Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

The most dramatic moment of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” comes when we reach the leatherfolk, notably Robert Morris’ untitled self-portrait (1974) in which he presents himself as a spiked-collar-and-chains-wearing he-man, Catherine Opie’s Being and Having (Papa Bear, Chief, Jake, and Chicken) (1991), and Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of two gay leathermen, each of which is hung near around the exhibition’s halfway point. As I noted yesterday, in the couple of galleries that open “Hide/Seek,” meek avoidance is the preferred presentation.

Opie and Mapplethorpe’s participation in leather communities is well-chronicled, and Morris’ representation of himself is leathery to the point of caricature. (And he knew it: “As for memorable images, one I consider a total failure and mistake, the 1974 poster of myself with chains and a Nazi helmet, seems destined for a Guggenheim T-shirt,” the exhibition catalogue quotes Morris as saying in 1994.)

This more confrontational work is installed in-and-out of chronological sequence. That’s fine because the work is a hinge which makes the point that somewhere between Johns and Rauschenberg’s generation and the generation of artists that grew up after Stonewall, something in American society changed. The coming-out movement began and quickly caught on. Gays and lesbians revealed themselves to be done with the coded, indirectness of early presentation. Even the flouting of gender norms, long a part of the portraiture of gays and lesbians, was more aggressive (as Opie’s work demonstrates). These middle-of-the-exhibition works suggest that the gay and lesbian leather communities may be more important to changing norms of gay-and-lesbian presentation in American art than is typically considered. (Even work that relies upon coded references is cheekier in its references: Keith Haring’s 1989 Unfinished Painting (below), which coyly refers to both a community’s unraveling and the stereotype of gays as decorators.)

Another way to think of this point in the show is as a reminder that gays and lesbians had to feel free to be themselves before they could fully assert their rights to the privileges heterosexuals take for granted, things like marriage. (There is a specific history of the margins pushing the gay community forward: Drag queens and subcultural ‘others’ led the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn; did the leather community lead the way toward new modes of self-representation?)

It’s hard to imagine any artist and couple being more assertive in any portrait than Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979, above) — no psuedonyms here, no first-names-only, but Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, if you please — Mapplethorpe’s masterpiece of a leather couple in front of their bourgeois drapes.  Beyond Mapplethorpe’s picture, the push for equality was at a high point: The next year, the Democratic National Convention adopted a pro-gay rights plank as part of the party platform, a gay man, Mel Boozer, addressed the Democratic National Convention and presidential candidate Sen. Teddy Kennedy aggressively courted gay and lesbian Democrats, a first. These new, more confrontational portraits reflected nascent changes in America.

And then it all changed when AIDS arrived. The focus of a community became not equality but the fight to not die. The show’s more-or-less final gallery is dominated by a semi-hidden hanging of AA Bronson’s Felix, June 5, 1994 (below). The piece shows Felix’s corpse, so devastated by wasting that Felix’s caretakers couldn’t even close his eyes after he died. (Also: We’re back to a portrait of a one-named man.) Just 15 years after gays and lesbians had presented themselves with muscular assertion, at the point of an on-their-terms mix of subcultural assertion and bourgeois bliss, Bronson’s presentation of a helpless AIDS-ravaged corpse is devastating.

The confrontation we see in Mapplethorpe’s or Morris’ works is a part of these AIDS-era works, but the way in which artists confront us has changed. Felix Gonzalez-Torres reminds Americans of the shamefulness of our government’s to AIDS by presenting his lover Ross as a stack of candy. As we take and consume a piece of the artwork, we are participating in diminishing Ross a second time. Bronson’s portrait of Felix isn’t just confrontational because a corpse is staring out at us, but at seven feet-by-14-feet, the work insists upon your attention — and that you look at what AIDS is doing to your fellow man. It is the exhibition’s least-known masterpiece, an artwork that is likely forever lodged in my visual memory as inexorably as the Mona Lisa.

As important as “Hide/Seek” is, there are some obvious absences: The show calls out for major Rauschenbergs, but there are only minor ones here. (Procuring loans of key portraits or self-portraits, such as 1955’s Untitled Combine (Man with White Shoes) or 1955-58’s Odalisk are notoriously difficult because of the delicateness of the works.) Both David Wojnarowicz and Catherine Opie are represented by important pieces, but neither is represented by their best works: Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (One day this kid…), a self-portrait, would have been a nice fit. Opie is the most important self-portraitist of the last quarter-century. It’s disappointing that none of them are in the show. Finally, the last decade is represented by only three works: A terrific Glenn Ligon painting that excerpts James Baldwin and photographs by Cass Bird and Jack Pierson.

The National Portrait Gallery is typically a middlebrow history museum, content to offer frippery such as photographs of Elvis Presley embarrassingly co-organized by a commercial gallery. In recent years its attempts to historicize the recent-present have been wincing missteps, particularly 2008’s “RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture,” a silly attempt at pop cultural relevance. “Hide/Seek” is welcome evidence that when the NPG puts its mind to it, it can present important exhibitions that are about art, art history and American history.

Previously on MAN: Part one: “Hide/Seek” reveals history, kills right-wing rhetoric. Part two: “Hide/Seek”: The furtive gaze.

In the first part of my review of the National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” I noted that the exhibition argues that there are few if any artistic techniques or references that are exclusive to gays and lesbian who make portraits of gays and lesbians vis-a-vis American portraiture as a whole.  That doesn’t mean that over the last 130 years there’s been a sameness in the representation of gays and lesbians and heterosexuals. “Hide/Seek” smartly reveals American history by chronicling how men and women assigned to otherhood by the dominant heterodoxy have presented themselves.

The furtiveness of sitters in the exhibition’s first gallery is overwhelming, even uncomfortable. “Hide/Seek” opens with Thomas Eakins’ Salutat (1898, above, collection Addison Gallery of American Art), a painting of a strapping young boxer being admired by a crowd. Ostensibly he’s being ogled because he’s about to fight for the gentleman’s entertainment. But on closer inspection it’s obvious that he’s the target of numerous lusty gazes: The two men standing to the left of the fighter are examining the boxer’s exposed buttocks and his lats. The men in the stands are uninterested in the fighter’s face; they’re captivated by his body. The seated fight-fans who comes closest to looking out at the viewer is facing forward but looks out of the corners of his eyes at the boxer’s body. Furtiveness as a dominant strategy, even a theme in early-20thC gay and lesbian portraiture, is established from the get-go.

The rest of the first gallery or two is filled with the skewed glance. Romaine Brooks hides her own eyes in her famous 1923 self-portrait. A young Lincoln Kirstein sits for Walker Evans with his eyes downcast. Grant Wood’s Arnold Comes of Age (1930) features a preppy-looking lad set against a homoerotic background. Arnold looks just off to our left, almost able to meet us, but not quite. Again and again Carl Van Vechten’s gay and lesbian subjects gaze off to stage left or stage right, particularly Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith and Hugh Laing and Antony Tudor (at right). The subtext of the show’s first couple galleries is uncomfortably direct: These people felt so acutely different from the world around them — and knew it — that they were uncomfortable with meeting a certain intensity of examination.

Only rarely do portrait subjects directly visually engage the artist portraying them: A cross-dressing Marcel Duchamp, an actor playing a role, looks right out at Man Ray. Berenice Abbott’s subjects Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes look right out at her, but the exhibition’s curators remind us that these are Americans in Paris, where sexual difference was more accepted.

Other rare examples of confrontation in these first galleries are a reminder of how certain kinds of otherness afforded safety from the social mores of the privileged. One of the most direct gazes in the show’s opening galleries comes from a black man who posed nude for John Singer Sargent around 1917-20. He stands with his side facing Sargent, but looks over and down at the viewer. It’s an arresting drawing — and a reminder that a man could be painted nude, confrontationally and with a bit of his phallus on view if he was so far outside Sargent’s (and his clients’) mainstream that the artist could, well, get away with it. (In the show’s catalogue, co-curator Jonathan Katz notes that Winslow Homer also found black men “safe” to present in homoerotic poses.)

As the show continues that changes — but it takes a while. Agnes Martin portrays a woman, possibly herself, behind a mask that recalls the one Picasso put on Gertrude Stein. Slowly but surely, the exhibitions subjects begin to meet our gaze. David Hockney confronts us not with his subjects’ eyes, but with abstracted warmth and affection in We Two Boys Together Clinging. Jasper Johns looks out through a carefully mediated self-portrait in Souvenir (1964), a collage that reminds us of the indirectness of much portraiture of gays and lesbians, but that points the way toward what comes next because ultimately Johns is looking out at us.

Continued in part three.

In 1914, Marsden Hartley wanted to make a memorial portrait of German Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, who had been killed in the early days of World War I. Hartley would have quickly realized the obvious problems with paying pictorial tribute to von Freyburg, his likely lover: Von Freyburg had been German and thus he was (or was about to be) an enemy soldier. He was also, well, a man and so a memorial portrait would have to be indirect. Hartley found a way and fed his grief into a series of paintings now known as the German Officer Paintings, canvases that were among the earliest American abstractions.

One of them, Painting No. 47, Berlin (1914-15, at right) is prominently featured in the National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Curated by Jonathan Katz of the University of Buffalo and the NPG’s David C. Ward, the exhibition is important and thrilling, one of the best shows of the year.

“Hide/Seek” turns seeing into noticing by highlighting 120 years of hints, techniques and tropes that American artists have used to refer to otherhood. For example, Hartley used code-as-abstraction: von Freyburg isn’t in Hartley’s portrait, but his helmet, his regimental flag, insignia and so on are, all abstracted down to mere semiotics.

Of course, there’s nothing particularly gay or lesbian about coded references in art. Dutch genre painters were notorious for their use of coded, often punny symbols. Portrait painters have long used semiotics to refer to their sitters’ professions or interests. It isn’t new or surprising that painters use and update other painters’ techniques.

Where “Hide/Seek” makes it mark is in refuting a position first put forth by conservatives in the 1980s. In a superb catalogue essay, Katz notes that Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) helped inaugurate the culture wars by equating homosexual with art with AIDS. Helms, a little-known congressman named Larry Craig and other conservatives swiftly moved to establish ‘gay’ and ‘artist’ as something apart from American. They equated their formula with fear, death and un-Americanness and segregated gays and artists into a rhetorical Manzanar.

With “Hide/Seek,” Katz and Ward wield research and scholarship to dismantle that bombast and leave fact-based history in its place. Katz and Ward’s exhibition effectively argues that queerness — or “difference” to use their word — has been a part of American art history almost since our art matured into something distinctly American. “Hide/Seek” demonstrates that to segregate ‘gay’ from ‘American’ is to willfully obscure a thorough understanding of our nation and its art.

Seemingly paradoxically, “Hide/Seek” reveals that the more intensely scholars burrow into specific micro-art histories, the more we learn about our broader American historical and art historical narrative. There are few — if any — techniques and references that are exclusive to gay artists or that gay artists have trafficked in to the exclusion of all others. Gay artists have been informed by straight artists, and vice versa. In other words, this exhibition tells an American story, and in so doing smartly underscores the social and cultural fluidity of which Americans are so proud.

The Hartley above is a good example. Despite the exhibition catalogue’s description of Hartley’s German Officer Paintings as being “wholly original,” they’re not. They were probably informed by a straight guy, in particular by a painting from a West Chester, Pa.-based artist named George Cope.

In 1887, Republican war veteran and West Chester businessman Levi Gheen McCauley commissioned a painting from Cope. McCauley had served the Union with distinction in the Civil War and for reasons that aren’t clear, he wanted to share his personal history with his community. (Active in Republican politics for most of his life and the chairman of the county Republican party, McCauley may have been thinking about running for public office.)

Cope made a ‘portrait’ of McCauley based on his war regalia. Cope’s audience, politically-engaged Pennsylvanians, would have understood what the two medals at the top of the portrait said about the major’s distinguished war service, that he had served with the 7th Pennsylvania regiment, that the two swords indicated a certain breadth of experience — and responsibility. The painting also summoned memories of the subject’s honor and heroism in a tasteful, restrained way. A more traditional portrait of of McCauley, who lost his right arm in a battle at Charles City, Va., might have evoked sympathy rather than respect and might have recalled viewers’ unpleasant war memories. Cope’s painting is apparently one of the earliest American portraits to rely entirely on semiotics for its presentation of its subject. (It is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and is not in the show or catalogue.)

Given the similarities between Hartley’s first German Officer Painting and Cope’s portrait, right down to the swords, tassels and regiment numbers, it’s likely that Hartley saw the Cope somewhere. Cope’s painting isn’t necessarily gay or heterosexual. Hartley’s isn’t either, at least not exactly. Part of what separates Hartley’s painting from Cope’s is that societal strictures forced Hartley into an abstraction, a revelation that tells us a lot about America. Good art survey exhibitions aren’t just about art history, they can be about how art history informs broader histories. This is a very good art exhibition.

Related: The sad cases of two high school yearbook pictures demonstrate how immediately relevant this exhibition is. Part two of my review: The furtive gaze. Part three of my review: Introducing confrontation.

To be continued…