Traipsing Through The Arts-All Serious 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Search For The Sublime-In The Time Of His Time-The Homoerotic Art Of Marsden Hartley-Portrait Of A German Officer (1914)

By Laura Perkins 

It is no secret at this point that I am wedded to the idea that all serious 20^th art, who knows maybe all art but I won’t go out on a limb for that proposition just as I have acknowledged that the jury is still out of 21^st century art that is massively influenced by digital technology among other trends, is centered on the search for the sexual and erotic courtesy of Mr. Freud’s insights. This seemingly rationale approach to an overview of 20^th century art has had many detractors, nay-sayers, who have not spared the cyber-ink in attempting to refute my theory and have to the extent that anybody has offered a viable alternate been promoting such ideas as the search for the sublime (or in the alternate if they are old-fashioned or if “sublime” seems too sexy a word-beauty) in this wicked old world or touted the now hoary “art for art’s sake” scam. (I am sorry but every time I write that term I have to snicker and think of all the rolled eyes and sneers of those fellow writers around the office water cooler when I mention the expression. Even those who don’t know art from a hold in the wall and last entered, trembling, into an art museum on a fifth-grade yellow bus field trip that they never got over.)   

Of course, the search for the sublime (usually called the search for beauty since most elementary and junior high school students would probably not know or relate to the word “sublime”) is the way art teachers in that just mentioned junior high school would present the subject for most of that century and certainly was a familiar term to me after I took art appreciation classes in college. That “sublime” language had been used from junior high school to the pinnacles of the modern art cabal (museum curators, directors, hired flaks, flattered and hired press agents and pundits, art critics for glossy journals, well-heeled art patrons and the key link in the chain the ever hustling art gallery owners) to avoid the then somewhat socially disturbing use of the word “sex” and “eroticism” to the uninitiated.

Certainly junior high school kids (and their prudish parents) would have freaked out at such terminology, would have red-faced laughed the teacher out of the room if she or he had used the word sublime since those racing hormones would have worked overtime to fathom that word in public. (Those parents would have been more forgiving talking about child molesters or running them out of town on a rail, things like that.) Hence the shorthand “beauty” business with the added distraction of “art for art’s sake” (what does that mean anyway except as gibberish to throw sand in the eyes by dunking everything created for whatever purpose from Impressionism to Op-Pop-Bop Art into the same cauldron). The attacks by the chief advocate of this “art for art’s sake” drone recently has been by one Clarence Dewar a professional art critic at Art Today (and who has made everybody very aware as if it needed comment that he is a pro and I am not, and I have never claimed such status).

(We have received communications from smaller fry spouting forth the same gibberish but either that bilious talk was from well-known art gallery press agents, hired guns to protect the value of unsold and unsaleable merchandise or art majors on the make who need jobs after graduation to get themselves or their parents or both out from that mountain of student debt when said student against all advise decided to cast his or her fate with the muses. We target, a very good word here, Mr. Dewar since he was an acolyte of the well-known late art critic Clement Greenberg who started all the gibberish. Beside we know from very close at hand sources that Mr. Dewar used to plagiarize, maybe still does, Greenberg’s articles merely throwing his name on the top for which he was summarily canned back when journalism standards were higher, and editors had more backbone.)     

Of course as usual with this denizen of the deep Dewar is once again retailing somebody else’s idea specifically if I recall the painter James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s back in the 19^th century (via that same Greenberg who added the theoretical flourishes and some nifty thefts from Vasari’s stockpile of odds and ends not seen since about the 15^th century and I remember waiting for the old “art is timeless” gag to buttress his argument but Dewar at least had enough sense to omit that noise). At least Whistler was using that idea to hustle money to ward off his creditors (and “advertise” his various mistresses’ availability for “escort service” as a high-end procurer of women for the artsy gentlemen clientele). I might add, which I do every time I can just as Dewar touts his professional status, and gladly do it twice here that earlier in his career in the days when he was nothing  but Clement Greenberg’s shill that he would submit copy as his own when he just was regurgitating his boss’ work and was fired for plagiarism. (Check the archives of Art Today for verification.)

What galls Mister Dewar these days is my statement in a review of one of the novelist John Updike’s three volumes of musings on art (the Looking series of 1989, 2005, 2012) that there was plenty of room for homoerotic art under the expansive art tent. I cited the late work of painter Marsden Hartley who whatever else grew immensely from his earlier Maine coast and mountains European rough trade blah-blah as he aged into a fully-coded partisan of homoerotic art as way to explain his personal sexual preferences. Totally legitimate then and now although then fraught with more danger given the extreme legal, social and political implications of revealing your sexual preferences to busy-body eyes, private and public. Dewar (and for this he only deserves to be called by his last name) claims, get this, that there has been no serious homoerotic art since Grecian times and one would have to look very, very carefully to see any such “closeted art,” his term worth the name in the 20^th century. Moreover, and maybe he had been drinking too heavily or gotten too deeply into the bong pipe, Dewar claimed that the coded art of (the few) known homosexuals in the 20^th century including Hartley did not prove decisive.

(To give a better idea what a total prude this so-called professional art critic is, a critic who seems only to have eyes to read my little scribblings and no other, a couple of reviews back I mentioned that 19^th century French painter Vuillard’s Woman In Stripe Dress was done in honor of their affair even though the musical Misia, the woman in the stripe dress, was married and her husband was paying the freight for the painting. A husband who was a patron of Vuillard’s work. Like it was impossible for a painter and what amounted to his model and muse to get under the silk sheets, married or not, friendly with husband or not. What art world does this guy live in. Doesn’t he remember the notorious Madame X painted by Singer Sargent which scandalized all Paris just a few years before. That is what the search for the sublime does to your brain, what is left of it after you smell the paints for too long. Misia and Vuillard would have had a good laugh if they heard about Brother Dewar’s musings.)                   

                  

Back to poor Hartley though who that same Greenberg (although I have never seen Dewar parrot his old boss on this subject) mentioned at a cocktail party in post-war New York long after the bugger had passed away had a face only a mother could love. From the few photographs I have seen when he was younger I am not sure what Greenberg was talking about although older photos show some serious dissipation, the tell-tale drug, drink, debauchery trifecta at work. (Sam Lowell, ever the class clown, responded when I told him about Greenberg’s comment said to me the famed art critic was a man only a mother could love.) Here is where Dewar (parroting Greenberg) is way off the line. He claims that the Greeks, all the various tribes but especially Sparta and Athens, were proud as shown on their dinnerware and earthenware to show all kinds of sexual antics, including scenes of men putting their penises in other men’s bungholes. (Fewer scenes of open lesbian love but what the heck was the isle of Lebos about anyway except to glorify that feminine love.)         

That was then when such sexual practices were rights of passages among certain classes of citizens, men. When even big named philosopher-kings like Plato, Socrates, Cynos had boyfriends morning, noon, and night. The Christian era, all forms of the doctrines and civil society together made such freedoms very danger to display in person or in art, public art anyway. Much easier to dangle the notorious severed head cults started by Salome taking down chaste John the Baptist, Jesus’ friend and some historians say lover and carried down to the present day through a drug-warped cult. Much easier to have a woman of the evening, a tart, like Mary Madeline, who got sainted for her efforts, half naked before repentance. Much easier to using the case of Whistler already mentioned above as a max daddy pimp (expression courtesy of Sam Lowell) and the wolf and fur used to advertise a woman’s availability for sex ever since the Whore of Babylon worked the palaces way back in the day. Much easier to have a painting disguised to the private initiates rather than bring edge of society sexual practices into public view.

Hartley, once he figured out his sexual preferences could hardly have been unaware of the social taboos to speak nothing of the risks of exposure in his growing up Maine, and even in Bohemian Greenwich Village one had to be cautious against getting caught doing the “love that dare not speak its name.” Some of Hartley’s earlier works from farm Maine times show a clear path to the coded language he would use to signal his sexual preferences and desires. The famous Portrait of a German Soldier from significant 1914 is what I want to decode today since it is unambiguous in its longings. It is well-known that Hartley was smitten with a young good-looking German officer who was killed early in World War I. (I checked with the English poet W.H. Auden whose other claim to fame beyond his poetry was his listing, private listings back then of gay men he claimed for a thing he called the “Homintern” Hartley and more importantly that young German officer were both on his listings even though the dates indicate that England was at war with Germany when he made the entries for the pair).               

I try, and maybe not always successfully, to not be too judgmental about the personal lives of painters and sculptors. (a big exception being that pimp Whistler and his art for art’s sake cover from running his mistresses ragged on the streets just to make rent money). Clearly Hartley was drawn, maybe addicted is the better way to put the matter to the “rough trade” side of same-sex relationships. The giveaway, remember everything is coded in 1914, is the triangle and the German cross inside which not only had military significance but was the “badge” of those who frequented the S&M cabarets on the back streets of Berlin. Some of that rough trade was pretty raw from what later devotees like French writer Jean Genet detailed about his wharf rats. The triangle itself means that the wearer is the “passive” one if that is all the badge shows. The iron cross means the wearer is the aggressor. Hartley was the punk and the German soldier did whatever he liked to him. If I am not mistaken Hartley took some social heat not because his was somebody’s slave girl but because his owner was a German at a time when that was not good in places like England or the United States even before the American entry into the war. That he never condemned his slave owner soldier boy was held against him even in Greenwich Village society.

Art critics have mistaken the bottles at the lower left corner for some kind of elixir before sex but I have it on good authority from Sam Lowell’s longtime growing up neighborhood friend Timmy Riley now known as Miss Judy Garland, a drag queen, who runs the notoriously famous KitKat Club in North Beach out in San Francisco that this is actually a “tool” used as part of the penetration process and let’s leave it at that. Maybe Hartley missed that, maybe he was sentimental about it. There is also a question about that number 24 with many assuming that it was Hartley’s lover’s regimental unit. Again the code comes into pay since those numbers usually represent the fact that oral sex is part of the proceedings. I think even this little without getting into the symbolism of the shield and the whips and chains that we are witnessing a great piece of pre-Stonewall coded homoerotic art.

Hartley would as his got older become more open in subject matter and aspiration concerning his sexual desires, look at his lumberjack on the beach, his fisherman, his fishermen with Jesus and a bunch more. Here is the funny thing, maybe not funny but sad in a way even Grady Lamont in the 1980s (not now) had to be coded in his heterosexual sexual references with his famous pine trees delving deeply into loose soil. Thanks Marsden for what you could do when you could do it.