{eye candy} – Page 30 – { feuilleton }

The recurrent pose 3

It’s that man again… Another instance of the perennial Flandrin pose, this time from photographer MJ Cardozo. The earlier examples are linked below.

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• The recurrent pose archive

Philip Core and George Quaintance

A solidly gay day for secondhand books with the discovery of two relatively scarce items by gay artists. Philip Core is probably more well-known as a writer than a painter, author of The Original Eye: Arbiters of Twentieth Century Taste and the masterful Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (both 1984 and both out of print, unfortunately). His paintings predominantly feature unclothed men but present these in a far more painterly style than one usually sees from gay artists, the approach too often being a kind of kitsch photo-realism that tends towards soft (or hard) porn. A shame that this volume is rather battered as it seems to be a rare book. Core died of AIDS in 1989 but his paintings are still being bought and sold, gay art being one genre that never lacks for an audience.

The Bermuda Triangle by Philip Core (1982).

Continue reading “Philip Core and George Quaintance”

Fred Holland Day

The Seven Words: “It is finished!” (1912).

Photographer and publisher Fred Holland Day (1864–1933) enjoyed the iconography of Easter enough to stage his own crucifixion tableau with friends, as well as producing a series of seven pictures based on Christ’s last words, of which the final poignant number is shown above. His 1898 crucifixion is homoerotic enough it might still cause a stir among today’s gay-hating cross-wavers if they saw it, and he had the audacity to play the part of Christ himself.

No surprise, then, that he also enjoyed photographing the unclothed bodies of young men which caused some controversy at the time. The examples of his pictures below display the same ritualistic qualities seen in some of Derek Jarman‘s films, especially the more formal compositions of The Angelic Conversation. I’ve never seen any acknowledgment of Day’s work from Jarman but, given that they both concerned themselves with Saint Sebastian, I’d be surprised if he wasn’t at least aware of these pictures.