| Description |
1 online resource (x, 285 pages) : illustrations (some color) |
| Contents |
Introduction: Art and homosexuality : an overview -- Varieties of "homosexuality," varieties of "art". Initiatory homosexuality : the "Sambia" of New Guinea and the ancient Greeks and Romans ; Gender-transcendent homosexuality : Polynesia and North America ; Performative homosexuality : Tokugawa, Japan -- Before modernism. Early Christian and medieval Europe ; The Renaissance ; Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe -- Inventing the modern : art and sexual identity in the late nineteenth century. Imagery at mid-century ; Inventing the "avant-garde" ; Artists at mid-century ; The modern artist as homosexual ; Aesthetes and art journals -- Secrets and subcultures, 1900-1940. Echoes of aestheticism ; Avant-garde contingents ; Sexuality and race ; Strategies of coding : abstraction and symbols ; The limits of the avant-garde ; The avant-garde and the open secret ; The open secret and mass culture -- The short triumph of the modern, 1940-65. Expression and repression in postwar art ; Popular imagery, Pop Art, and the origins of postmodernism ; Camp and criticism -- The avant-garde and activism, 1965-82. Art and politics ; Feminists, lesbians, and female sensibility ; Identity and sensibility -- The AIDS decade, 1982-92. AIDS and the avant-garde ; AIDS, activism, and visual culture ; Homophobia and visual culture -- Queer and beyond. Queer ; Fragmentation from within ; Pressure from without ; Working through difference : the Black male nude |
| Summary |
"This bold, globe-spanning survey is the first book to thoroughly explore the radical, long-standing interdependence between art and homosexuality. It draws examples from the full range of the Western tradition, including classical, Renaissance, and contemporary art, with special focus on the modern era. It was in the modern period, when arguments about homosexuality and the avant-garde were especially public, that our current conception of the artist and the homosexual began to take shape, and almost as quickly to overlap. Not a chronology of gay or lesbian artists, the book is a fascinating and sophisticated account of the ways two conspicuous identities have fundamentally informed one another. Art and Homosexuality discusses many of modernism's canonical figures--painters like Courbet, Picasso, and Pollock; writers like Whitman and Stein--and issues, such as the rise of abstraction, the avant-garde's relationship to its patrons and the political exploitation of art. It shows that many of the core ideas that define modernism are nearly indecipherable without an understanding of the paired identities of artist and homosexual. Illustrated with over 175 b/w and color images that range from high to popular culture and from Ancient Greece to contemporary America, Art and Homosexuality punctures the platitudes surrounding discussions of both aesthetics and sexual identity and takes our understanding of each in stimulating new directions."--Publisher description |
| Notes |
Formerly CIP. Uk |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-280) and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Homosexuality and the arts.
|
| LC no. |
2010017792 |
| ISBN |
0199830444 (electronic bk) |
|
1306168481 (ebook) |
|
9780199830442 (electronic bk) |
|
9781306168489 (ebook) |
|
