Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark

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Peter Reed from a 1977 photo shoot for After Dark magazine. The Flickr page this is from also has photos of the dancer by Robert Mapplethorpe (no longer…see below), while the After Dark pools have a wealth of scanned material ranging from the sexy to the iniquitous, with hair and fashion crimes aplenty.

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David Meyer in Salomé.

And if you make your way past the shirtless models and naked ballet boys, the 1975 pages have a nice set of pictures from Lindsay Kemp’s Salomé which I hadn’t seen before.

Update: Unfortunately Hilly Blue has had to delete all his Flickr pages but he’s now blogging here. He explains what happened in the comments below.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Salomé archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Felix D’Eon
Dancers by John Andresen
Youssef Nabil
Images of Nijinsky
The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953

The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949

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Man Emerging from a Tree Stump (no date).

Yet another artist I’d be unlikely to have come across had it not been for the web. Andrey Avinoff’s art manages to be both mystical and homoerotic in equal measure and there’s a good selection of his paintings and drawings to be found in a collection at the Kinsey Institute. Avinoff was an entomologist and worked as director of the Carnegie Museum along with that other famous butterfly enthusiast, Vladimir Nabokov. He was also a friend of Alfred Kinsey’s for many years and the art which Kinsey collected seems (perhaps inevitably) more sexual than the artist’s mystical work or his butterfly pictures. As with other artists discussed here, we learn that “he may have been homosexual”, an equivocation which seems particularly silly when looking at his study of a (naked) young man entitled My Special Longing. He was also a Nijinsky enthusiast and one of his portraits has the dancer as a naked faun bestride an overgrown butterfly.

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left: Standing Nude Man with Figure of Saint (no date); right: Nijinsky (1918).

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