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| Youth Sitting on a Stone, by F. Holland Day (1907) |
What in the world makes someone a gay artist? I'm talking about does the art make them gay or the fact that they are gay make them a gay artist? Can a man be straight but a gay artist?
One of the ideas that I’ve been grappling with my own work
is the idea that there is no clear definition of what makes something “gay.”
For example, there’s an idea for art historians put forward by an article by an
author by the name of Roland Barthes, that I had to read in graduate school,
called “Death of the Author.” The theory basically is that whenever an image or
work of art is seen by someone other than the artist the meaning changes for
that work of art because of who that person is who’s viewing it.
There’s an artist is a little bit of an enigma, named F.
Holland Day. He worked in the beginning of the 20th century at a
time when homosexuality was suspect but it was still a big part of high
culture. Again, as in other artists, it’s kind of the don’t ask don’t tell
policy. I did some research on this artist and I’m not completely convinced he
was a so-called “gay” man. It almost seems to me from the what little I’ve read
that he might’ve actually been a sexual or at least completely repressed in
terms of his sexuality.
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| Tommaso Dei Cavalieriby Michelangelo |
This is interesting because I think the same thing is
true about Michelangelo and there are documents that support that Michelangelo
was attracted to men but never actually acted on it. I base this on some
letters that he wrote to a young man named Tommaso Cavalieri.
So looking at F Holland Day’s photographs the images in them
are very romantic portrayals of young beautiful man. He also has a couple of
gnarly looking Jesus portraits but all of them have for me a strong erotic
content based on looking at the human body, especially the male body. Today
most of his models would be labeled “twinks.” However the symbolism of his work
is based in some sort of Greco-Roman 19th to early 20th
century ideal of what male beauty is.
Doing an Internet search for his work it’s interesting to
note that some of his photographs have a sort of 19th century
ethnographic quality to them. In some ways his photographs are very similar to
the paintings of the Orientalists such as Gerome, Delacroix, and Ingres. He had
some portraits in which he’s dressed up as an Arab and he has some
self portraits as Jesus. The temptation for art historians is to read an
awful lot into this.
He also has imagery depicting women, however, none of the
imagery concerning women or depicting women seems to have the same erotic
charge that his portraits of young men have.
He does even have one portrait of a Marine that in my head I
immediately thought of “The Village People,” is sort of gay stereotype of the
sailor. And this Marine is pretty hot and has some good hair.
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| A Marine 1912 Fred Holland Day |
So in conclusion, I think it’s possible to classify his work
as having homoerotic tones to it but I’m not sure if you would actually call
him a gay artist. I don’t think that that label would’ve even existed at that
point in time, obviously. In the same way that in the Renaissance there were many
artists who expounded on and supported the idea of male to male love and
relationships based in a Greek historical context. However, they just didn’t
think about it as either being gay or straight at that point in time. Maybe it
was just too closeted but I also suspect that there was a tolerance for
homoerotic imagery in Renaissance art and in the 19th century as
long as one didn’t get all Oscar Wilde about it.
