These vintage posters promoting solidarity between Russia and China sure look like the story of a gay couple who met, fell in love and then farmed the land to provide for their kids 😄 Certainly nobler than what they’re up to nowadays.
Muse Monday *38
Golden Fleece by Kirill Fadeyev
Sculpture Saturday *17
Ganymede and Zeus by Adamo Tadolini (1788-1868)
The art of Henry Scott Tuke
In 1858, Henry Scott Tuke was born in York to a prominent Quaker family. A British painter best known for his intimate and sensual paintings of the male nude, Tuke’s art fell from fashion in the years before his death. In the 1970s, his work returned to the limelight after he became an icon among the LGBTQ+ community and a new generation of openly gay artists.
By today’s standards, Tuke’s paintings are no less visually captivating or compelling than they once were. He is widely celebrated for his impressionistic rendering of the English coasts, as well as his lifelike capturing of the softness and translucency of flesh.
However in recent years, Tuke’s fascination with youth – including unclothed male adolescents – has raised difficult yet intriguing questions about how to judge his work morally and sensitively in today’s context.
Brought up in Falmouth and London, Tuke studied at the Slade School of Art under Alphonse Legros and Sir Edward Poynter. In 1880, he trained in Florence for a year before spending three years in Paris.
In France, Tuke met the artist Jules Bastien-Lepage who encouraged him to paint en plein air, which translates into ‘painting outdoors’. This practice facilitated the depiction of natural, soft light and had a profound influence on Tuke’s work and style.
Felix d’Eon
Felix D’Eon is a gay artist from Mexico City. His paintings are delirious fantasies, like fairy tales in the most exuberant book. With the one startling catch that, for all their convincing illusionism, they represent images of queer love.
His paintings celebrate queer desire in an unabashed and unembarrassed form, speaking in a language commonly associated with the status quo, and projecting into the past a gay sensibility which surly existed, but which could never before have been given voice.
His beautiful fantasies re- claim a language which had been long denied us, and in the telling create a dream of queer love and sensibility, in which any shame surrounding same sex love and sexuality is stripped away.
His work allows, in the imagination, a past which could not have been to come into existence, and he fervently hopes it will play its small role in allowing fantasy to become reality; that his fantasy of the past will instead become a promise of what is to be.
Sculpture Saturday *16
Two Friends by Gerhard Marcks
Muse Monday *31
The Sunbathers by Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929)
My darling, I lie awake all night…
Letters written to each other by two gay WWII soldiers have inspired a new exhibition that proves “love never changes” through the ages.
Gilbert Bradley and Gordon Bowsher’s love letters were written during the second world war, when same-sex activity was still illegal in the UK. On display at Oswestry Town Museum, in Shropshire, the missives were not discovered until after Bradley’s death in 2008.
“My darling, I lie awake all night waiting for the postman in the early morning, and when he does not bring anything from you I just exist, a mass of nerves,” Bowsher wrote in one letter.
Inspired by the letters, artist Megan Hayward and poet Emmy Clarke collected “local love stories from across the decades”, and turned them into an exhibition for the arts programme ART-efact Oswestry.