different direction to him.

Counterpoise. The image pulls in two directions. Above their head a series of cantilevered staircases ascends to the heavens, thought ascending. A masterpiece.

So many of the other photographers in this posting crowd the plane with people looking in all directions, closed off foregrounds or tensionless images. Images that are too complex or too simple. There is an opposition to Cartier-Bresson’s images that is difficult for the viewer to resolve neatly, yet they appear as if in perfect balance. Look at Brooklyn, New York, 1947 towards the bottom of the posting. Nothing in this still life is out of place (from the light to the multiple, overlapping shadows and the out of focus elements of the composition) yet there is humbling agony about the whole thing. It is almost is if he is saying, “cop a load of this, this is what I can see.” And what a fabulous eye it is.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Somerset House for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Ernst Haas (Austrian-American, 1921-1986)
New Orleans, USA,
1960
Chromogenic archival print
50 x 35cm
© Ernst Haas Estate, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Snow
1960
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Cat next to red car, New York,
1973
Type C prints
18 x 12 inches
© Estate of Helen Levitt

Alex Webb (American, b. 1952)
Tehuantepec, Mexico
1985
71 x 47cm
Digital Type C print
© Alex Webb

“I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner.”

~ Alex Webb

Jeff Mermelstein (American, b. 1957)
Untitled (Package Pile Up, New York City)
1995
Chromogenic print
© Jeff Mermelstein
Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art, New York

Carolyn Drake (American, b. 1971)
Birthday party at Olympia, a gated community, Wellington, Florida
2005
Digital Pigment Print
© Carolyn Drake / Magnum Photos

Carolyn Drake (American, b. 1971)
Hotel room. Zhetisay, Kazakhstan. Carolyn Drake
2009
Digital Pigment Print
© Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos

Andy Freeberg (American, b. 1958)
Sean Kelly, Art Basel Miami
2010
From the series Art Fare
Artist: Kehinde Wiley
63 x 43cm
Pigment ink print
© Andy Freeberg
Courtesy Kopeikin Gallery

Carolyn Drake (American, b. 1971)
New Kashgar. Kashgar, China
2011
30.48 x 20.32cm
Digital Light Jet print
© Carolyn Drake 2012

Positive View Foundation announces its inaugural exhibition Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour, to be held at Somerset House, 8 November 2012 – 27 January 2013. Curated by William A. Ewing, the exhibition will feature 10 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs never before exhibited in the UK alongside over 75 works by 15 international contemporary photographers, including: Karl Baden (US), Carolyn Drake (US), Melanie Einzig (US), Andy Freeberg (US), Harry Gruyaert (Belgium), Ernst Haas (Austrian), Fred Herzog (Canadian), Saul Leiter (US), Helen Levitt (US), Jeff Mermelstein (US), Joel Meyerowitz (US), Trent Parke (Australian), Boris Savelev (Ukranian), Robert Walker (Canadian), and Alex Webb (US).

The extensive showcase will illustrate how photographers working in Europe and North America adopted and adapted the master’s ethos famously known as ‘the decisive moment’ to their work in colour. Though they often departed from the concept in significant ways, something of that challenge remained: how to seize something that happens and capture it in the very moment that it takes place.

It is well-known that Cartier-Bresson was disparaging towards colour photography, which in the 1950s was in its early years of development, and his reasoning was based both on the technical and aesthetic limitations of the medium at the time. Curator William E. Ewing has conceived the exhibition in terms of, as he puts it, ‘challenge and response’. “This exhibition will show how Henri Cartier-Bresson, in spite of his skeptical attitude regarding the artistic value of colour photography, nevertheless exerted a powerful influence over photographers who took up the new medium and who were determined to put a personal stamp on it. In effect, his criticisms of colour spurred on a new generation, determined to overcome the obstacles and prove him wrong. A Question of Colour simultaneously pays homage to a master who felt that black and white photography was the ideal medium, and could not be bettered, and to a group of photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries who chose the path of colour and made, and continue to make, great strides.”

Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour will feature a selection of photographers whose commitment to expression in colour was – or is – wholehearted and highly sophisticated, and which measured up to Cartier-Bresson’s essential requirement that content and form were in perfect balance. Some of these artists were Cartier-Bresson’s contemporaries, like Helen Levitt, or even, as with Ernst Haas, his friends; others, such as Fred Herzog in Vancouver, knew the artist’s seminal work across vast distances; others were junior colleagues, such as Harry Gruyaert, who found himself debating colour ferociously with the master; and others still, like Andy Freeberg or Carolyn Drake, never knew the man first-hand, but were deeply influenced by his example.

Press release from Somerset House website

Fred Herzog (Canadian born Germany, 1930-2019)
Man with Bandage, Vancouver, Canada
1968

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Madison Avenue, New York City
1975
Archival Pigment Print
© Joel Meyerowitz 2012
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Camel Coats, Fifth Avenue, New York
1975
Archival Pigment Print
© Joel Meyerowitz 2012
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, US
1981

Fred Herzog (Canadian born Germany, 1930-2019)
Crossing Powell 2
1984
Ink jet print

Harry Gruyaert (Belgian, b. 1941)
Morocco, town of Duarzazte
1986
© 2015 Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos

Harry Gruyaert (Belgian, b. 1941)
Province of Brabant, Flanders region, Belgium
1988
© 2015 Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos

Harry Gruyaert is known for his extraordinary photographic work with color. Born in Antwerp in 1941, he originally dreamed of becoming a film director. In the late 1970s, Pop art and a trip to Morocco inspired him to become one of the first photographers in Europe to devote his work entirely to color photography. Gruyaert’s cinematographic background instilled in him an aesthetic conception of photography. Rather than telling stories or documenting the world through his lens, he searches for beauty in everyday elements. His images are simply snapshots of magical moments in which different visual aspects, primarily color, form, light and movement, spontaneously come together in front of his lens.

Text from the Magnum website

Jeff Mermelstein (American, b. 1957)
Unitled ($10 bill in mouth) New York City, 1992
1992
Chromogenic print
20 x 16 in.
© Jeff Mermelstein
Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art, New York

“My process is linked to everyday life. Only on rare occasions do I go out specifically to ‘shoot’. My best photographs were taken going to or from work, or some other destination. Sometimes a picture appears that helps me sum up a strange mood or thought that I’ve struggled with for weeks. Other times my work is more documentary in nature.

Photographing in public keeps me awake and aware, always looking around, in awe at what we humans are up to. In a time when staged narratives and rendered images are popular, I am excited by the fact that life itself offers situations far more strange and beautiful than anything I could set up.”

~ Jeff Mermelstein

Jeff Mermelstein (American, b. 1957)
Run #9, New York
1999-2000
© Jeff Mermelstein

Trent Parke (Australian, b. 1971)
Man Vomiting, Gerald #1
2006
Type C print
© Trent Parke
Courtesy Magnum Photos

Karl Baden (American, b. 1952)
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
2009
Archival Inkjet
40.64 x 54.19cm
© Karl Baden

Boris Savelev (Russian, b. 1947)
Cafe Ion, Moscow
2009
© Boris Savelev

Andy Freeberg (American, b. 1958)
Nina Menocal, Armory Show
2011
From the series Art Fare
Pigment ink print
© Andy Freeberg
Courtesy Kopeikin Gallery

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Brooklyn, New York, 1947
1947
Gelatin silver print / printed in 2007
Image: 19.8 x 29.8cm
Paper: 22.9 x 30.4cm
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, Courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Melanie Einzig (American, b. 1967)
September 11th, New York 2001
2001
21 x 33cm
Inkjet print
© Melanie Einzig 2012

Terrace Rooms & Courtyard Rooms, Somerset House
Strand, London, WC2R 1LA

Opening hours:
10am – 6pm daily

Somerset House website

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Exhibition: ‘Bob Mizer: ARTIFACTS’ at Invisible-Exports, New York / Research into photographs of men at the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana 1999

Exhibition dates: 14th December 2012 – 27th January 2013

** Warning this posting contains male nudity **

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Rick Gordon, rooftop studio, Los Angeles
1972
Vintage color transparency
Cibachrome print
10.5 x 10.5 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

There are some appealing but relatively tame photographs from one of the doyens of male physique photography from the 1950s-1970s in this posting. More interesting to me are the photographs that never get published or shown in a gallery. While visiting The Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana as part of my PhD research Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male in 2001 I made a list of all the physique photographers present in their collection, as well as annotated notes on the photographs of Baron von Gloeden, George Platt Lynes, male homosexual catalogue photographs, male homosexual photographs and male2male sex photographs. Unfortunately almost nothing of this amazing collection of photographs at The Kinsey has ever been published, mainly I suspect due to the prudish nature of American society.

The physique photographers include artists such as Russ Warner, Al Urban, Lon of New York (who began their careers in the late 1930’s), Bob Mizer (started Athletic Model Guild (AMG) in 1945 and later, on his own, Physique Pictorial), Charles Renslow (started Kris studio in 1954), Bruce of Los Angeles, Douglas: Detroit, Dick Falcon, Melan, Karl Eller and Physique Culture and Early Homosexual Magazines.

Bob Mizer set up AMG in 1945 to photograph male bodybuilders and it is now the oldest male model photography studio in the United States of America. All models in the photographs that I studied were well built, smooth, toned. Lots of outdoor shots! Models are usually quite young (18-22 approx.) Tiny waists and v shaped. For example Image No. 51820. 3 studio portraits of one smooth boy featuring twisted back, arms and torso to great effect. Total V shape. Lots of erotic wrestling photographs from AMG as well.

Although not showing nudes in publications such as Physique Pictorial, private photographs by Bob Mizer heavily feature nudity. Wide use made of projected backdrops – abstracts, leaves, mountains, ships, classical Roman ruins. 4″ x 5″ prints are much better than the 8″ x 10″ enlargements. The Annotations on back of both size images tell of the models jobs and sexual orientation and what they will or will not do sexually if known. It is interesting to note that these annotations are usually the only thing that places the physical bodies in a social context. The studio shots really have no context while the outdoor shots have slightly more context. The annotations helps define the social and sexual structures within which the models circulated.

What surprised me the most in The Kinsey Institute collection were the black and white and colour photographs of the beefcake models with erect penis and having full on male2male sex out in the open. These photographs are never seen, never published or exhibited but these prurient texts provide an important touchstone when trying to understand the more sexually and aesthetically passive work. It is a pity that the viewer cannot make an informed decision on the development of an artist’s oeuvre without im/morality raising its ugly head.

PLEASE SEE THE NOTES FROM MY RESEARCH AT THE KINSEY INSTITUTE BELOW IN THE POSTING.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Invisible Exports for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
John Benninghoff
1991
Vintage color transparency
Cibachrome print
7 x 10.5 inches
Edition of 5
Printed 2012

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Unknown, Los Angeles
1972
Vintage color transparency
Cibachrome print
10.5 x 10.5 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Production still from “Boy Factory”
1969
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
16 x 20 inches
Edition of 3
Printed in 2012

Most widely known as a photographer-filmmaker, independent publisher, and midcentury iconoclast, Bob Mizer (1922-1992) was an erotic auteur and a lyrical chronicler of the pre-Stonewall demimonde. In his meticulously staged idiosyncratic private work, Mizer revealed himself as a conscientious artist of intimacy and depth, a visionary stylist of the male-on-male gaze as it was refracted through a culture suffused with masculine iconography, which yet stymied and redirected the vectors of desire. The objects and photographs here show Mizer to be the progenitor of a new kind of devotional work that honours the kaleidoscopic typology of desire in the final stages of the underground era, while approaching it simultaneously as an improvised and mesmerising ethnography.

Mizer founded the Athletic Model Guild studio in 1945 when American censorship laws permitted women, but not men, to be photographed partially nude, so long as the result was “artistic” in nature. In 1947 he was wrongly accused of having sex with a minor and subsequently served a year-long prison sentence at a desert work camp in Saugus, California. But his career was catapulted into infamy in 1954 when he was convicted of the unlawful distribution of obscene material through the US mail. The material in question was a series of black and white photographs, taken by Mizer, of young bodybuilders wearing what were known as posing straps – a precursor to the G-string.

Upon his release from prison, he continued working undeterred, founding the groundbreaking magazine Physique Pictorial in 1951, which also debuted the work of artists such as Tom of Finland, Quaintance and many others. Models included future Andy Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro, actors Glenn Corbett, Alan Ladd, Susan Hayward, Victor Mature, and actor-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Throughout his long career he produced a dizzying array of intimate and idiosyncratic imagery, some flattened of explicit content but bathed nevertheless in an unmistakable erotic glow – tributes to the varieties of desire. Although Mizer’s studio was successful, his influence on artists ranging from David Hockney (who moved from England to California in part to seek out Mizer), Robert Mapplethorpe, Francis Bacon, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and many others is only now beginning to be more widely appreciated.

The works collected in Bob Mizer: ARTIFACTS include a rare selection of staged tableux, images of California subcultures and an intimate collection of objects from various private sessions – preserved by Mizer along with photographs, films, videos and an ever-expanding catalog of props which over time evolved into a haphazard private museum and a natural history of American desire.

Press release from the Invisible-Exports website

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Jim Carroll, Los Angeles
c. 1951
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Bill Holland, Los Angeles
c. 1951
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Beau Rouge, Los Angeles
c. 1954
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Research at the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana

16/08/1999 – 19/08/1999

This research was undertaken as part of my Phd research Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male at RMIT University, Melbourne.

~ Male homosexual catalogue photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute
~ George Platt Lynes photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute
~ M2M sex photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute
~ Notes on physique culture photographs and magazines from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute
~ Baron von Gloeden photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

Male homosexual catalogue photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

Image No. 543-280. Frontier Club, San Diego, California.
Mr. America – Plus Frontier #11. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Image No. 543-281. Frontier Club, San Diego, California.
Mr. America – Plus Frontier #5. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Proof sheet photographs cut up and taped down onto card and the rephotographed. #11 features a solo young man, naked except boots and hat, posing with whip. #5 features natural boys in shorts, shirts, wrestling, one punching the other’s stomach, holding each other just wearing underwear. Really cute, natural bodies and photographs. Some posing by photographer. Lighting obviously just by table lamps or lights, very amateur, but all the more intriguing and interesting for that.

Image No. 2667-9. Anonymous. Nd Acquired 1951

Image No. 2669 is a duplicate of No. 2667. 8″ x 10″ sheet of proofs 6 side by 6 high, each proof oblong in shape. Originally folded in four and now flattened out.

2 men, possibly 3 (hard to tell from small proofs), in the country by a river/pond, diving, fishing, posing, lifting weights, rocks, rowing boats together, archery, playing tennis, wrestling, running. Sunbaking side by side, one back down, the other stomach down on a rock by the river, great bodies – some of the most beautiful physique photographs, if not THE best in the whole collection. Need to have negatives made and printed! 2 men have great bodies, smooth, built, and great poses and rapport with each other. Strong sunlight. They have painted on posing pouches, so originally they must have been nude photographs. American. Social setting and context is interesting – theirs or a friends country property? (tennis courts, lake, etc., …) enabled the privacy needed to photograph them like this, so from a moneyed social class.

Image No. 2864-5. Anonymous. Nd 1950s? Chicago Police Dept., Acquired 05/1961

Image No. 2864. 12 models on a 3″ wide x 4″ high page.
Image No. 2865. 4 models on a 2″ wide x 4″ high page.

Rare physique photographs of nude men with erections. Some are shot using double flash or lights in a house (skirting board visible). A couple on an unmade bed and others in a studio setting with nothing behind. Most models are smiling! Same photographer in both proof sheets as curtain behind bed features in both sheets. Also numbered sequentially 1-12 for first sheet, 13-16 for second sheet.

George Platt Lynes photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

It is interesting to note that most of the photographs list the names of the models used but I am unable to print them here due to an agreement between GPL and Dr. Kinsey as to their secrecy. Also most of the photographs have annotations in code on the back of them giving details of age, sexual proclivities of models and what they are prepared to do and where they were found. This information gives a vital social context to GPL’s nude photographs of men and positions them within the moral and ethical framework of the era in which they were made. I hope that one day this information, along with the names of the models, can be made available to the public to give them a greater insight into the development of GPL’s personal aesthetic as well as the development of the visible erotic desire of the male body by and for other men during the 1940s-1950s.

Untitled Nude. 1944

Photograph of a well built older (about 25?) nude man reclining on a bench with a high back. Lit by one spot on body forming heavy shadows with the backdrop lit to form outline of body against it. Head is tilted back so face not visible, left arm flung out. man is smooth, toned and quite hunky. Hairy legs with one knee in air. This is a very passive pose and the genitalia are hidden in deep shadow as though afraid to be revealed. Despair/sex/anonymity?

See Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993, Plate 16.

Some earlier nudes especially portrait of Reginald Beane, 1938, have a very Man Ray quality too them. See Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993, Plate 47.

Untitled Nude. 1953

Black man lying on a white mattress in a horizontal position, the top of mattress showing creases in the sheet covering it. Photographed from slightly higher than the prone body, horizontal print. This photograph is an exercise in tonal scale and lighting / textures. Beautiful light on body. The image is divided into different planes and spaces.

See Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993, Plate 57.

Male Nude Hanging. 1940

Close up of fuller length photograph of 1940 Crucifixion showing agony on face, shaved armpits(!) and pubes, legs, ropes cutting into wrists. Beautiful cool brown / grey tonality to print. Lighting is from two sides as can be seen by the shadows formed on the body and the backdrop. Quite a feminine image I feel, with the heavy eyebrows, very smooth ephebe body and the lean of the torso. Print is more tonal than the reproduction in the book.

See Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993, Plate 75.

Untitled Nude. 1955

Tanned older (25?) nude man with hanging big cut dick standing in front of graffiti wall. Head back and eyes closed, not engaging with the camera. Tan line of shorts very visible. Beautiful smooth body, and lovely skin tones in print.

Untitled Nude. 1952

This photograph has much more life than the reproduction in the book. Every hair on his chest GLOWS. The grey of the print is more intense and the print darker overall. The arm of the left hand side of the print is not so blown out and the hands have more of a feeling of suspension to them.

See Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993, Plate 41.

Male Nude. 1951

Paper negative? Smooth, young man lying on his back, breathing in, thin waist, arm behind head, looking straight into camera. Backdrop lit by two spots to outline body. Horizontal print with lots of negative space above body. Those eyes really get you and the tufts of pubic hair really stand out in the original photograph. Outline shape is amazing and the reproduction does not do it justice. Real presence. One of the most moving prints yet. It is a privilege to see it!

See Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993, Plate 72.

Untitled Nude. 1954

Young man on left hand side of photograph wearing necklace, ring on right hand, tattoo of rose on right forearm, rocker haircut, looking down and away from camera. Darker figure. Another smooth, youthful male form behind opaque screen has hand reaching for first figure, touching him with left hand. Lighter figure with tattoo on left hand bicep. Print is mid to light grey in its tonality. Very homoerotic.

Untitled Nude. 1952

Beautiful photograph of a nude young male sitting on a work bench table in a derelict building, 2 windows behind him to either side. His body is very smooth and he has a cut dick. His arms are out behind him on table to support his body which is leaning back. One leg is hanging over edge of table whilst the front leg is raised with knee in the air with the foot resting on the edge of the work bench. The background is lit from the left and the figure is lit from behind and above – great lighting.

Strong use of chiaroscuro and opposite way lighting in later photographs. There are several photographs of men in unmade beds, genitalia showing or face down showing butts off.

Untitled Nude. 1946

One such photograph shows 2 boys lying in single unmade beds next too each other. The second young man is way out of focus in the background. These are not studio shots any of these. They are much more personal. In this photograph the erect, stiff, nodular end post of the bed is like a metaphor for an erect penis, the opposite side of flaccid one of the young man on the bed nearest the camera. The young man has his one hand on his stomach and the other behind his head, eyes closed, as though he is asleep. Flash or strong lights? Definitely flash.

Untitled Nude. 1953

Same backdrop but different pose from Plate 61 in Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993. Here one of the men has his hand under his chin, arm resting on folded knee, looking down at prone body which is face down beside him. Young man face down has cute butt with tan line. Beautiful tonal print, especially skin tones.

Image No. 141. Untitled Nude. 1942. Acquired GPL 1950

Beautifully toned photograph of a young man kneeling on a mattress with feet hanging over its edge. Backdrop is lit to give outline and form to shoulders / head and fade into darkness above. His balls hang down between his legs and you can see every hair on them. Young man has a cute butt. Photograph is very erotic, very suggestive of anal penetration, and very about form as well.

Image No. 144. Untitled Nude. 1953. Acquired GPL 07/1955

Strong image always quoted as an example of GPL’s more direct way of photographing the male nude in the last years of his life. Male is solid, imposing, lit from above, heavy set, powerful, massive. Eyes are almost totally in shadow. Later photos have more chiaroscuro possibly, more use of contrasting light (especially down lit or up lit figures) but are they more direct? Yes. Models look straight into camera.

See Plate 59 in Ellenzweig, Allen. The Homoerotic Photograph. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, p. 103.

Image No. 153. Untitled Nude. 1953. Acquired GPL 07/1955

Really strong image of older man sitting on edge of bench, cropped mid thigh and under mouth. Image shows hairy chest, arms, legs, cut dick and great definition of abdominals. Tan line visible, skin tones in print are just above mid grey. Really good shadows on stomach, under pecs. Lit from above, softbox?

Image No. 186-194. Untitled Nudes. 1951. Acquired GPL 09/1954

Whole series of studio shots of male butt and arsehole in different positions. Quite explicit. Some close-up, others full body shots with legs in the air. Not his best work but interesting for its era. Very sexually anal or anally sexual! As in GPL’s work, very about form as well. In one photograph a guy spreads his cheeks while bending over from the waist, in another photograph he spreads his cheeks while standing slightly bent forward.

These are the most explicit of GPL’s images in the collection that I saw, though perhaps not the most successful or interesting photographically. 8″ x 10″ contact print.

See Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993, Plate 78 for an image from this series.

It is interesting to note that George Platt Lynes photographed his own erect penis as early as 1929, although this photograph is not present in The Kinsey Institute Collection and belongs to The Collection of Anatole Pohorilenko (See Crump, James. “Iconography of Desire: George Platt Lynes and Gay Male Visual Culture in Postwar New York,” in Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993, p.151, Footnote 19).

I also did not see the photograph titled “Erection, c. 1952,” (See Figure 29 on page 255 of the Hard copy of the Project notes; Crump, James. “Iconography of Desire: George Platt Lynes and Gay Male Visual Culture in Postwar New York,” in Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993, p.153), while at The Kinsey Institute which illustrates this article. This is the most sexually explicit photograph of GPL’s that I have ever seen but there is no accreditation listed for this photograph in a book which is subtitled ‘Photographs From The Kinsey Institute’. Is this photograph part of The Kinsey Collection and if it is, why didn’t I see it when I was researching there?

Image No. 457. Untitled Nude. 1955

Man on an unmade bed staring into camera. Tattoo of ‘Chuck’ on upper left arm bicep / shoulder. Older man with tan line and cute butt. Behind is a dark, dark background of a bedroom with a Venetian blind over a window, plant just visible in front of it, bookcase in back right of photo, down light from table lamp highlighting books on side table. Printed down background to make it darker? Man stares straight into camera with a penetrating gaze – presence, engagement, defiance! After sex? Before sex? with GPL? Photograph is blurred so slow shutter speed and tungsten lighting. The white highlights of sheet nearest camera are almost blown out by lighting. Very personal and beautiful photograph placing the male body in bedroom available for sex with another male.

See Plate 50 in Ellenzweig, Allen. The Homoerotic Photograph. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, p. 93.

Image No. 481. Untitled Nude. 1941. Acquired GPL 10/05/1950

Two young men stretched out, intertwined legs and arms, very sensual pose. Horizontal print. Lots of darker negative space above the bodies. Backdrop lit to highlight body outline – usual GPL trademark.

Image No. 482.Untitled Nude. 1941. Acquired GPL 10/05/1950

2 smooth young men, ephebes, about 19 years old, one cut off at the waist, leaning backwards and resting on others stomach. Both have blond hair and the young man at front has his right hand resting on his chest, eyes closed. Rear figure has his head turned away from the camera.

See Plate 52 in Ellenzweig, Allen. The Homoerotic Photograph. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, p. 95.

One of the best images in the collection. Very evangelical and homoerotic at the same time.

Image No. 483. ‘Charles ‘Tex’ Smutney, Charles ‘Buddy’ Stanley and Bradbury Ball’. 1941. Acquired GPL 10/05/1950

Studio shot of 3 smooth, nude young men in various positions on an unmade mattress bed sitting on GPL’s studio floor. All three young men are intertwined with a white sheet covering some of the bodies and faces. Dark chair in background has clothes lying on it. Lit from above left. Skin tones in print are just above mid grey. According to Leddick, David. Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes 1935-1955. New York: Universe Publishing, 1997, p. 21, the names of the models are as above and come from a series of 30 photographs of three boys undressing and lying on a bed together. Image No. 483 and 484 come from the same series as the reproduced photograph.

Image No. 484. ‘Charles ‘Tex’ Smutney, Charles ‘Buddy’ Stanley and Bradbury Ball’. 1941. Acquired GPL 10/05/1950

Different pose from above. No genitalia visible. No touching each other. Darker print than above. Beautiful tone of print.

M2M sex photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

Image No. 54106-7. M. Koch – O. Reith. ‘Der Act’. Acquired 1946

Early (1880-1910?) male nude photographs used as models for other artists. 2 older males together supporting the pediment of a Roman column, themselves taking the place of the column. In Image No. 54107 they have their arms around each other. Just natural male bodies, smooth, moustaches, uncut.

Image No. 54112. Anonymous photographer. Nd Acquired Chicago Police Dept. 05/1961

VERY RARE location shot of male nudes at baths(?) White nude male laying down, with black man doing handstand on his shins, back to the viewer. In the background is another nude black man, partially visible. Hanging up on pegs behind him are 5 singlets and 1 pair of underwear. Small photograph 2” wide by 4” high. Significant in that the photograph appears to be at the baths, shows interracial nudity and M/M contact.

One of the most significant photographs in the whole collection in my opinion. The sexologists of the era did not collect photographs of gay men and their bodies in social contexts, preferring instead to concentrate on photographs of M/M bodies engaged in sexual acts or physique photographs taken in the studio which generally do not have any context in relationship to the outside world. I know they did not have much of a choice in the material offered to them but surely there must have been photographs of gay men in the park, at the beach lying next too each other. In contemporary research we would embed such photographs within broader situational contexts and theoretical analyses.

Image No. 543-280. Frontier Club, San Diego, California.
Mr. America – Plus Frontier #11. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Image No. 543-281. Frontier Club, San Diego, California.
Mr. America – Plus Frontier #5. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Proof sheet photographs cut up and taped down onto card and the rephotographed. #11 features a solo young man, naked except boots and hat, posing with whip. #5 features natural boys in shorts, shirts, wrestling, one punching the other’s stomach, holding each other just wearing underwear. Really cute, natural bodies and photographs. Some posing by photographer. Lighting obviously just by table lamps or lights, very amateur, but all the more intriguing and interesting for that.

Image No. 55201. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Edina Minneapolis Police Dept., 01/1962

Small photograph 2″ wide x 3″ high. Interior. Male nude with hips thrust to one side, right leg splayed outwards, smooth, uncut, holding cane in left hand and top hat on his head at a rakish angle with right hand. Backdrop probably a Japanese fabric of bamboo canes. Very effeminate photograph of a young nude man in a bedroom possible (?) – very personal.

Image No. 55202. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Chicago Police Dept., 05/1961

Nude man in gaiters (1920s-1940s?), uncut, watch on left hand, drinking from small silver cup which hides mouth. Right hand holds half smoked cigarette. Body has no shape about it at all – really strange. In the background is a standard lamp, skirting board and striped wallpaper. Flash or lamp lit. Personal / private photograph.

Image No. 55203. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Chicago Police Dept., 05/1961

Young man, nude, uncut, flattened against interior wall covered with Arabic scene of horses, men and tigers above skirting board and wooden floor. Possibly 1930s. He has a tattoo on right forearm and the most amazing tan line from wearing shorts and singlet. His body has no shape to it at all, he has thin arms and is about 20-22 years old. Really unusual to see such a tan line, possibly from a bathing suit. With the background, I would say it positions this man socially in the upper classes and is interesting for its social contextualisation of the male body.

Image No. 55259. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Chicago 1940

Photograph one and a half inches square of male nude approx. 25-28 years old, smoking a cigarette, in slip on shoes, standing in front of what looks like army tents with trestle tables inside them. Body is natural, no real shape, smooth, man is smiling.

Image No. 55260. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Chicago Police Dept., 05/1961. 385971

Male nude with dark hair, three quarters side profile standing in lounge room. Very Diane Arbus. Table lamp with big shade and 2 tiered side table. Vinyl chair behind. Print on wall is nearly completely hidden, curtain to top right hand side with wood grain wall as well. Beautiful man, serene, calm, relaxed in his own body – ONE OF THE BEST PHOTOGRAPHS. Flash was used as heavy shadow of man outline falls on the wall behind. Body is smooth, hunky but not a bodybuilder. Cut dick. Hands by side. Nice face, smiling, looking at camera.

Really like this photograph as the man is comfortable in showing off his body in front of the camera yet not really posing or puffing himself up. He and his body are aware but relaxed and just so.

Image No. 55042. Anonymous. Nd Acquired O.W. 05/1954

Small photograph 2″ wide x 3″ high of young nude man sitting in car facing out of the open passenger side door with his trousers down below his knees. Left hand is resting on knee and the right hand is pinned against the seat by the weight of his own body. Uncut dick. Curly dark hair, eyes closed. Car has stick shift left hand drive (American) probably early 1950s. Body is smooth, boyish and young man is about 17-19 years old.

Just before or after sex? Intimacy? Photograph positions the body in an era and specific situation. Was he about to be sucked off? Was he being forced into pulling his pants down and being photographed? I don’t think so from the closed eyes and position of the body within the car. Lover is the photographer?

Image No. 55087. Anonymous. Nd Acquired McG. NYC 1946

Photograph approx. 7″ wide by 5″ high. Smooth young man, about 18, eyes closed, wavy hair, leaning back on one hand on sandy beach. Right hand leg rests on lower of 2 wooden steps. Right hand rests on knee of right leg. Cut dick. Smiling. Lake in background with 3 sailing boats on it, one with sail up and 2 people in it. Pair of shoes sits on second step.

Beautiful photograph – intimacy, again possibly a lover has taken this photo, and it has some context to it – shoreline and people sailing boats in the background, steps leading to holiday shack? Young man is beautiful, happy and at ease in his surroundings, his company and in his own body.

Image No. 54768-54779. Anonymous. Nd Figure Set 41. 1960s(?)

All photographs 3″ wide x 4″ high. 2 nude men, about 25-30 years old, in bedroom, mirror on front of wardrobe, flowers in vase on dressing table, bed, flower patterned wallpaper, window behind dressing table. One man is hairy and cut, the other smooth and uncut. They are using a measuring tape (in inches) to measure each others necks, arms, chests, waists and calves in this series of photographs. Both men are smiling at each other and at other people off camera and are totally unaffected by the cameras presence in one respect whilst posing for it in another. Flash used. In some of the photographs the smooth man has his hand on the others head (for balance?) No, probably lovers.

Great series of photographs, very natural using built bodies in a bedroom setting (their own?), measuring and showing off the results of their bodybuilding. The images are quite a laugh and they are obviously comfortable and having a good time too! Much less formal than the usual physique photograph and show an intimacy between the two models, plus a context for that intimacy, the bedroom.

Image No. 41601. Anonymous. 1935+-. Acquired 1948

Annotation: Swedish boy named Gustav(?) Young man in trousers, white shirt, hair parted down middle, holds a Gladstone bag. He is smiling. House in background with women pulling kid along which is blurred in middle distance. Slim, natural body especially arms.

Image No. 41602. Anonymous. 1935+-. Acquired 1948

Annotation: Took him to baths in Germany. Same young man as above now in a one piece bathing suit, hair wet, slicked back. SLIM, beautiful boy. He is sitting on sand. People lying on beach in background including another boy who is out of focus.

Image No. 41602. Anonymous. 1935+-. Acquired 1948

Annotation: Met in Navarin Masquerade, 1932. Same young man lying on towel on beach, Gladstone bag behind him. Very smooth young man, very Horst P. Horst model. Wearing a one piece bathing suit pulled down to his waist.

Good set of 3 photographs because it shows this young gay man in a variety of different settings posing for the photographer who he obviously knows from the annotations. Relaxed in his body and his surroundings. Perhaps they are on holiday together?

Image No. 41607/41610. Anonymous. c. 1946. San Francisco. Acquired 1958

4 guys in various uniforms, table in front of them filled with alcohol. Hands on each others crutches. Second photograph has friends with Navy coats on coming in door. Like stills from a film?

Image No. 41612. ‘Ray Baker’. c. 1946. Acquired 1950

Annotation: Donny 16-17 years. Bob 25 years. Donny seated, nude, socks on, reading a bit of paper. Bob, standing, hand on Donny’s inner thigh, bent over reading bit of paper as well. Donny is very slim ephebe, beautiful, smooth. Bob is older, hairy chest. Look like a married couple. Very good image.

Image No. 41614. Set of CK. 1950s. Acquired 1953

2 young men nude in shower, back shot with bums.

Image No. 41615. Set of CK. 1950s

Acquired 1953. Same young men, frontal shots in shower, very smooth, not built bodies.

Image No. 44224. Anonymous. 1928-1935. Acquired 1961

2 men sitting on a couch, naked , one with arms crossed looking into camera, smiling, tapestry on wall behind. Older men – 30s? Not young men which is unusual in these muscular mesomorphic photographs. They sit side by side, feet touching, knees touching. Everyday bodies. Good for its openness and body-images.

Image No. 44228. Anonymous. 1935+. Acquired 1947

Beautiful image. 2 slim young men, one seated, one standing by a pond.

Image No. 44263. Anonymous. 1940s?

Good photograph of 2 older men, hairy, naked, with their arms around each other. No erections. Smiling at camera.

Image No. 44426. Anonymous. n.d. 1950s?

2 young men in bathing trunks, standing, hugging each other on a beach, sea behind. Very good photograph.

Image No. 44526/44532. Anonymous. n.d. 1960s?

2 nude young men, one with arm around others shoulder with the guy on left looking warily at the camera. Natural bodies. Small 2″ square print. Image No. 44532 has them seated, laughing and is a much better photograph, less self conscious.

Notes on physique culture photographs and magazines from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

This section includes my research notes on the physique culture photographs held in the collection at the Kinsey Institute by the photographers listed below. It also includes a description of early homosexual magazines held by the Kinsey Institute.

1/ Bruce of Los Angeles: Project notes pages 343-345
2/ Detroit: Douglas: Project notes page 346
3/ Dick Falcon: Project notes pages 346-347
4/ Melan: Project notes page 347
5/ Bob Mizer/AMG: Project notes page 348
6/ Karl Eller: Project notes pages 348-349
7/ Anonymous: Project notes page 349
8/ Al Urban: Project notes page 350
9/ Bob Mizer/Physique Pictorial: Project notes pages 350-352
10/ Physique culture & early homosexual magazines: Project notes pages 353-354

1. Bruce of Los Angeles

Image No. 52001. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1942-1950. Acquired 1950

Grey backdrop. Young man, nude, about 19, with curly wavy blond hair leaning back with arms behind back. Smooth, toned body with tattoo of owl. Good dick sticking straight out with big fat erection. Young man is looking into camera. Diffused (soft box?) lighting. Doesn’t hide his face to hide his identity – quite open towards camera.

Image No. 52002. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1942-1950. Acquired 1950

Same young man/backdrop. Radio and curtain to right. Carpet floor. Interior of house so shoot not done in the studio. Dressed in sailors uniform with white cap on. Big hands, crossed and clasping each in front of him. Slight shadow on backdrop.

Image No. 52003. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1942-1950. Acquired 1950

Same young man/backdrop, nude, reading a newspaper while being sucked off by an older man dressed in white shirt with cufflinks, stripped trousers, black socks. Young man wears only socks and lace up shoes, watch on left arm, bracelet on right arm. Must be tungsten lighting because boys upper body is slightly blurred.

Image No. 52004. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1942-1950. Acquired 1950

Same young man, backdrop. Frontal pose, with hands behind back. Limp, cut dick. Staring straight into camera. Tattoo of hearts and word ‘mom’ visible of left bicep. Wearing black socks and shoes.

Unusual in that this series shows erections and sexual activity within a specific context and environment (the home) and between an older and younger man.

Also unusual is that these photographs are by a physique photographer, obviously not for publication but for private consumption. These are the only photographs that I found during research at The Kinsey Institute that were explicitly sexual in nature taken by a physique photographer.

Image No. 52005. Bruce of Los Angeles. Acquired 1966

Young man, dark hair, wearing white posing pouch leaning against tree, one arm behind him holding tree, other raised behind his head. Long grass around. Good arms, chest, stomach development. Must have been nearly midday as the shadow of his head is cast onto neck and upper chest. Eyes are closed and looking down, leaving body open for inspection / adoration without challenge of return gaze. Matt surface to print.

Image No. 52006. Bruce of Los Angeles. Acquired 1950

Annotation: Tom Matthews, 24 years old. Older man, dark hair. Big pecs, arms, tanned, hairy arms and chest, looking down and away from camera. Nude, limp cut dick. Sitting on a pedestal which is on a raffia mat. Metal chain wrapped around both wrists which are crossed. Lighting seems to be from 2 sources – high right and mid-left. Unusual in that this physique photograph shows an older, hairy man who is nude.

Image No. 52010. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1948

Numbered 7-12. 6 small (1.5” wide by 2” high) photographs of older (22-25?) muscleman posing outside near a stream with mountains in the background. Mounted on one piece of card. He wears white posing pouch and has BIG arms, chest, back. Real bodybuilder. Tattoo on right bicep.

Image No. 52011. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1948

Numbered 13-16. Same guy as above now posing with an older blond well built man in 3 photographs mounted on one piece of card. Both posing in bathing trunks using fencing swords as props! Both very big men, arms, chest, lats, etc. …

Image No. 52012. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1948

Numbered 17-20. Blond man from above series posing alone but still with fencing sword. Again 3 photographs mounted on one piece of card. Same location used for all 3 series. I think these photographs dispelled the myth that I had built up that all of Bruce of Los Angeles photography was studio based.

Image No. 52017-20. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1950

Annotation: Lewis Tan, 21 years old and Tom Matthews, 24 years old. Taken outdoors, full sunlight / shadow, mountains in background. Wrestling photographs using same raffia mat used in Image No. 52006. Quite erotic. Posed but usually only arms grasping each other. Not full body contact. Developed bodies, masculine, biceps straining, wearing posing pouches.

Image No. 52021-23. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1950?

Annotation: Bert Elliot (stud), 20 years old and Hector De Hoyos, 19 years old. Wrestling, beautiful action shots taken in sand dunes. Both are cute, have dark hair, smooth, tanned bodies and are wearing posing pouches. 8″ x 10″ prints. More full body to body contact in these photographs.

Image No. 52029. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1950

Annotation: Bulldog Football Team. All Married. 3 naked men with dark hair drying themselves after a shower. Bench with cigar a towel on foreground. Location shot using flash. Naturally hairy bigger bodies. Good photograph a la Diane Arbus mould.

Image No. 52062. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1950

Annotation: Dick Fowler 17 years old. Nude, slim body, dark hair with cut dick standing on a beach in front of a water fountain. Typical ephebe. Pylons in background. Strange photograph.

2. Douglas: Detroit

Image No. 52068. Douglas photographer. Detroit. 1946

Annotation: Guy, age 28, Persian descent, Ht 5’10”, Wt 165, skilled factory operator. Hair over whole chest and abdomen shaved off. Posing in nude with trees in background. Triumphant pose with clenched fists.

Interesting to note that body hair has been shaved off before photo shoot. Douglas seems to have photographed a lot of Polish models from the images with annotations that I have seen. His photographs seem to hark back to the more stylised 1930s era.

3. Dick Falcon

Image No. 52202. Models of Dick Falcon. Columbus, Ohio. NYC 1949

2 blond (one slightly darker than the other) haired young men with smooth bodies, washboard abs, limp cut dicks. One young man is standing in water, one sitting on a log. 8″ x 10″ print.

Image No. 52206. Models of Dick Falcon. Columbus, Ohio. NYC 1949

Same young men as in Image No. 52202. Looking away from camera, smooth, washboard abs, limp cut dicks standing in front of a fallen tree. Holding hands – not fully clasped hands but just resting there. Very sensitive photograph. They feel like lovers to me. Small photograph approx. 3″ wide x 4″ high. Very contrasty image. What definition the right hand boy has!! Long and lanky, slim and not big, really toned ephebe.

Image No. 52218. Models of Dick Falcon. Columbus, Ohio. NYC 1949

Same young men as in Image No. 52202-6. Lighter blond haired young man is balanced on one shoulder of other young man.

Image No. 52229. Models of Dick Falcon. Columbus, Ohio. NYC 1949

Same young men as in Image No. 52202-6. Lighter blond haired young man balanced on other man who is on all fours. Blond young man smiling with one arm raised in the air, looking at camera. Other boy looking away. Natural bodies, outdoors.

Strange set of photographs reminds me of later Diane Arbus photographs of nudist camp. Most of this photographers studio work harks back to a more stylised classical romantic tradition.

4. Melan

Image No. 52276. Melan. Numbered 298-306. NYC 1940

Proof sheet of young man at waterfall wearing black posing pouch. One of the best bodies I’ve ever seen photographs of. Tall, beautiful face, abs for days, chest not that big, good arms. Great poses outdoors, sensitive – like to see enlargements! One lying on a rock in a crucifix position. One where he is sitting on edge of rock with feet in water – WOW! Not massively big but what a body and the small size of the images makes them all the more intriguing.

Image No. 54643. Anonymous. Nd (possibly Melan). NYC 1946

5″ x 7″ print off proof sheet above that I said was the most beautiful body that I’d ever seen! Bad print, bottom half of print loosing its tonality, fogging out. Still a magnificent body, really long legs, amazing stomach. By a waterfall, arms outstretched, cut dick. My attribution.

5. Bob Mizer / Athletic Model Guild

Bob Mizer set up AMG in 1945 to photograph male bodybuilders and it is now the oldest male model photography studio in the United States of America. All models in the photographs that I studied were well built, smooth, toned. Lots of outdoor shots! Models are usually quite young (18-22 approx.) Tiny waists and v shaped. For example Image No. 51820. 3 studio portraits of one smooth boy featuring twisted back, arms and torso to great effect. Total v shape. Lots of erotic wrestling photographs from AMG as well.

6. Karl Eller

Image No. 51844. Karl Eller. 1949

Annotation: Ex-German. Unusual shot of male lying on stomach in sunlight/shadow with flowers in hair. Small photograph 5″ wide x 3″ high. Screen behind. Quite sensitive. More an art photograph that just a physique study?

Image No. 51846. Karl Eller. 1949

Same young man, standing, back/side on, head turned so looking into camera. Private reflection/moments. Maybe the photographers lover? Flowers in hair reminder of Fred Holland Day’s Dionysian photographs of ephebes.

Image No. 51848. Karl Eller. 1949

Same young man looking to left, fontal nude. 2 screens behind, one covered with flowered wallpaper (dark), the other with a leaf design wallpaper (light).

Image No. 51850. Karl Eller. 1949

Same young man in a reverie. Much more intimate than usual physique photography.

Image No. 51852. Karl Eller. 1949

Same young man in same positioning as Image No. 51848 but hand to mouth in a pensive mood.

Image No. 51853. Karl Eller. 1949

Same young man by an open window, nude, uncut dick, sunlight falling on chest, flowers in hair. Head turned away from sun so in shadow. Looking down and not into camera. Must be about 18-20 years old.

This series is using the romantic ideal of the young ephebe. It is much more intimate than the usual physique photography images and I wonder what it is doing in this section of the archive?

Present in The Kinsey Institute collection were a lot more nude photographs than were published. Really, most physique photographers used stock standard poses across the board. An exception to this rule was one of the most interesting series of photographs in the collection. It was taken by anonymous photographer and is described below.

7. Anonymous

Image No. 51901-20. Anonymous. n.d. Donated by RES. Acquired 1952-1953

Fantastic series of studio photographs of several different bodies – some are built bodies and some are not. Black background, beautiful skin tones.

Difference: Close up of different body parts. Butts, chests, arms, cut off heads, arms/legs, just sections … in anticipation of Robert Mapplethorpe’s deconstruction of the body in his nudes. Did he see some of these? Interesting thought! Very art shots of buttocks, torsos. Very tonal like Edward Weston’s nudes or Steiglitz in some of his nudes of Georgia O’Keefe. Image No. 51912 shows close up of veins in arms and hair in armpit. 8″ x 10″ prints.

WOW! for the whole series.

8. Al Urban

Much more studio set shots than outdoors. Use of black background or white background. Mainly nudes in The Kinsey Institute collection. There is an occasional black nude (Image No. 53145 from 1949). Most prints are 8″ x 10″ but some, like Image No. 53145, are 3″ x 7″ approx.

Image No. 53247-8. Al Urban. 04/01/1949

Two dark haired young men, 17 and 18, posing nude, both cut. Both have all over tans, arms on hips, looking at each other, laughing kinda – both bodies ‘ripped’ and toned like you wouldn’t believe! Arms, pecs, 8 pak washboard stomachs, skinny legs. Not big built like a muscular mesomorph or bodybuilder but young men, toned and cut. Amazing definition.

9. Bob Mizer / Physique Pictorial

Image No. 52505-9. Bob Mizer. 1954

Annotation: Used by DA to show intent to exh pvt RCT. Both 4″ x 5″ contacts and 8″ x 10″ enlargements. Series of 12 photographs confiscated by police and used in the 1954 court case by the District Attorney to show intent to exhibit partially erect. What happened in court case? Obviously the charge of exhibiting partially erect did not stick but Mizer lost then won on the obscenity of the male rump: “Not long after the first issues of Physique Pictorial began appearing on the newsstands, the magazine drew the published comment of the columnist Paul Coates of the now defunct L.A. Mirror. Vice officers raided the AMG studio and a case was taken to court which Mizer lost. But the decision of an Appellate Court overturned the earlier ruling and declared that “the male rump is not necessarily obscene.””

Siebernand, P. The Beginnings of Gay Cinema in Los Angeles: The Industry and The Audience. Ann Harbor, Michigan: Xerox Microfilms International, 1975, pp. 44-45.

Although not showing nudes in publications such as Physique Pictorial, private photographs by Bob Mizer heavily feature nudity. Wide use made of projected backdrops – abstracts, leaves, mountains, ships, classical Roman ruins. 4″ x 5″ prints are much better than 8″ x 10″ enlargements. Annotations on back of both size images tell of models jobs and sexual orientation and what they will or will not do sexually if known. Interesting in that these annotations are usually the only thing that places the physical bodies in a social context. Studio shots really have no context. Outdoor shots have slightly more. Commentary helps define social and sexual structures of models.

Image No. 52514. Bob Mizer. 1948

Annotation: Charles Brant, 20 years old. Tried suicide because wife refused to take him back. 4″ x 5″ contact. Tiled floor (dark), white drapes both sides. Dark fabric backdrop. Ephebe body, smooth, looking right and up and out of frame. Hands held palm upwards and curled fingers, elbows slightly out from sides. Like he’d just cut his arms, or pleading. Did the photographer pose this in an imitation of an attempted suicide? Strong shadow behind – tungsten or flash? Disturbing photograph.

Image No. 52740. Bob Mizer. 07/01/1952

Great photograph of 3 bodybuilders at a contest. Left hand man seated looking off camera. Middle figure seated looking at figure behind both of them walking out of frame carrying huge trophy. Figure behind smirking at his prize!! To the right and back of photograph is a throne which is really symbolic. 4″ x 5″ contact.

Beautiful. One of the few less posed and more fluid photographs in the collection, shot on location.

Image No. 523-8. Bob Mizer. 28/10/1951

Later photographs such as this have more overt homosexual overtones. Backdrop of projected Italian style waterfront (steps, canvas umbrellas). 2 smooth men, one older, one younger, posing pouches, one held down by the other wearing a sailors cap. Pinned by wrists. Younger man underneath has head turned towards camera, eyes closed in a submissive attitude, very passive. Man on top looking down at his face. Has power over him.

Image No. 523-9. Bob Mizer. 28/10/1951

Same men, looking at each other, smiling, sitting side by side. Young man underneath in last photo has his arm around his “buddy,” both wearing sailors hats. At least 2-3 or possibly 4 lighting sources in this shot because of the shadows at different angles – strong and fill lighting.

Image No. 523-10. Bob Mizer. 28/10/1951

Younger man underneath now face down being hog-tied with the other guy kneeling on his back but upright, showing off his body, over him whilst using rope to tie him up. Good tonality to print, probably 4″ x 5″ contact? Older guy much bigger than younger guy.

Image No. 523-139. Bob Mizer. 27/09/1951

Image of bodybuilder in white trunks looking down about too lift weights. Guy crouched down over weights on tiled floor. Huge negative black space around him.

Image No. 523-140. Bob Mizer. 28/10/1951

Muscular mesomorph. Big legs, arms, chest, smile, everything!! Posing in black trunks with arms in S shape, fists clenched. Big negative black space around him.

Like the idea of using this large expanse of negative space above models in my own work. Some of his nude and posing pouch models have dirty feet. Walking around outside or on dirty studio floors.

Image No. 523-431. Bob Mizer. 28/10/1951

Two young men with dark hair in posing pouches walking along a train track, one on each rail, holding hands/supporting each other across the tracks. Tanned, built, abs, lats, lovers? Mountains and hills in the background.

10. Physique Culture and Early Homosexual Magazines

A. Tomorrow’s Man. Irving Johnson Health, 1952.

B. Body Beautiful. Montreal: Weider Publishing, 1955.

C. Adonis. Montreal: Weider Publishing, 1955.

D. Your Physique. Vol. 1, No. 1. Montreal: Joe Weider, August, 1940.

The first issue is really crude. Headings are hand done and filled in like kids graffiti. Typed content is on A4 pages. Hand drawings also. Only the cover uses magazine paper and it has a photograph printed on it. Cost 15c. The second issue is in a smaller format but is printed all on magazine paper and properly printed. Much more professional. Later editions are back to A4 size.

E. Vim – for Vigorous Living. Vol. 1, No. 1. Chicago: Victory Printing and Publishing Co., May 1954.

Small magazine about 5″ wide x 7″ high.

F. The Greyhuff Review. 1st Edition. Minneapolis, Minn: Directory Services Inc., 1965.

Homosexual magazine. Pictures of lithe, nude young men, articles, cartoons, social comment. “What is Obscenity?” “Discovery: Can a Young Man in a Small Country Town Find Happiness in the Great Big City?” “Is Punishment the Answer? Is There an Effective Way to Eliminate Homosexuality?” “The Public is Watching.”

2nd Edition.
Quotation: “The beginning of wisdom is the realization that there are other points of view than my own. Understanding those points of view is the next step. The final test of wisdom is understanding why those points of view are held.”

G. Der Neue Ring. No.1. Hamburg/Amsterdam: Gerhard Presha, November 1957.

Homosexual magazine.

H. Butch. Issue No. 1. Minneapolis, Minn: DSI Sales, 1965.

Homosexual magazine. Small 5″ wide x 9″ high ‘art’ magazine including nude posing.

I. Der Kries. No.1. Zurich: No Publisher, January, 1952.

Homosexual magazine. Typical photographs of the era in this magazine. No frontal nudity even up to the later 1965 editions. Lithe young men, drawings and articles, including one on the Kinsey Report in the first edition (pp. 6-7).

Some of the photographs in Der Kries of young European men are similar to German naturist movement photographs (Oct, Nov, Dec 1949 – Cat. No. 52423, May, June 1949 – Cat. No. 52452 showing 5 nude boys outdoors throwing medicine ball in the air with their arms upraised).

Also some photographs are similar to von Gloeden’s Italian peasants (July 1952 – Cat. No. 52424, August 1960 – Cat. No. 52425, all 4 photographs in May, Oct 1956 – Cat. No. 52426). The 1949 photographs are possibly taken from earlier German magazines anyway? Discus, javelin, archer and shot putter images. Mainly nudes. George Platt Lynes contributed to the magazine under the pseudonym Roberto Rolf.

Baron von Gloeden photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

Young peasant boys, all with uncut dicks, pose (unpretentiously some of them) for the camera. Innocence lost to the Baron, to the camera? Most models ages range from 11-18 years old. There are a couple o f portraits of older men with moustaches in the collection. Usually his photographs are full length portraits against walls using steps, props (swords, tiger skins, fish, hats, togas, flowers, vases). He doesn’t rely on classical props as much as I thought he would – just the form of the body with perhaps a ribbon in the hair, for example. Some are incredibly beautiful photographs and have a distinct presence. Catalogue No.’s 79 and 80 are two particularly good photographs I think. Relatively long exposures can be seen in the movement of dogs and trees in prints.

Catalogue No. 18. #9744. Nd

One of my favourites is not a full length composition but a seated boy cropped mid thigh, legs and body turned slightly to the right, staring straight into the camera. The body within the frame takes up a much greater space within the image than in the other photographs. The young mans hair is amazing.

Catalogue No. 129. ANG #60. Nd

2 nude young men, 14 years old, in country landscape, grasses, mountains in far distance. Both have uncut dicks, one is lighter skinned, the other darker. Lighter skinned one has an arm around the other boy. Darker skinned boy is holding lighter skinned boys other hand and affectionately looking at him What an intimate photograph!! What was he thinking! The darker skinned lad looking at the other boy. Catalogue No. 165 is a cropped version of the above print.

Catalogue No. 167. Nd

Magnificent. 2 naked young men reclining on a tiger skins in a courtyard surrounded by flowering plants. Both have rough hands and feet. In bottom left of print you can see the shadow of photographer and camera(?) This has been retouched to try and remove this.

The 100 or so von Gloeden’s are stunning, mainly 8″ x 10″ prints – contact prints?

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Unknown, Handstand, Santa Monica
1945
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Unknown Woman Lifting, Santa Monica
c. 1951
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Unknown Woman, Los Angeles
c. 1951
Vintage large-format black and white negatives
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer (American, 1922-1992)
Unknown on Platform, Santa Monica
c. 1945
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

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Exhibition: ‘Imogen Cunningham’ at Fundación Mapfre, Madrid

Exhibition dates: 18th September 18 2012 – 20th January 2013

Imogen Cunningham exhibition poster

This is the first posting on one of my favourite photographers of all time: Imogen Cunningham. The sensuality of this artist, from the early Pictorialist studies (including her ground breaking depiction of the male nude, her husband artist Roi Partridge) to the later Modernist nudes, portraits, industrial landscapes and botanical photographs is of the highest order. Cunningham reminds me of a photographic version of Georgia O’Keeffe without the undoubted darkness that inhabits some of O’Keeffe’s work.

The portrait of Frida Kahlo Rivera (1931, below) is a magnificent study of a proud woman with delicate use of natural light framing the face and gently clasped hands. Note the textures within the photograph – the dress, the shawl, the wicker chair and the wall – and also notice the reflective light falling behind the sitter upper left to balance the frontal light coming from bottom right. Masterful. Cunningham’s famous Two Callas (1929, below) is an glorious study of form, light and texture, a sensual symphony for the eyes, the background a kind of mutable black that allows the viewer’s gaze to be immersed in the subject. The viewer’s voyeuristic gaze is further engaged by the voluptuous suggestiveness of the copious hair and out of focus breast of Phoenix Recumbent (1968, below) where, “the object of the gaze is not aware of the current viewer (though they may originally have been aware of being filmed, photographed, painted etc. and may sometimes have been aware that strangers could subsequently gaze at their image).” (Daniel Chandler “Notes on ‘The Gaze'” on the Aberystwyth University website [Online] Cited 12/01/2013 no longer available online)

Finally, the photograph of Imogen Cunningham and Twinka Thiebaud by Judy Dater (1974, below) seems to me to capture the spirit of the human being Imogen Cunningham with indelible grace. Youth, beauty, age, wisdom. A constantly inquisitive mind, wanting to know, wanting to see things more clearly, taking photographs right up until her final years. There she is with her twin-lens Rollei dressed as if from another century, the quizzical nature of her left hand and the look that passes between Imogen and Twinka, the space between them seeming to shimmer with possibility. That space seems to wash away the years of Imogen’s life to when she was young, lying naked near some trees (Self-Portrait (1906, below). It is a truly memorable image. In the sensitivity of this image, Dater embodies everything that I admire in Cunningham’s work: light, texture, sensitivity to subject, an understanding of beauty and an irrepressible, joyous sensuality. A fitting tribute to one of the world’s great photographers.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Fundación Mapfre, Madrid for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a a larger version of the image.

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Roi on the Dipsea trail 3
1918
Gelatin sliver print
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust, 2012

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Magnolia Blossom
1925
Gelatin silver print
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust, 2012

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Three Dancers, Mills College
1929
Gelatin silver print
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust, 2012

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
The Unmade bed
1957
Gelatin silver print
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust, 2012

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
The Wood Beyond the World
c. 1912
Gelatin silver print
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Edward Weston and Margrethe Mather, Photographers I-II
1922
Gelatin silver print
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust, 2011

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Hen and Chickens
1929
Gelatin silver print
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust, 2011

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Frida Kahlo Rivera, Painter and Wife of Diego Rivera
1931
Gelatin silver print
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust, 2012

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Cary Grant, Actor
1932
Gelatin silver print
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust, 2012

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Phoenix Recumbent
1968
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection

Judy Dater (American, b. 1941)
Imogen Cunningham and Twinka Thiebaud
1974

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Exhibition: ‘Wolfgang Tillmans’ at Moderna Museet Stockholm

Exhibition dates: 6th October 2012 – 20th January 2013

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Installation photographs of various rooms of the exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans at Moderna Museet Stockholm, including Venus transit (2004) and Man pissing on chair (1997)
Photographs © Carmen Brunner

In this bumper posting, a big call: in my opinion, the greatest photography based image maker in the world today.

Tillmans challenges the way we think and feel about photography. As Tom Holert in his excellent catalogue essay The Unforeseen notes, Tillmans problematises and reconfigures narration and visualisation, experimenting with a sensory experiential backdrop against and within which the photographs are produced. Modes of perception and the regimes of emotion are inducted into the aesthetics of production and meaning so that, “the pictures communicate with each other in a way that is not bound to the pattern of a closed narrative or any particular line of argument. Instead they create a form of aesthetic and thematic interaction that Tillmans sees as ‘a language of personal associations and “thought-maps.”” The mobilisation and reversal of value and meaning are central strategies in Tillmans’ praxis.

In this way Tillmans opens up spaces for research, “in which learning and unlearning, resonance and interference, a new affective solidarity and real experimentation might be possible before the onset of all sorts of methods, all forms of governance, all kinds of discipline and doxa [common belief or popular opinion].

Through these rhizomic tendencies (a la Delueze and Guittari A Thousand Plateaus) Tillmans images generate emotion and affect, “rhythmically resonating between pictures, from wall to wall, from room to room, from side to side,” so that in each instance, in each publication or exhibition, he can “modify and modulate anew the relations between picture and picture support, representation and presentation, motif and materiality.”

Nothing is ever fixed in linear time. The work is presented as an infinitely variable, spatial and emotional relationship – an orthogonal performativity where the ritual of production and meaning is never fully predetermined at any stage of production and reception.

Tom Holert’s excellent catalogue essay The Unforeseen. On the Production of the New, and Other Movements in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans includes information on Jacques Rancière’s concept of “‘aisthesis’ for the way in which very different things have been registered as ‘art’ for the last two hundred years or so. As he points out, “this is not about the ‘reception’ of works of art, but about the sensory experiential backdrop against and within which they come about. These are completely material conditions – places of performance or exhibition, forms of circulation and reproduction – but also modes of perception and the regimes of emotion, the categories that identify them and the patterns of thought that classify and interpret them.'” A thought provoking text (extracts below to accompany the photographs).

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs and the text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Paper drop (window)
2006
© Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

Wolfgang Tillmans is one of the leading artists of his generation and is constantly in the public eye, with exhibitions all over the world. The exhibition at Moderna Museet is Tillmans’ first major show in Sweden and brings nearly twenty years of picture-making to a new audience. Moderna Museet is delighted to welcome Wolfgang Tillmans – an artist who has extended the boundaries of photography and redefined the medium of photography as an artform.

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) first attracted attention at the beginning of the 1990s, with his apparently mundane pictures of subjects taken from his own surroundings. After studying in Britain, he published photographs in prominent publications such as i-D, Spex and Interview. Today, these pictures are considered trendsetting for the young generation of the 1990s, and raise questions about subcultures and sexual identities. By turning everyday situations into almost monumental images, Tillmans very strikingly captured the spirit of the times. It soon became evident that his pictures renegotiate photographic conventions and reflect contemporary currents related to culture and identity. Since then, Tillmans has continued his in-depth investigations, expanding the the realm of photography and redefining the very medium as an artform.

“Wolfgang Tillmans moves freely between images of the club scene in Berlin, political manifestations, and skyscrapers in Hong Kong; all with the same direct tonality. At the same time, all of his pictures explore photography itself – as a medium, but also as a material, convention and process,” says Curator Jo Widoff.

Recently Tillmans’ art has taken a number of different directions, revolving around various issues, everything from still lifes and modern landscapes to his lifelong interest in astronomy and the night sky. He has also taken his in-depth exploration of abstract photography even further. Tillmans’ abstract images are more closely related to the painterly tradition and he researches photography as a self-reflexive medium. Abstract images, such as Freischwimmer and Silver, are made in the darkroom, striking a balance between the deliberate and chance. Since 1995, Tillmans has been working actively and strategically with the exhibition space, so as to reveal the possibilities and limitations of the space in interplay with the photographs. His installations display a bewildering variety of formats and sizes, ways of composing the hanging of the pictures, and contexts. The exhibition at Moderna Museet should thus be seen as a site-specific installation. In recent years, Tillmans has been travelling the world taking photographs with the general title Neue Welt. These pictures relate to the new world of markets and trade, to politics and economics, and to the hypermodern. The title also refers to the new digital camera that Wolfgang used to take these pictures, which captures and documents more detail than we can perceive with the naked eye.

“Wolfgang Tillmans is one of today’s most prominent artists. Despite its visual complexity, his pictorial language is immediately recognisable. He captures the explosive energy in social situations and crosses boundaries between different artforms. He is able to use photographic means to create a kind of abstract painting,” says Museum Director Daniel Birnbaum.

Press release from the Moderna Museet website

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Paper drop (Roma)
2007
C-type print
30.5 x 40.6cm
Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Freischwimmer 93
2004
© Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

The Freischwimmer series – Free Swimmer is the most basic Lifesaving level in Germany and Switzerland – is an excellent example of Tillmans’s more experimental works. On one hand, the huge photographic papers were affixed to the wall with simple adhesive tape or paper clips; on the other, the images eluded all description and eschewed portraiture, landscape, still life or other subject matters he had centred on up to then.

The creative process of Freischwimmer, ongoing to the present, seems to speak to pure photography, divested of any form of intervention either in shooting or in enlargement, or indeed optical devices of any kind. We can almost imagine the artist in front of a large tray with reagents, performing some kind of alchemical ritual at the origin of these vaporous images, images containing a refinement that exceeds any human intention, just pure representations of themselves, of a unique and absolutely unrepeatable process. Of their reality.”

José Manuel Costa. “Swimming to Freedom 38,” on the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo website [Online] Cited 12/10/2013 no longer available online

The Freischwimmer, which Tillmans started to produce in the early 2000s, form a group or family of images that are not made using a camera lens. As the results of gestural and chemical operations in the dark room, these originals on medium-sized photo paper, which are subsequently scanned and enlarged both as ink-jet prints and as light-jet prints on photo paper, are unrepeatable one-offs. It has been said that these images, which include ensembles such as Peaches, Blushes and Urgency, call to mind microscopically detailed images of biological processes, hirsute epidermises, highly erogenous zones, and that their aura fills the whole space – above all when they are presented in such large formats as in Warsaw or yet larger still, as in the case of the two monumental Ostgut Freischwimmer (2004) that used to grace the walls of the Panorama Bar at Berghain in Berlin. The Freischwimmer and their kin can be read as diagrams of sexualised atmospheres in private or semi-public spaces, in boudoirs or clubs, as highly non-representational images that both suspend and supplement conventional depictions of sex.

Extract from Tom Holert. The Unforeseen. On the Production of the New, and Other Movements in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans. [Online] Cited 12/10/2013 no longer available online

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Nanbei Hu
2009
Inkjet print
207 x 138cm
Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Anders pulling splinter from his foot
2004
© Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Venus transit
2004
© Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Heptathlon
2009
Inkjet print
208.5 x 138cm
Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Headlight (a)
2012
© Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Ushuaia Lupine (a)
2010
© Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Tukan
2010
Inkjet print on paper, clips

Extracts from Tom Holert. The Unforeseen. On the Production of the New, and Other Movements in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans. [Online] Cited 12/10/2013. No longer available online

Parallelism – Subjectivism – Objectivism

This all means that the decorative unity of wall and image, which the hanging of the Freischwimmer initially promises, is not only thwarted by the shift in dimensions, the infringement of symmetrical order and the (supposed) discontinuity of abstraction and figuration, and by the fact that the different types of image and their configuration on this wall require the viewer to move around in the space and to continually readjust his or her gaze, bearing in mind that in the corner of one’s eye or following a slight turn of the body more pictures are constantly looming into view, mostly unframed, very small (postcard-sized), very large, hung very low down, but also very high up, portraits and still lifes, gestural abstractions, a close-up of a vagina, a picture of a modern Boy with Thorn, street scenes, an air-conditioning system. It also means that the pictures communicate with each other in a way that is not bound to the pattern of a closed narrative or any particular line of argument. Instead they create a form of aesthetic and thematic interaction that Tillmans sees as ‘a language of personal associations and “thought-maps”‘,1 as ‘… a pattern of parallelism as opposed to one linear stream of thought’,2 and which the critic Jan Verwoert has aptly described as a ‘performative experiment’ with the viewer.3

With all their variability and flexibility – underpinned by an invisible rectilinear grid yet fundamentally open in their interconnections – these installations serve Tillmans as reflections of his own way of perceiving the world, as externalisations of his thinking and feeling, and as a chance to fashion a utopian world according to his own ideas and fantasies.4 However, this Romantic subjectivism of self-expression or externalisation has to be seen in light of a radical objectivism (Tillmans attaches great importance to this) that specifically draws attention not only to the expressive potential arising from the ageing process, from evidence of wear and other precariousnesses in the materials of photography (paper, camera techniques, chemicals, developing equipment etc.) but also to the remarkable resistance and persistence of these same materials.

Amongst the phenomena that inform this objectivism there are those instances of loss of control that can arise during the mechanical production processes of analogue photography or from coding errors, glitches, in digital images. Temporality, finity, brevity come into play here – a certain melancholy that activates rather than paralyses.

Over the years Tillmans has constantly found new ways to explore, to interpret and to stage this dialectic of intention and contingency. His repertoire and means of aesthetic production have multiplied. And this expansion has not been without consequences for the presentation of his work. Tillmans himself feels that the character of his installations has changed since 2006/07, in other words, when different versions of a solo exhibition of his work toured to three museums in the United States. It was during this exhibition tour that Tillmans started to see the benefit of placing greater weight on individual groups of works in the various rooms of larger exhibitions. In so doing he gave visitors the chance to engage in a different kind of concentration, without the pressure of constantly having to deal with the ‘full spectrum’ (Tillmans) of his oeuvre.5

Value Theory, Value Praxis

The visitor to an exhibition of the work of Wolfgang Tillmans in the year 2012, in this case the author of these lines, arrives in expectation of a particular, clearly defined type of art and image experience. A sense (however fragmentary) of the artist’s past exhibitions and publications is always present in any encounter with his work. And this includes the need to see the ‘abstract pictures’ in the context of an oeuvre where realistic and abstract elements have never intentionally been separated from each other. On the contrary, abstraction is always co-present with figurative and representational elements. There is no contradiction between forms and matter free of meaning – that is to say, visual moments that on the face of it neither represent nor illustrate anything – and Tillmans’ photographs of people, animals, objects and landscapes; in fact there is an unbroken connection, a continuum. This applies both to individual images as much as to the internal, dynamic relationalism of his oeuvre as a whole. And it also applies to each individual, concrete manifestation of multiplicity, as in the case of the installation in the first room of the exhibition in Warsaw.

Both aesthetic theory and the institution of art itself provide decisive grounds for discussing photography and visual art in such a way that images are not solely considered in terms of documentary functions or ornamental aspects nor are they reduced to the question as to whether their contents are stage-managed or authentic, but that attention is paid instead to the material nature of the pictures and objects in the space, to their sculptural qualities. Having decided early on against a career as a commercial photographer and in favour of a life in art, there was no need for Tillmans to seek to justify the interest he had already felt in his youth in a non-hierarchical, queer approach to various forms and genres in the visual arts. For the young Wolfgang Tillmans the cover artwork for a New Order LP, a portrait of Barbara Klemm (in-house photographer at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), or a screenprint collage of Robert Rauschenberg in Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen were all ‘equally important’ images’.7 The mobilisation and reversal of value and meaning are central strategies in his praxis. He questions the ‘language of importance’8 in photography and alters valencies of the visual by, for instance – in a ‘transformation of value’9 – producing C-prints from the supposedly impoverished or inadequate visuality of old black-and-white copies or wrongly developed images and thus raising them to the status of museum art. However much he may set store by refinement and precision, he avoids conventional forms of presentation, that is to say, ‘the signifiers that give immediate value to something, such as the picture frame’.10

Conditions: Subject – Work – Mediation

If we take the line proposed by the philosopher Jacques Rancière, then the ‘aesthetic regime’ of the modern era, which – following the introduction of a modern concept of art and aesthetics – abandoned the regulatory aesthetic canon of the classical age in the nineteenth century, is distinguished by the fact that under its auspices the traditional hierarchies separating the high from the popular branches of narration and visualisation were problematised and reconfigured in such a way that a new politics of aesthetics and a ‘distribution of the sensible’ in the name of art ensued. Rancière has recently proposed the term ‘aisthesis’ for the way in which very different things have been registered as ‘art’ for the last two hundred years or so. As he points out, this is not about the ‘reception’ of works of art, but about the sensory experiential backdrop against and within which they come about. ‘These are completely material conditions – places of performance or exhibition, forms of circulation and reproduction – but also modes of perception and the regimes of emotion, the categories that identify them and the patterns of thought that classify and interpret them.’12

In order to understand why the work of Wolfgang Tillmans – so seemingly casual, so heterogeneous and so wide-ranging – is not only extremely successful, but has, for over twenty years, been intelligible and influential both within and outside the field of art, with the result that by now his praxis seems like a universal, subtly normative style of perception and image-making, it is essential to consider the ‘conditions’ alluded to by Rancière. For these are fundamental to the specific visibility and speakability of this oeuvre and to its legitimacy as art…

The Production of the New

Tillmans thus also makes his contribution to an answer to the question posed by the philosopher John Rajchman (in response to Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and their deliberations on the production of the new and on the creative act in present-day, control-obsessed societies). Rajchman asked how, in and with the arts and their institutions, spaces for open searches and researches could be devised, in which learning and unlearning, resonance and interference, a new affective solidarity and real experimentation might be possible before the onset of all sorts of methods, all forms of governance, all kinds of discipline and doxa.18

This form of experimentation does not lead to benchmark research results; nothing is ever proved or illustrated, regardless of what is in the images or what they may purport to show. Ever engaging in experiment Tillmans roams through the reality of materials, forms, affects and gives us tangible access to these unportrayble, unreferential realities. Tillmans engages his emotions when he is working, also and specifically when he is photographing people, or plants, machines and cities. Individual emotions separate off from the representation of living beings and objects and form nodes of emotion in the viewer’s mind. ‘Artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects’, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it in What is Philosophy?, ‘they draw us into the compound’.19 And indeed Tillmans’ laboratories are places where emotion and affect are generated and presented, rhythmically resonating between pictures, from wall to wall, from room to room, from side to side. The dog asleep on the stones, its breathing body warmed by the sun (in the video Cuma, 2011), Susanne’s lowered gaze (in Susanne, No Bra, 2006), with the line of her hair encircling her head like an incomplete figure of eight, but also the disturbed, interrupted, lurking monochromaticism of the Lighter and Silver works – they all open up the longer you look at them, the longer you are with them, to a perceiving in terms of forces and affects. They alert us to the fact that all images are fabricated.

Assimilating Photography into the Paradox

By virtue of the portability and variability of his works, with every print, with every exhibition, with every publication Tillmans can modify and modulate anew the relations between picture and picture support, representation and presentation, motif and materiality. In the two decades that have elapsed since his entry into the art business his praxis has continuously expanded. From the outset photography was his springboard for both integrative and eccentric acts. And even though this oeuvre may create the impression that the medium of photography knows no limits, photography – as discourse, as technique, as history, as convention – has remained the constant point of reference for all of Tillmans’ complex operations. It could also be said that he is immensely faithful to his chosen medium, although – or precisely because – that medium is not always recognisable as such. To quote an older essay on photography and painting by Richard Hamilton (whom Tillmans once photographed), his work is about ‘assimilating photography into the domain of paradox, incorporating it into the philosophical contradictions of art…’30 Since Tillmans’ experiments with a laser copier in the 1980s, he has produced hundreds of images that may be beholden to the etymology of photography (light drawing) but that also constantly undermine or overuse the social and epistemological functions of photography as a means to depict reality, as proof, as an aide mémoire, as documentation or as a form of aesthetic expression. The discourse on photography, with all its ‘post-photographic’ exaggerations, the debate on the status of the photographic image – none of these have been concluded; on the contrary, Tillmans is continuously advancing them on his own terms. His praxis forms the backdrop for experimentation and adventures in perception that are closely intertwined with the past and the present of photography and theories of photography; yet the specific logic of this oeuvre creates a realm of its own in which archive and presentation interlock in such a way that photography still plays an important part as historic and discursive formation, but the problems and paradoxes of fine art have now taken over the key functions.

The contagious impact of the epistemological problems of art has opened up new options for the medium of photography, new contexts of reception. And in this connection it is apparent, as Julie Ault has put it, that ‘Tillmans enacts his right to complex mediation’.31 In other words, photography provides a means for him to engage with a whole range of interactions with the viewer. In his eyes and hands photography becomes a realm of potential, where a never-ending series of constellations and juxtapositions of materialities, dimensions and motifs of the ‘unforeseen’ can come about. Photography thus regains a dimension of experimentation, an openness that is not constrained by aesthetic formats and technical formatting but that does arise from a precise knowledge and understanding of the history of the medium.”

Extracts from Tom Holert. The Unforeseen. On the Production of the New, and Other Movements in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans. [Online] Cited 12/10/2013 no longer available online

Footnotes from extracts

1/ “Peter Halley in Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Jan Verwoert, Peter Halley and Midori Matsui, Wolfgang Tillmans (London: Phaidon, 2002), 8-33 at 29

2/ Steve Slocombe, “Wolfgang Tillmans – The All-Seeing Eye,” in Flash Art, vol. 32, no. 209, November – December 1999, 92-95 at 95

3/ Jan Verwoert, “Survey: Picture Possible Lives: The Work of Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Verwoert et. al., Wolfgang Tillmans, 36-89 at 72

4/ See Slocombe, “Wolfgang Tillmans – The All-Seeing Eye” (see note 2), 95

5/ See Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Wolfgang Tillmans (London: Serpentine Gallery / Koenig Books, 2010), 21-27 at 24

7/ Wolfgang Tillmans, email of 12 May 2012.

8/ Julie Ault, “Das Thema lautet Ausstellen Installations as Possibility in the Practice of Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Wolfgang Tillmans. Lighter (Stuttgart/Berlin: Hatje Cantz/SMB), Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2008, 27

9/ See Hans Ulrich Obrist, Wolfgang Tillmans (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007 = The Conversation Series, 6), 41

10/ Gil Blank, “The Portraiture of Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Influence, 2, autumn 2004, 110-21 at 117

12/ Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis. Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 10

18/ Zepke (ed.), Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (London: Continuum, 2008), 80-90 at 89

19/ See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 175

30/ Richard Hamilton, “Photography and Painting,” in Studio International, vol. 177, no. 909, March 1969, 120-25 at 125

31/ Julie Ault, “The Subject Is Exhibition” (see note 8), 15

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Alex Lutz back
1992
© Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees
1992
Inkjet print on paper, clips
208 × 138 cm

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Moderna Museet is ten minutes away from Kungsträdgården, and twenty minutes from T-Centralen or Gamla Stan. Walk past Grand Hotel and Nationalmuseum on Blasieholmen, opposite the Royal Palace. After crossing the bridge to Skeppsholmen, continue up the hill. The entrance to Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet is on the left-hand side.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11 – 18
Monday closed

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Text: ‘Orality, (n)framing and enactment in the art of Jacqui Stockdale’ in IANN magazine Vol.8, ‘Unfound in Australia’, October 2012

January 2013

Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968)
Negro Returno, Long Gully
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

“What does it mean, to rediscover an unknown continent through the medium of photography in the 21st century? The seven artists that appear in this “Unfound in Australia” issue are well versed in the photographic technique and language familiar to modern art, yet show cultural distinctness that is nothing short of extraordinary. Our readers might experience a sense of shock or alienation from their work, which combines the new with the old. This kind of unsettling feeling may very well be an unconscious reaction to what we consider to be the ‘other.’ It is my hope that our readers will rediscover the power of photography as a chronological and visual language through these works of long under appreciated modern Australian photography.

IANN magazine Vol.8, “Unfound in Australia,” October 2012 ‘IANN Magazine’ website [Online] Cited 06/01/2013

My text that appears in IANN magazine Vol.8, “Unfound in Australia” (October 2012) on the art of Jacqui Stockdale is a reworking of the review of her exhibition Jacqui Stockdale: The Quiet Wild at Helen Gorie Galerie in April – May 2012. It is a good piece of writing but it is the “lite” version of the text that I wrote. Instead of the “heavy” version fragmenting away on some long forgotten backup hard drive, and for those of you that like a little more conceptual meat on the bone, it is published below.

Other artists featured in the Volume 8 edition of IANN magazine include Marian Drew, Henri Van Noordenburg, Justine Khamara, Magdalena Bors and Christian Thompson.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Orality, (n)framing and enactment in the art of Jacqui Stockdale

The concept of Orality is important in the art of Australian Jacqui Stockdale for her works are visual tone poems. Portraying identities in flux, her mythological creatures rise above the threshold of visibility to engage our relationship with time and space, to challenge the trace of experience.

Stockdale uses the body not as passive object but as descriptive and rhapsodic theme, the body as pliable flesh acting as a kind of threshold or hinge of experience – between interior and exterior, viewer and photograph, longing and desire. Drawing on personal places and stories, assemblage and performance (the process of painting the models and the outcome of this interaction), Stockdale creates a wonderful melange of archetypal characters that subvert traditional identities and narratives. Her creatures “shape-shift” and frustrate attempts at categorisation and assimilation.

The artist inverts cultural stereotypes (which embody elements of fixity, repetition, and ambivalence) located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary in order to dis/place the collective memory of viewers that have been inscribed with a stereotypical collective vernacular. In this process the work elides “fantasy” which Bhabha suggests plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power.1 In Stockdale’s upside-down world (quite appropriate for the “land down under”), “Each new identity is one of inversion; man becomes woman, child becomes adult, animals transform into humans and vice-versa.”2

An example of this inversion can be seen in her latest series of photographs, The Quiet Wild (2012). Here Stockdale unsettles traditional textual readings, the titles of her photographic portraits indecipherable to the uninitiated, a coded language of identity and place. Lagunta, Leeawuleena and Jaara for example, are three Aboriginal names meaning, respectively, Tasmanian Tiger, the name for the land around Cradle Mountain on that island and the name for the Long Gully region around Bendigo, Victoria (Stockdale’s native area); El Gato is the cat and Gondwanan the name for the southernmost of two supercontinents (the other being Laurasia) before the world split apart into the structure that we known today.

Stockdale’s performative tactics and multiple modes of address, her polyvocal subject if you like, may be said to be an effect of intertextuality3: “a conscious recognition and pursuit of an altogether different set of values and historical and cultural trajectories.”4 Undeniably her re-iterations and re-writings of cultural trajectories as ritual performative acts have links to Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque and the carnival paradigm, which accords to certain patterns of play where “the social hierarchies of everyday life… are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies.”5

It is through this “play” that the context of the photographs and their relationship to each other and the viewer are “framed.” This device emphasises the aesthetic rather than information and encourages the viewer to think about the relationship between the body, the world of which it is part and the dream-reason of time.6

This intertextual (n)framing (n meaning unspecified number in mathematics) encourages the viewer to explore the inbetween spaces in the meta-narrative, “and by leaps (intuitive leaps, poetic leaps, leaps of faith)”7 encourage escapism. Through the (n)framing of the body and the enactment of multiple selves Stockdale narrativises her mythological creatures, her charged bodies initiating new conditions of Otherness in the mise-en-scène of being. This is why her images are so powerful for her art approaches Otherness using a visual Orality and a theatrical openness that encourages disparate meanings to emerge into consciousness. It is up to us as viewers to seek the multiple, disparate significances of what is concealed in each photograph – in the myth of origin; in something that can’t be explained by man; in the expression of meaning of the things that are beyond us.

Dr Marcus Bunyan
August 2012

Footnotes

1/ “According to Bhabha, stereotypes are located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary. He suggests that fantasy plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power. Bhabha describes the mechanism of cultural stereotypes as embodying elements of fixity, repetition, fantasy, and ambivalence, and suggests that if certain types of images are constantly presented in a range of different contexts, they will become imprinted onto the collective memory of viewers and inscribed within a collective vernacular.”
Vercoe, Caroline. “Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, p. 240.

2/ Stockdale, Jacqui. Artist statement 2012

3/ Intertextuality “is always an iteration which is also a re-iteration, a re-writing which foregrounds the trace of the various texts it both knowingly and unknowingly places and dis-places.” Intertexuality is how a text is constituted. It fragments singular readings. “The reader’s own previous readings, experiences and position within the cultural formation” also influences these re-inscriptions.”
Keep, Christopher, McLaughlin, Tim and Parmar, Robin. “Intertextuality,” on The Electronic Labyrinth website [Online] Cited 13/11/2011

4/ Fisher, Jean. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 227-228.

5/ Anon. “Carnivalesque,” on the Wikipedia website. [Online] Cited 13/05/2012

6/ Bacon, Julie Louise. “Liquid Archive: On Ambivalence,” in Liquid Archive. Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), 2012, p. 119

7/ Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “The Museum – A Refuge for Utopian Thought,” in Rüsen, Jörn; Fehr Michael, and Ramsbrock, Annelie (eds.). Die Unruhe der Kultur: Potentiale des Utopischen. Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2004. In German.

Marcus Bunyan writings

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Exhibition dates: 24th November 2012 – 11th March 2013

Louise Bourgeois & Australian Artists 13 October 2012 – 14 April 2013

Tough Love

Louise Bourgeois & Australian Artists

Exhibition dates: 13th February – 9th March 2013

Exhibition dates: 1st December 2012 – 5th March 2013

David Goldblatt

Ernest Cole

Billy Monk

Exhibition dates: 17th February – 28th April 2013

Exhibition dates: 19th October 2012 – 4th March 2013

Diversity and abundance: showing for what “nude men” could stand

The exhibition

Prologue

Theme 1: Classicism and the Power of Reason

Theme 2: Classical Modernism

Theme 3: Post-1945 Developments

Exhibition dates: 8th November 2012 – 27th January 2013

Exhibition dates: 14th December 2012 – 27th January 2013

Research at the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana

16/08/1999 – 19/08/1999

Male homosexual catalogue photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

Image No. 543-280. Frontier Club, San Diego, California. **Mr. America – Plus** Frontier #11. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Image No. 543-281. Frontier Club, San Diego, California. **Mr. America – Plus** Frontier #5. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Image No. 2667-9. Anonymous. Nd Acquired 1951

Image No. 2864-5. Anonymous. Nd 1950s? Chicago Police Dept., Acquired 05/1961

George Platt Lynes photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

Untitled Nude. 1944

Untitled Nude. 1953

Male Nude Hanging. 1940

Untitled Nude. 1955

Untitled Nude. 1952

Male Nude. 1951

Untitled Nude. 1954

Untitled Nude. 1952

Untitled Nude. 1946

Untitled Nude. 1953

Image No. 141. Untitled Nude. 1942. Acquired GPL 1950

Image No. 144. Untitled Nude. 1953. Acquired GPL 07/1955

Image No. 153. Untitled Nude. 1953. Acquired GPL 07/1955

Image No. 186-194. Untitled Nudes. 1951. Acquired GPL 09/1954

Image No. 457. Untitled Nude. 1955

Image No. 481. Untitled Nude. 1941. Acquired GPL 10/05/1950

Image No. 482.Untitled Nude. 1941. Acquired GPL 10/05/1950

Image No. 483. ‘Charles ‘Tex’ Smutney, Charles ‘Buddy’ Stanley and Bradbury Ball’. 1941. Acquired GPL 10/05/1950

Image No. 484. ‘Charles ‘Tex’ Smutney, Charles ‘Buddy’ Stanley and Bradbury Ball’. 1941. Acquired GPL 10/05/1950

M2M sex photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

Image No. 54106-7. M. Koch – O. Reith. ‘Der Act’. Acquired 1946

Image No. 54112. Anonymous photographer. Nd Acquired Chicago Police Dept. 05/1961

Image No. 543-280. Frontier Club, San Diego, California. **Mr. America – Plus** Frontier #11. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Image No. 543-281. Frontier Club, San Diego, California. **Mr. America – Plus** Frontier #5. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Image No. 55201. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Edina Minneapolis Police Dept., 01/1962

Image No. 55202. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Chicago Police Dept., 05/1961

Image No. 55203. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Chicago Police Dept., 05/1961

Image No. 55259. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Chicago 1940

Image No. 55260. Anonymous. Nd Acquired Chicago Police Dept., 05/1961. 385971

Image No. 55042. Anonymous. Nd Acquired O.W. 05/1954

Image No. 55087. Anonymous. Nd Acquired McG. NYC 1946

Image No. 54768-54779. Anonymous. Nd Figure Set 41. 1960s(?)

Image No. 41601. Anonymous. 1935+-. Acquired 1948

Image No. 41602. Anonymous. 1935+-. Acquired 1948

Image No. 41602. Anonymous. 1935+-. Acquired 1948

Image No. 41607/41610. Anonymous. c. 1946. San Francisco. Acquired 1958

Image No. 41612. ‘Ray Baker’. c. 1946. Acquired 1950

Image No. 41614. Set of CK. 1950s. Acquired 1953

Image No. 41615. Set of CK. 1950s

Image No. 44224. Anonymous. 1928-1935. Acquired 1961

Image No. 44228. Anonymous. 1935+. Acquired 1947

Image No. 44263. Anonymous. 1940s?

Image No. 44426. Anonymous. n.d. 1950s?

Image No. 44526/44532. Anonymous. n.d. 1960s?

Notes on physique culture photographs and magazines from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute

1. Bruce of Los Angeles

Image No. 52001. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1942-1950. Acquired 1950

Image No. 52002. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1942-1950. Acquired 1950

Image No. 52003. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1942-1950. Acquired 1950

Image No. 52004. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1942-1950. Acquired 1950

Image No. 52005. Bruce of Los Angeles. Acquired 1966

Image No. 52006. Bruce of Los Angeles. Acquired 1950

Image No. 52010. Bruce of Los Angeles. 1948

Louise Bourgeois & Australian Artists
13 October 2012 – 14 April 2013

Image No. 543-280. Frontier Club, San Diego, California.
Mr. America – Plus Frontier #11. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Image No. 543-281. Frontier Club, San Diego, California.
Mr. America – Plus Frontier #5. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Image No. 543-280. Frontier Club, San Diego, California.
Mr. America – Plus Frontier #11. Catalogues and ads, December 1967

Image No. 543-281. Frontier Club, San Diego, California.
Mr. America – Plus Frontier #5. Catalogues and ads, December 1967