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The Cult of Antinous

Antinous Mondragone (c.130 AD).

Antinous: the face of the Antique
Main Galleries, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
Exhibition: 25.05.06 – 27.08.06

The Emperor Hadrian’s young lover was Antinous, a beautiful youth who drowned mysteriously in the Nile before his 20th birthday. The Emperor, in his grief, commissioned busts and statues of his beloved, and as the cult of Antinous spread throughout the Roman Empire, many more were erected by his subjects.

Today Antinous has more sculptures to his name than almost any other figure from classical antiquity. The earliest of these finds were identified by comparison to tiny coin-portraits, each with an identifying legend, so that by the sixteenth century his aquiline nose and full lips were well known. Yet such was his appeal that as more and more heads, busts and statues were unearthed, there was a temptation to call those of any young pretty boy “Antinous”. Into the modern age, archaeologists and scholars have worked studiously to define the corpus of Antinous portraiture, basing their identification primarily on his hairstyle.

Drawing together loans from all over Europe, this is the first exhibition dedicated to Antique sculpture to be held at the Institute and the first in Britain to explore the mythical image of Antinous. As a subject, Antinous works not only to provide a very human way into looking at Antique sculpture, but also as an introduction to some of the thorniest issues surrounding work of this period. Issues of recognition, restoration and re-naming are all present, and to a degree we can deal with these by simply asking: does it look like him?

This exhibition has been selected by Dr Caroline Vout, of the University of Nottingham, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with essay and entries by Dr Vout, along with extracts from more historical texts.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Emmanuel Frémiet (1824–1910) is chiefly known for his rather prosaic sculptures of animals, some of which are still sold in reproduction today. He also produced a notorious piece in 1887 entitled Gorilla Carrying off a Woman, a precursor of King Kong and all the other rampaging apes of later pulp fiction.

His Lizard ceramic (also 1887) is untypical which is a shame, I’d liked to have seen more in this style. It reminds me of the similarly stylised winged lion on the wonderful cover of Wolf City by Amon Düül II.

Las Pozas and Edward James

Edward James by René Magritte, La Reproduction Interdite (1937).

Art collector Edward James (1907–1984) was a characteristically English eccentric, a kind of 20th century equivalent of William Beckford or Horace Walpole, who was captivated by Surrealism in the 1930s and became a lifelong devotee of the movement. Much of his inherited wealth was spent supporting artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Lenora Carrington and his homes at Monkton House and Walpole Street in London were transformed into showcases of Surrealist decor; Dalí’s famous sofa modelled on Mae West’s lips was designed with assistance from James.

Continue reading “Las Pozas and Edward James”

Surrealism at the Hayward

Something I’ll definitely be going to see, especially given the emphasis on Georges Bataille. Above: André Masson’s cover design for the first issue of Bataille’s Acéphale (1937).

UNDERCOVER SURREALISM: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille. The Hayward Gallery, London, 11 May–31 Jul 2006.

This major Surrealist show, curated by Surrealism specialist Dawn Ades, documents the extraordinary cross-currents of Paris in the late 1920s, through painting, film, sculpture, music, photography, masks, ritual objects – all subject to the provocative vision of Georges Bataille.

Featuring works by Miró, Dalí, Giacometti, Brancusi, Boiffard, de Chirico, Arp, Nadar and Ernst, and an entire room of works by Picasso, it brings together loans from major collections around the world.

Bataille waged war on the “idealism” of the Surrealist movement, using his famous magazine DOCUMENTS as his weapon. Undercover Surrealism takes his magazine’s subversive juxtapositions as its starting point, and shows how Bataille unflinchingly exposed the raw underbelly of the human creative impulse.

The Hayward Gallery first explored Surrealism almost 30 years ago in its legendary 1978 show, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, co-curated by Dawn Ades. Ades, now regarded as one of the world’s greatest Surrealism experts, returns to curate this exhibition.

Evolution of an icon

Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864) was a Neo-Classical painter whose work tends to lack the sensuality of his master, Ingres, yet who managed to produce one picture at least which has been an inspiration to subsequent artists and photographers.

Jeune Homme Assis au Bord de la Mer (Young Man Sitting by the Seashore) was painted in 1836. The simplicity and directness of the rendering is probably intended to be reminiscent of Classical sculpture and the figures seen on Greek pottery and bas-reliefs. There’s nothing in Flandrin’s history to suggest a homoerotic intent but the picture has that effect nonetheless, and it’s to gay artists (and viewers) that the work has mostly appealed since, as can be seen below.

The first (?) copy, usually dated as being from 1900 although it may be earlier, and a very careful imitation of the original pose. Photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden specialised in Classical-themed gay erotica and gave his figure a Biblical allusion by titling the picture Cain. Gloeden’s follower, Gaetano d’Agata, produced his own version.

Ebony and Ivory (1897) by Fred Holland Day.

L’Apocalypse by Pierre Yves Trémois (1961).

Ajitto by Robert Mapplethorpe (1981).

A rare sculpture version, L’Homme de l’Apocalypse by Pierre Yves Trémois (1998).

Finally, here’s my own Fallen Angel picture from 2004 which added wings to the figure.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive
• The gay artists archive

Category: {sculpture}

The Cult of Antinous

Frémiet’s Lizard

Las Pozas and Edward James

Surrealism at the Hayward

Evolution of an icon