Synopses & Reviews
An entirely new interpretation of modern American portraiture based on the history of sexual difference.Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, companion volume to an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, traces the defining presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture through a seductive selection of more than 140 full-color illustrations, drawings, and portraits from leading American artists. Arcing from the turn of the twentieth century, through the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and to the present, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed or tacitly ignored, even by the most progressive sectors of our society: the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating American modernism.
Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists such as Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more—in addition to artists of more recent works such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Cass Bird. The authors argue that despite the late-nineteenth-century definition and legal codification of the “homosexual,” in reality, questions of sexuality always remained fluid and continually redefined by artists concerned with the act of portrayal. In particular, gay and lesbian artists—of but not fully in the society they portrayed—occupied a position of influential marginality, from which vantage point they crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits. Their resistance to society's attempt to proscribe them forced them to develop new visual vocabularies by which to code, disguise, and thereby express their subjects' identities—and also their own.
Bringing together for the first time new scholarship in the history of American sexuality and new research in American portraiture, Hide/Seek charts the heretofore hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on American art and portraiture and creates the basis for the necessary reassessment of the careers of major American artists—both gay and straight—as well as of portraiture itself.
Synopsis
A landmark examination of iconic and provocative portraits by Warhol and Mapplethorpe, presented side by side and in depth for the first time
Synopsis
This exciting and original book is the first to consider the work of Warhol and Mapplethorpe together, with a focus on their provocative portraits and self-portraits.
Synopsis
Andy Warhol (1928andndash;1987) and Robert Mapplethorpe (1946andndash;1989) are well known for significant work in portraiture and self-portraiture that challenged gender roles and notions of femininity, masculinity, and androgyny. This exciting and original book is the first to consider the two artists together, examining the powerful portraits they created during the vibrant and tumultuous era bookended by the Stonewall riots and the AIDS crisis. Several important bodies of work are featured, including Warholandrsquo;s
Ladies and Gentlemen series of drag queen portraits and his collaboration with Christopher Makos on
Altered Image, in which Warhol was photographed in makeup and wigs, and Mapplethorpeandrsquo;s photographs of Patti Smith and of female body builder Lisa Lyon. These are explored alongside numerous other paintings, photographs, and films that demonstrate the artistsandrsquo; engagement with gender, identity, beauty, performance, and sexuality, including their own self-portraits and portraits of one another.
and#160;
Essays trace the convergences and divergences of Warhol and Mapplethorpeandrsquo;s work, and examine the historical context of the artistsandrsquo; projects as well as their lasting impact on contemporary art and queer culture. Firsthand accounts by the artistsandrsquo; collaborators and subjects reveal details into the making and exhibition of some of the works presented here. With an illustrated timeline highlighting key moments in the artistsandrsquo; careers, and more than 90 color plates of their arresting pictures, this book provides a fascinating study of two of the most compelling figures in 20th-century art.
About the Author
Jonathan D. Katz is director of the visual studies doctoral program, State University of New York–Buffalo. Katz founded and directed the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University and was the founding chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies at City College of San Francisco, the first department of lesbian and gay studies in the United States. The first tenured professor in gay and lesbian studies in the nation, he has written extensively on postwar American art, culture, and sexuality for a wide range of publications in the United States and Europe. Katz lives in Philadelphia, PA.
David C. Ward is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Charles Wilson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic and has published articles on a variety of topics in history and culture and on such figures as Hart Crane, Marsden Hartley, Ernest Hemingway, and Gerhard Richter. Ward is also a poet and critic who has been widely published in Anglo-American literary magazines.
Table of Contents
Foreword–
Martin E. SullivanHide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture–Jonathan Katz
CATALOGUE
Before Difference, 1870–1918
New Geographies/New Identities
Abstraction
Postwar America: Accommodation and Resistance
Stonewall and More Modern Identities
Postmodernism
Notes
For Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index