Traipsing Through The
Arts-All Serious 20th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You
Learned In Art Class About The Search For The Sublime-In The Time Of His
Time-The Homoerotic Art Of Marsden Hartley-Portrait Of A German Officer (1914)
By Laura Perkins
It is no secret at this
point that I am wedded to the idea that all serious 20th art, who
knows maybe all art but I won’t go out on a limb for that proposition just as I
have acknowledged that the jury is still out of 21st century art
that is massively influenced by digital technology among other trends, is
centered on the search for the sexual and erotic courtesy of Mr. Freud’s
insights. This seemingly rationale approach to an overview of 20th
century art has had many detractors, nay-sayers, who have not spared the
cyber-ink in attempting to refute my theory and have to the extent that anybody
has offered a viable alternate been promoting such ideas as the search for the
sublime (or in the alternate if they are old-fashioned or if “sublime” seems
too sexy a word-beauty) in this wicked old world or touted the now hoary “art
for art’s sake” scam. (I am sorry but every time I write that term I have to
snicker and think of all the rolled eyes and sneers of those fellow writers
around the office water cooler when I mention the expression. Even those who
don’t know art from a hold in the wall and last entered, trembling, into an art
museum on a fifth-grade yellow bus field trip that they never got over.)
Of course, the search
for the sublime (usually called the search for beauty since most elementary and
junior high school students would probably not know or relate to the word
“sublime”) is the way art teachers in that just mentioned junior high school
would present the subject for most of that century and certainly was a familiar
term to me after I took art appreciation classes in college. That “sublime”
language had been used from junior high school to the pinnacles of the modern
art cabal (museum curators, directors, hired flaks, flattered and hired press
agents and pundits, art critics for glossy journals, well-heeled art patrons
and the key link in the chain the ever hustling art gallery owners) to avoid
the then somewhat socially disturbing use of the word “sex” and “eroticism” to
the uninitiated.
Certainly junior high
school kids (and their prudish parents) would have freaked out at such
terminology, would have red-faced laughed the teacher out of the room if she or
he had used the word sublime since those racing hormones would have worked
overtime to fathom that word in public. (Those parents would have been more
forgiving talking about child molesters or running them out of town on a rail,
things like that.) Hence the shorthand “beauty” business with the added
distraction of “art for art’s sake” (what does that mean anyway except as
gibberish to throw sand in the eyes by dunking everything created for whatever
purpose from Impressionism to Op-Pop-Bop Art into the same cauldron). The
attacks by the chief advocate of this “art for art’s sake” drone recently has
been by one Clarence Dewar a professional art critic at Art Today (and who has made everybody very aware as if it needed
comment that he is a pro and I am not, and I have never claimed such status).
(We have received
communications from smaller fry spouting forth the same gibberish but either
that bilious talk was from well-known art gallery press agents, hired guns to
protect the value of unsold and unsaleable merchandise or art majors on the
make who need jobs after graduation to get themselves or their parents or both
out from that mountain of student debt when said student against all advise
decided to cast his or her fate with the muses. We target, a very good word
here, Mr. Dewar since he was an acolyte of the well-known late art critic
Clement Greenberg who started all the gibberish. Beside we know from very close
at hand sources that Mr. Dewar used to plagiarize, maybe still does,
Greenberg’s articles merely throwing his name on the top for which he was
summarily canned back when journalism standards were higher, and editors had
more backbone.)
Of course as usual with
this denizen of the deep Dewar is once again retailing somebody else’s idea
specifically if I recall the painter James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s back in the
19th century (via that same Greenberg who added the theoretical
flourishes and some nifty thefts from Vasari’s stockpile of odds and ends not
seen since about the 15th century and I remember waiting for the old
“art is timeless” gag to buttress his argument but Dewar at least had enough
sense to omit that noise). At least Whistler was using that idea to hustle
money to ward off his creditors (and “advertise” his various mistresses’
availability for “escort service” as a high-end procurer of women for the artsy
gentlemen clientele). I might add, which I do every time I can just as Dewar
touts his professional status, and gladly do it twice here that earlier in his
career in the days when he was nothing
but Clement Greenberg’s shill that he would submit copy as his own when
he just was regurgitating his boss’ work and was fired for plagiarism. (Check
the archives of Art Today for
verification.)
What galls Mister Dewar
these days is my statement in a review of one of the novelist John Updike’s
three volumes of musings on art (the Looking
series of 1989, 2005, 2012) that there was plenty of room for homoerotic art
under the expansive art tent. I cited the late work of painter Marsden Hartley who
whatever else grew immensely from his earlier Maine coast and mountains
European rough trade blah-blah as he aged into a fully-coded partisan of
homoerotic art as way to explain his personal sexual preferences. Totally
legitimate then and now although then fraught with more danger given the
extreme legal, social and political implications of revealing your sexual preferences
to busy-body eyes, private and public. Dewar (and for this he only deserves to
be called by his last name) claims, get this, that there has been no serious
homoerotic art since Grecian times and one would have to look very, very
carefully to see any such “closeted art,” his term worth the name in the 20th
century. Moreover, and maybe he had been drinking too heavily or gotten too
deeply into the bong pipe, Dewar claimed that the coded art of (the few) known
homosexuals in the 20th century including Hartley did not prove
decisive.
(To give a better idea
what a total prude this so-called professional art critic is, a critic who
seems only to have eyes to read my little scribblings and no other, a couple of
reviews back I mentioned that 19th century French painter Vuillard’s
Woman In Stripe Dress was done in
honor of their affair even though the musical Misia, the woman in the stripe
dress, was married and her husband was paying the freight for the painting. A
husband who was a patron of Vuillard’s work. Like it was impossible for a
painter and what amounted to his model and muse to get under the silk sheets,
married or not, friendly with husband or not. What art world does this guy live
in. Doesn’t he remember the notorious Madame X painted by Singer Sargent which
scandalized all Paris just a few years before. That is what the search for the
sublime does to your brain, what is left of it after you smell the paints for
too long. Misia and Vuillard would have had a good laugh if they heard about
Brother Dewar’s musings.)
Back to poor Hartley
though who that same Greenberg (although I have never seen Dewar parrot his old
boss on this subject) mentioned at a cocktail party in post-war New York long
after the bugger had passed away had a face only a mother could love. From the
few photographs I have seen when he was younger I am not sure what Greenberg
was talking about although older photos show some serious dissipation, the
tell-tale drug, drink, debauchery trifecta at work. (Sam Lowell, ever the class
clown, responded when I told him about Greenberg’s comment said to me the famed
art critic was a man only a mother could love.) Here is where Dewar (parroting
Greenberg) is way off the line. He claims that the Greeks, all the various
tribes but especially Sparta and Athens, were proud as shown on their
dinnerware and earthenware to show all kinds of sexual antics, including scenes
of men putting their penises in other men’s bungholes. (Fewer scenes of open
lesbian love but what the heck was the isle of Lebos about anyway except to
glorify that feminine love.)
That was then when such
sexual practices were rights of passages among certain classes of citizens,
men. When even big named philosopher-kings like Plato, Socrates, Cynos had boyfriends
morning, noon, and night. The Christian era, all forms of the doctrines and
civil society together made such freedoms very danger to display in person or
in art, public art anyway. Much easier to dangle the notorious severed head
cults started by Salome taking down chaste John the Baptist, Jesus’ friend and
some historians say lover and carried down to the present day through a
drug-warped cult. Much easier to have a woman of the evening, a tart, like Mary
Madeline, who got sainted for her efforts, half naked before repentance. Much
easier to using the case of Whistler already mentioned above as a max daddy
pimp (expression courtesy of Sam Lowell) and the wolf and fur used to advertise
a woman’s availability for sex ever since the Whore of Babylon worked the
palaces way back in the day. Much easier to have a painting disguised to the
private initiates rather than bring edge of society sexual practices into
public view.
Hartley, once he figured
out his sexual preferences could hardly have been unaware of the social taboos
to speak nothing of the risks of exposure in his growing up Maine, and even in
Bohemian Greenwich Village one had to be cautious against getting caught doing the
“love that dare not speak its name.” Some of Hartley’s earlier works from farm
Maine times show a clear path to the coded language he would use to signal his
sexual preferences and desires. The famous Portrait
of a German Soldier from significant 1914 is what I want to decode today
since it is unambiguous in its longings. It is well-known that Hartley was
smitten with a young good-looking German officer who was killed early in World
War I. (I checked with the English poet W.H. Auden whose other claim to fame
beyond his poetry was his listing, private listings back then of gay men he
claimed for a thing he called the “Homintern” Hartley and more importantly that
young German officer were both on his listings even though the dates indicate
that England was at war with Germany when he made the entries for the
pair).
I try, and maybe not always
successfully, to not be too judgmental about the personal lives of painters and
sculptors. (a big exception being that pimp Whistler and his art for art’s sake
cover from running his mistresses ragged on the streets just to make rent
money). Clearly Hartley was drawn, maybe addicted is the better way to put the
matter to the “rough trade” side of same-sex relationships. The giveaway,
remember everything is coded in 1914, is the triangle and the German cross
inside which not only had military significance but was the “badge” of those
who frequented the S&M cabarets on the back streets of Berlin. Some of that
rough trade was pretty raw from what later devotees like French writer Jean
Genet detailed about his wharf rats. The triangle itself means that the wearer
is the “passive” one if that is all the badge shows. The iron cross means the
wearer is the aggressor. Hartley was the punk and the German soldier did
whatever he liked to him. If I am not mistaken Hartley took some social heat
not because his was somebody’s slave girl but because his owner was a German at
a time when that was not good in places like England or the United States even
before the American entry into the war. That he never condemned his slave owner
soldier boy was held against him even in Greenwich Village society.
Art critics have
mistaken the bottles at the lower left corner for some kind of elixir before
sex but I have it on good authority from Sam Lowell’s longtime growing up
neighborhood friend Timmy Riley now known as Miss Judy Garland, a drag queen,
who runs the notoriously famous KitKat Club in North Beach out in San Francisco
that this is actually a “tool” used as part of the penetration process and
let’s leave it at that. Maybe Hartley missed that, maybe he was sentimental about
it. There is also a question about that number 24 with many assuming that it
was Hartley’s lover’s regimental unit. Again the code comes into pay since
those numbers usually represent the fact that oral sex is part of the
proceedings. I think even this little without getting into the symbolism of the
shield and the whips and chains that we are witnessing a great piece of
pre-Stonewall coded homoerotic art.
Hartley would as his got
older become more open in subject matter and aspiration concerning his sexual
desires, look at his lumberjack on the beach, his fisherman, his fishermen with
Jesus and a bunch more. Here is the funny thing, maybe not funny but sad in a
way even Grady Lamont in the 1980s (not now) had to be coded in his
heterosexual sexual references with his famous pine trees delving deeply into
loose soil. Thanks Marsden for what you could do when you could do it.
