Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas
This bold, globe-spanning survey is the first book to thoroughly explore the radical, long-standing interdependence between art and homosexuality. It draws examples from the full range of the Western tradition, including classical, Renaissance, and contemporary art, with special focus on the modern era. It was in the modern period, when arguments about homosexuality and the avant-garde were especially public, that our current conception of the artist and the homosexual began to take shape, and almost as quickly to overlap. Not a chronology of gay or lesbian artists, the book is a fascinating and sophisticated account of the ways two conspicuous identities have fundamentally informed one another. Art and Homosexuality discusses many of modernism's canonical figures—painters like Courbet, Picasso, and Pollock; writers like Whitman and Stein—and issues, such as the rise of abstraction, the avant-garde's relationship to its patrons and the political exploitation of art. It shows that many of the core ideas that define modernism are nearly indecipherable without an understanding of the paired identities of artist and homosexual. Illustrated with over 175 b/w and color images that range from high to popular culture and from Ancient Greece to contemporary America, Art and Homosexuality punctures the platitudes surrounding discussions of both aesthetics and sexual identity and takes our understanding of each in stimulating new directions.
1100258855
Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas
This bold, globe-spanning survey is the first book to thoroughly explore the radical, long-standing interdependence between art and homosexuality. It draws examples from the full range of the Western tradition, including classical, Renaissance, and contemporary art, with special focus on the modern era. It was in the modern period, when arguments about homosexuality and the avant-garde were especially public, that our current conception of the artist and the homosexual began to take shape, and almost as quickly to overlap. Not a chronology of gay or lesbian artists, the book is a fascinating and sophisticated account of the ways two conspicuous identities have fundamentally informed one another. Art and Homosexuality discusses many of modernism's canonical figures—painters like Courbet, Picasso, and Pollock; writers like Whitman and Stein—and issues, such as the rise of abstraction, the avant-garde's relationship to its patrons and the political exploitation of art. It shows that many of the core ideas that define modernism are nearly indecipherable without an understanding of the paired identities of artist and homosexual. Illustrated with over 175 b/w and color images that range from high to popular culture and from Ancient Greece to contemporary America, Art and Homosexuality punctures the platitudes surrounding discussions of both aesthetics and sexual identity and takes our understanding of each in stimulating new directions.
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Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas

Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas

by Christopher Reed
Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas

Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas

by Christopher Reed

Hardcover(New Edition)

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Overview

This bold, globe-spanning survey is the first book to thoroughly explore the radical, long-standing interdependence between art and homosexuality. It draws examples from the full range of the Western tradition, including classical, Renaissance, and contemporary art, with special focus on the modern era. It was in the modern period, when arguments about homosexuality and the avant-garde were especially public, that our current conception of the artist and the homosexual began to take shape, and almost as quickly to overlap. Not a chronology of gay or lesbian artists, the book is a fascinating and sophisticated account of the ways two conspicuous identities have fundamentally informed one another. Art and Homosexuality discusses many of modernism's canonical figures—painters like Courbet, Picasso, and Pollock; writers like Whitman and Stein—and issues, such as the rise of abstraction, the avant-garde's relationship to its patrons and the political exploitation of art. It shows that many of the core ideas that define modernism are nearly indecipherable without an understanding of the paired identities of artist and homosexual. Illustrated with over 175 b/w and color images that range from high to popular culture and from Ancient Greece to contemporary America, Art and Homosexuality punctures the platitudes surrounding discussions of both aesthetics and sexual identity and takes our understanding of each in stimulating new directions.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780195399073
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 05/26/2011
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 6.80(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Christopher Reed is Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture at Pennsylvania State University. His previous books include Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture and Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity, winner of a 2005 Historians of British Art prize.

Table of Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. VARIETIES OF 'HOMOSEXUALITY'; VARIETIES OF 'ART'
· INITIATORY HOMOSEXUALITY: THE 'SAMBIA' OF NEW GUINEA & ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME
· GENDER-TRANSCENDENT HOMOSEXUALITY: POLYNESIA & NORTH AMERICA
· PERFORMATIVE HOMOSEXUALITY: TOKUGAWA JAPAN

CHAPTER 2. BEFORE MODERNITY
· EARLY CHRISTIAN AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE
· THE RENAISSANCE
· 17TH- AND 18TH-CENTURY EUROPE

CHAPTER 3. INVENTING THE MODERN: ART AND SEXUAL IDENTITY IN THE LATE- NINETEENTH CENTURY
· IMAGERY AT MID-CENTURY
· INVENTING THE AVANT-GARDE
· ARTISTS AT MID-CENTURY
· THE MODERN ARTIST AS HOMOSEXUAL
· AESTHETES AND ART JOURNALS

CHAPTER 4. SECRETS AND SUBCULTURES, 1900-1940
· ECHOES OF AESTHETICISM
· AVANT-GARDE CONTINGENTS
· SEXUALITY AND RACE
· STRATEGIES OF CODING: ABSTRACTION AND SYMBOLS
· THE LIMITS OF THE AVANT-GARDE
· THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE OPEN SECRET
· THE OPEN SECRET AND MASS CULTURE

CHAPTER 5. THE SHORT TRIUMPH OF THE MODERN: 1940-1965
· EXPRESSION AND REPRESSION IN POST-WAR ART
· POPULAR IMAGERY, POP ART, AND THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNISM
· CAMP AND CRITICISM

CHAPTER 6. THE AVANT-GARDE AND ACTIVISM: 1965-1982
· ART VS. POLITICS
· FEMINISTS, LESBIANS, AND FEMALE SENSIBILITY
· IDENTITY AND SENSIBILITY

CHAPTER 7. THE AIDS DECADE: 1982-1992
· AIDS AND THE AVANT-GARDE
· AIDS, ACTIVISM, AND VISUAL CULTURE
· HOMOPHOBIA AND VISUAL CULTURE

CHAPTER 8. QUEER AND BEYOND
· QUEER
· FRAGMENTATION FROM WITHIN
· PRESSURE FROM WITHOUT
· WORKING THROUGH DIFFERENCE: THE BLACK MALE NUDE

BIBLIOGRAPHY & NOTES
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