Today In Gay History WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12

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Today In Gay History

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 2013

 
1858 – on this date the English Impressionist painter HENRY SCOTT TUKE was born (d; 1929). His most notable work was in the Impressionist style, and he is probably best known for his paintings of nude boys and young men.

Tuke studied at the Slade School of Art under Alphonse Legros and Sir Edward Poynter under scholarship.  He later travelled and painted in Italy in 1880 and Paris where he was encouraged to paint en plein air.  He gained various lucrative commissioned and exhibited his work at the Royal Academy of Art in London.  In 1914 he was elected to full membership at the Academy. Tuke suffered a heart attack in 1928 and died in March, 1929. Towards the end of his life Tuke knew that his work was no longer fashionable. In his will he left generous amounts of money to some of the men who, as boys, had been his models. Today he is remembered mainly for his oil paintings of young men, but in addition to his achievements as a figurative painter, he was an established maritime artist and produced as many portraits of sailing ships as he did human figures. Tuke was a prolific artist—over 1,300 works are listed and more are still being discovered.

Tuke favoured rough, visible brush strokes, at a time when a smooth, polished finish was favoured by fashionable painters and critics. He had a strong sense of colour and excelled in the depiction of natural light, particularly the soft, fragile sunlight of the English summer. Although Tuke often finished paintings in the studio, photographic evidence shows that he worked mainly in the open air, which accounts for their freshness of colour and the realistic effects of sunlight reflected by the sea and on the naked flesh of his models.

In his early paintings, Tuke placed his male nudes in mythological contexts, but the critics found these works to be rather formal, lifeless and flaccid. From the 1890s, Tuke abandoned mythological themes and began to paint local boys fishing, sailing, swimming and diving, and also began to paint in a more naturalistic style. His handling of paint became freer, and he began using bold, fresh color. Although Tuke's paintings of nude youths undoubtedly appealed to his gay friends and art-buyers, they are never explicitly sexual. The models' genitals are almost never shown, they are almost never in physical contact with each other, and there is never any suggestion of overt sexuality. Most of the paintings have the nude models standing or crouching on the beach facing out to sea, so only the back view is displayed.  Tuke is also regarded as an important maritime artist. Over the years, he painted many pictures of the majestic sailing ships, mainly in watercolour, that were common until the 1930s. Tuke was often fascinated with the beauty of a fully rigged ship, and since his childhood could draw them from memory. His decision to move to Falmouth in 1885 was, in part, influenced by the constant presence of the ships there.

After his death, Tuke's reputation faded, and he was largely forgotten until the 1970s, when he was rediscovered by the first generation of openly gay artists and art collectors. He has since become something of a cult figure in gay cultural circles, with lavish editions of his paintings published and his works fetching high prices at auctions.  During the 150th year after H.S. Tuke's birth, there were three exhibitions of his work at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro and the Fine Art Society, New Bond Street,


1892 – DJUNA BARNES, American author born (d. 1982); An American writer who played an important role in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 1930s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T.S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of Lesbian themes and its distinctive writing style. Since Barnes's death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back in print. In the 1920s, Paris was the center of modernism in art and literature; as Gertrude Stein remarked, "Paris was where the twentieth century was." If you thought San Francisco was wild and wonderful in the pre-AIDS 1970s, these women made that look like kindergarten. Let's just say it this way: these women grabbed life by the throat and lived it to the hilt.

Barnes first traveled to Paris in 1921 on an assignment for McCall's Magazine. She interviewed her fellow expatriate writers and artists for U.S. periodicals and soon became a well-known figure on the local scene; her black cloak and her acerbic wit are remembered in many memoirs of the time. Even before her first novel was published, her literary reputation was already high, largely on the strength of her story A Night Among the Horses, which was published in The Little Review and reprinted in her 1923 collection A Book. She was part of the inner circle of the influential salon hostess Natalie Barney, who would become a lifelong friend and patron, as well as the central figure in Barnes's satiric chronicle of Paris lesbian life, Ladies Almanack. Since Barney rarely let it happen any other way, they probably also had a brief affair, but the most important relationship of Barnes's Paris years was with the artist Thelma Wood. Wood was a Kansas native who had come to Paris to become a sculptor, but at Barnes's suggestion took up silverpoint instead, producing drawings of animals and plants that one critic compared to Rousseau. By the winter of 1922 they had set up housekeeping together in a flat on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

Her Ladies Almanack (1928) is a roman à clef about a predominantly lesbian social circle centering on Natalie Clifford Barney's salon in Paris. It is written in an archaic,Rabelaisian style, with Barnes's own illustrations in the style of Elizabethan woodcuts.

Barney appears as "Dame Evangeline Musset", "who was in her Heart one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls as in their Hinder Parts, and their Fore Parts, and in whatsoever Parts did suffer them most, lament Cruelly". "[A] Pioneer and a Menace" in her youth, Dame Musset has reached "a witty and learned Fifty," she rescues women in distress, dispenses wisdom, and upon her death is elevated to sainthood. Also appearing pseudonymously are Elisabeth de Gramont, Romaine Brooks, Dolly Wilde (Oscar's niece) Radclyffe Hall and her partner, Una Troubridge, Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, and Mina Loy. The obscure language, inside jokes, and ambiguity of Ladies Almanack have kept critics arguing about whether it is an affectionate satire or a bitter attack, but Barney herself loved the book and reread it throughout her life.


1906 - Italian poet SANDRO PENNA, (d: 1977) was born on this date. For Penna boyhood was the embodiment of desire and the inspiration for all of his poetry. Penna was born in Perugia, but after the age of sixteen, spent most of his life in Rome. By some standards, his life was uneventful, unambitious, lonely, scruffy, and sordid. One does not have to endorse this view. Penna made firm choices about the two things in life that interested him most: poetry and boys. For several years, he had a competition with Pier Paolo Pasolini to see who could make love with the greater number of boys along the overgrown banks of the Tiber and in the scattered urinals of Rome's ugly urban landscape. It was Pasolini who most consistently championed Penna's poetry. One poem sums up Penna's attitude to criticism of his thematic narrowness. Responding to the complaint that there are always young men in his poems, the poet replies: "Ma io non so parlare d'altre cose. / Le altre cose son tutte noiose" ("But I don't know how to write about anything else. Everything else is just boring"). If his sexual interest is a limitation, it is one he accepts with cheerful equanimity.

1981 - Gay men and Lesbians picket a conference of the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards at the Loaves and Fishes, New Zealand's Wellington Cathedral.

2002 – BILL BLASS, American fashion designer died (b. 1922); An American designer, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Blass was known for his tailoring and innovative combinations of textures and patterns. He was the recipient of many fashion awards, including seven Coty Awards and the Fashion Institute of Technology's Lifetime Achievement Award (1999). Blass began his New York fashion career in 1946 as yet another protégé of Baron de Gunzburg (who was also mentor to Vaslav Nijinsky, prior to Diaghilev, and  later to Calvin Klein). In 1970, after two decades of success in menswear and womenswear, he bought Maurice Rentner Ltd., which he had joined in 1959, and renamed it Bill Blass Limited. Over the next 30 years he expanded his line to include swimwear, furs, luggage, perfume and chocolate. By 1998, his company had grown to a $700-million-a-year business.

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