Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture

Jonathan Katz has co-curated Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, which is currently on until February 13, 2010.

Incoming Speaker John Boehner and the Catholic League objected and achieved a partial censorship.

Some images of interest (Click on the link below for more details):

Romaine Brooks.  Self Portrait, 1923.


















Janet Flanner, aka Genet, by Berenice Abbott, 1927



















Dancing Sailors, 1917, by Charles Demuth.

Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991, by Nan Goldin

I Look Just Like My Daddy, 2003, by Cass Bird

• Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.  http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/hideseek/index.html.
• Brian Logan.  “Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America”.  The Guardian, 5 December 2010.  www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/05/hide-seek-gay-art-smithsonian

Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980) photographer, set & costume designer.

Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was the son of a prosperous timber merchant. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, where he read history, art and architecture but left without a degree.

The first photograph that he sold was of the Shakespearean scholar, George Rylands, in drag as the Duchess of Malfi. It was published in Vogue. Beaton worked regularly for Vogue from 1927 in addition to having his own studio. He became known for his fashion, society and royalty photographs.

In 1934 Gerald Berniers, under the name Adela Quebec, published his spoof novel, The Girls of Radcliff Hall, which featured himself, Beaton and others as lesbian schoolgirls at an institution named after the famous writer. Beaton attempted to have all the copies destroyed and it became a very rare book until reprinted in 2000.

Five years later Beaton published his own spoof of the memoirs by minor royals that were popular at the time. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton features photographs of Beaton and some of his friends crossdressed as the characters in the book.

During the war Beaton worked for the Ministry of Information. Later he photographed many Hollywood and Broadway stars. He expanded into set and costume design for both stage and film, and won Oscars for the costumes in Gigi, 1958 and My Fair Lady, 1964. He was an influence on photographers Angus McBean and David Bailey. He had affairs with Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo.

He was knighted in 1972, and two years later was paralysed on the right side of his body after a stroke. He died in his sleep at age 76.

• Adela Quebec. The Girls of Radcliff Hall. Privately published 1934. Reprinted as by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt Berners. London: Montcalm, 2000.
• Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Bülop, Baroness. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton. London: B.T Batsford. 1939. Reprint: London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson xiv, 105 pp1960.
• “Cecil Beaton”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Beaton.
• “The Girls of Radcliff Hall”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girls_of_Radcliff_Hall.

Noël Coward (1899 – 1973) and Gerald du Maurier (1873 - 1934) …

at a theatrical garden party in the late 1920s.

This photograph is found on page 40 of Terry Castle.  Noël Coward & Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits.  New York: Columbia University Press 1996.

Madame X

This photograph is online at: http://www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=8&FP=46801092&E=2K1KTS6URHS5K&SID=2K1KTS6URHS5K&New=T&Pic=2&SubE=2C6NU0CVNJC3

It is exhibited at Toulouse, musée d'Art moderne et contemporain, les Abattoirs.

The author is Joël-Peter Witkin (1939 – ).

Title: Madame X.

While, of course it is a riff on the Venus de Milo, I think that it captures well the ambivalence of the male gaze with regard to androgyny.  The fact that it is a modified photograph, and thus more ‘realistic’ than a statue, that it combines ‘hermaphrodite’ in the art sense with body mutilation that accidentally happened to Greek and Roman statues over 2,000 years.   Wasn’t it the 1953 Julius Caesar, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz with Marlon Brando, that featured armless statues of the Venus de Milo type as if the Romans actually created them like that?