George Quaintance – Page 3

Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).

No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that women were depicted in late Victorian and Symbolist art, with one chapter, “Connoisseurs and Bestiality and Serpentine Delights”, being devoted to representations of women with animals, especially snakes. The story of Eve and the Serpent prompts many of these latter images, of course, while scenes with other creatures seem intended to demonstrate the Victorian attitude that woman was closer to the brute beasts than man and could often be found conspiring with them to bring down her masculine masters. Continue reading “Men with snakes”

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”