Albert Lewin’s 1945 film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray showed Jul 10 and James Whale’s 1931 classic Frankenstein is set for Jul 17, with films by Cocteau, Fellini and others still to come.
Faceless painting gay painter series#
The National Gallery has planned a series of lectures and films over the summer to complement the special exhibition. Meanwhile Salvador Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) is gut-wrenchingly prophetic of the devastation that awaited Spain. Canadian painter Alex Colville’s evokes the horror of the holocaust in his haunting Bodies in a Grave, Belsen. Much of the so-called “degenerate” art is far more powerful than the stately classicist works.Īnd if the eerie echoes of “Seig Heil” that seep from the viewing room of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will aren’t enough to send chills up your spine, the final section of the exhibition, appropriately entitled “The Charnel House,” certainly will. In the exhibit as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, it’s the image of the decaying core that packs the greatest punch. On the outside, Dorian Gray is the ideal image of perpetual youth and vigour, but at his core, as his portrait reveals, there is only decay. One of the archetypal metaphors of the exhibition comes from gay literary history: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. But it’s also an important reminder to step back and see who’s left out by the state’s official culture.
It’s disquieting for those of us obsessed with physical perfection to see something of ourselves in the art co-opted by homophobic totalitarian regimes. Ditto the photos of sleek Soviet gymnasts. Austrian painter Albert Janesh’s Water Sport, with its buff rowers in tighty whities, glorifies the male body and anticipates the development of 1950s gay muscle mags. The most homoerotic works in the collection served as Nazi and Stalinist propaganda pieces of idealized male virility. The official classicism espoused by the totalitarian regimes is set in opposition to avant-garde works, which were labelled “degenerate” and marked for purging.īut the divisions are never clean. The strength of the 1930s exhibition is in its exploration of the tensions within and among competing social and artistic movements as they responded to the science and politics of the day. But the exhibition reminds us with devastating clarity how quickly the freedom enjoyed by minorities can be lost in times of political and economic turbulence. The 1920s and early 1930s saw significant advances in sexual freedom for the gay and lesbian community, particularly in Berlin. Queer art lovers and politicos will find much to ponder. The exhibition looks how the tension between competing artistic currents of the time represented the rise and fall of this “new man,” set against the spectres of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. That push was paired with a quest to subsume humans into the faceless, collective masses of a totalitarian utopia. The 1930s was marked by quests for biological and social perfection of the species with the development of “the new man” through, among other things, eugenics - selective breeding designed to nudge evolution along. It explores the quest for racial perfection as it played out in the art and politics of pre-war Europe, particularly in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union.
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