Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, by James M. Saslow, New York, Viking, 1999, $39.95

When I was an undergraduate, reading H.W. Janson's History of Art reminded me of the Old Testament: Both are authoritative and authoritarian texts comprising fragmentary and familial narratives in need of exegesis. I found the History of Art so dense that it seemed accessible only through rote learning. (I recently came across a yellowed flash card that reads: Velasquez, Las Meninas, Spanish, 1656, self portraits & dwarf). But mainly I kept reading because I liked the pictures.

Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts by James M. Saslow, like the fabulously illustrated History of Art, is a millenia-spanning historical epic that transports us from the distant past to the present. Pictures and Passions has many virtues: It is a product of both careful looking and (primarily) synthetic scholarship. It is an admirable corrective to Janson's original pre-feminist, heterosexist volume which implied that artists' lives rarely extended beyond court and cathedral. Straightforwardly (sometimes stylishly) written, it evokes the connections between desire and social circumstance, the play of the personal and political. At its best, it manages to create a panorama of art and cultural history, that elusive cross-disciplinary blend so much on the lips of academics but still so rare.

Saslow's primary interest is the relationship of art and (homo)sexuality, rather than the creation of an all-star line-up for the hetero or homo team. Nevertheless--and not surprisingly--an enlarged queer canon does result from Saslow's broading of the notion of what constitutes homosexual activity, as he delineates it in his introduction:

This book widens the scope of what counts as homosexual relations. Older scholars minimized homosexuality by limiting it to behavior, not feelings. But what matters for us today is less "who did what to whom" than who wanted whom--not just physical acts, but the nature of same-sex desire itself: how it feels, how it may combine or conflict with heterosexual passions, blossom or wither in various social climates. "Homosexuality" here embraces a continuum of emotions between people of the same sex, from homosocial friendship to homoerotic intimacy to genital passion, whether or not they culminate in sexual union.

Two of his three previous books--Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (1986) and The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (1991)--make Saslow, a Renaissance scholar at Queens College in New York, an authority on homoerotic imagery and coding. In Pictures and Passions, he briefly sketches the congruence of Michelangelo's torment about his own homosexuality and the insidious workings of the closet--the connecting link between the social and the personal, between censorship and self-censorship. Art historians have their own part to play in this roundelay. Saslow, for instance, points out that the bevy of Greek nudes in the background of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo is frequently interpreted to represent moral progress from paganism to Christianity, but that the lounging figures also surely represent what the author calls the artist's "irresolvable dilemma" of his love of Christ and his sexual love of men.

Michelangelo's dilemma seems strikingly up-to-date. The (homo)eroticism of his work hardly went unnoticed by his contemporaries; the genitals of his statue of David, perhaps the hunkiest rendition of the biblical hero, also prompted the application of the first fig leaf in history. At the same time, homosexual and bisexual behavior became marks of sophistication among those pursuing the sixteenth-century Dolce Vita. Benvenuto Cellini wrote in his autobiography of a 16-year old male model in drag he took to an artists' party as his date. The Sienese artist Gianantonio Bazzi--dubbed "Il Sodoma" or The Sodomite--kept a retinue of boys and was later chastised by the chronicler Vasari for his brazenness. When one of Bazzi's horses won a race, the artist-owner insisted that he be announced by this unflattering nickname, an incident that Saslow amusingly describes as "arguably the first 'coming out' in Western history." (Less funny is Bazzi's narrow escape from stoning by the crowd.) Saslow notes that by around 1525, this alarming same-sex libertinism emanating from Rome led to the adoption of sodomy and censorship statutes throughout Western Europe. Plus ca change...

Pictures and Passions is divided into eight sections including an introduction, and seven chapters covering Classical Greece and Rome; the Middle Ages; the Renaissance, Asian and Islamic art; the rise of modernity; the modernist, pre-Stonewall 20th century; and post-modernism. The Renaissance material makes for the book's most engaging and elegantly shaped section. (Given Saslow's academic specialty this comes as no surprise.) But by the time World War II rolls around there is too much information, both art historical and social, for the author to deal with convincingly. It feels as if Saslow has run out of steam. (H.W. Janson solved this problem in the early editions of History of Art, by making World War II his cut-off date.) Andy Warhol, for instance, deserves more than three long paragraphs devoted to a rather cliched view of the artist-emperor having no clothes. In fact, contra Saslow, scholars are finding Warhol's pioneering attitudes toward the production of gendered domestic products like wallpaper, increasingly resonant.

No art historian can master the entirety of art history and Saslow's ambition is praiseworthy. If the book's vast breadth is its strength, it is also its weakness; this might have been a three-volume study. Saslow rightly tips his hat to high and low art, (for exampleAlice Austen's snapshot of women in drag or macho gay erotica from Tom of Finland) and to pioneering exhibitions and events such as the World Conference on Lesbian and Gay Culture in 1998. (A surprise to this reader.) But Passions and Pictures is still a rather old-fashioned book in its chronological approach and picture-by-picture interpretive style. Writing a survey may be a losing proposition akin to curating the Whitney Biennial: every commentator knows how he or she would have done it--invariably differently. This may not be the first work of its kind, but it is arguable the best. And it looks like some kind of masterpiece next to one of the few other recent homosexual-art overviews, Emmanuel Cooper's The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986, revised 1994), which is burdened with a leaden narrative and the author's penchant for kitschy male nudity.

Unfortunately The Sexual Perspective also boasts more illustrations than Pictures and Passions. Although the images in Pictures and Passions are well selected and reproduced, there are only 150 of them. Isn't it time such survey-works were produced in hybrid, print and online formats featuring thousands of images? Or consider a print prototype of the early eighties: Peter Selz's Art In Our Times, a relatively inexpensive and little-noticed landmark. Published by Abrams and arranged in thematic, non-chronological double-page spreads, the volume contained thousands of pictures. It was a modern-art data base, a CD-Rom for the analog era. Unfortunately, the cost of reproduction rights has now rendered such visual abundance unaffordable.

Ultimately Saslow's book, too, is modern rather than postmodern: It is the first such survey to appear after the emergence of the new disciplines of queer- and cultural studies as embodied in anthologies like Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures (1997), edited by Martin Duberman. Despite similar originating interests in private activites, Pictures and Passions doesn't reflect its recent coinage. (The most notable overlap between the two studies may be Saslow's dedication of the final sections of the book to very short discussions of the "fringes of the fringe"--ethnic, geographic and sexual minorities within contemporary queerdom.). A larger question Pictures and Passions inadvertently poses is: how do we as gay and lesbian artists and critics move from the margins to the mainstream--that is, to the status of subject within a History of Art that encompasses our lives? When I was an art history graduate student in the seventies struggling to come out and to write a masters' thesis about Francis Bacon, this book might have provided personal and professional succor. Despite the plethora of queer films and novels of the past decade-and-a-half, I doubt that the need for such an affirming resource has diminished one iota.

The Rest of the Story
Art in America, May 2001, p.53

Lesbian Art in America, by Harmony Hammond, New York, Rizzoli International, 2000, $50

Harmony Hammond's Lesbian Art in America is messy, fragmentary, impossibly large in its ambitions and completely compelling. It's exactly the sort of account we need to counteract the exclusionary tendencies of the mainstream gallery-and-museum system. Hammond's sprawling book is less a work of conventional art history than a fervent report by a well-known lesbian artist, activist and player in many of the events she describes. Her ambitions for the book are large: to "document lesbian visual art since 1970 in relationship to gay and woman's liberation, lesbian feminism, mainstream art, feminist art, ethnic-based art movements, queer activism and theory, media attempts to commodify and consume the lesbian (and her art) as chic spectacle, and resistance to this appropriation" and so to further "a dialogue situated within feminist discourse and the history of visual production."

It's a tall order and, as with Hammond's accomplished art, the balanced mix of attention paid to overall form and close-up focus is everything. The author divides her book into three parts, each corresponding to a decade; within each part, she includes four to seven artists' profiles (performance and video artists are excluded.) So the first section "Representing the Lesbian Nation: The 70s," devotes 25 pages to feminist/lesbian social history and 10 pages to artist profiles of Kate Millett, Louise Fishman, Joan Snyder and Fran Winant. The social-history section brings us fascinating material about pioneering journals (e.g., the "lesbian issue" of Heresies) and events (e.g., the famous "battle of the sexes" debate in 1971 that pitted Norman Mailer against Jill Johnston, Germaine Greer and Jacquie Ceballos), while the profiles offer not only biography but also the discussion of still-contested art-issues such as the possibility of lesbian content within abstraction.

If the '70s seems intriguing but distant to those readers who weren't around then, the book's '80s and '90s sections rehearse the familiar modern-to-postmodern shift embodied in the move from representations of the lesbian body to active, queer interventions. Although lesbians (and gay men) found little place in the artworld's straight, male-dominated Neo-Expressionism of the '80s, some--like Nicole Eisenman and Catherine Opie--became quite prominent in the '90s. How did this happen? Who were the dealers, curators and collectors who helped? Did it have anything to do with the media's 1993 Lesbian chic boomlet (insufficiently discussed by Hammond despite prods like a New York magazine cover story), which certainly was a consequence of Bill Clinton's election over George Bush and the Pat Buchanan crowd. And how can social history of the last five years be written from so recent a vantage point? Hammond's dismissal, for example, of inclusive queer, versus lesbian, strategies during the late '90's--"The quick antiquity of Queer was inevitable"--seems premature.

I raise these small points because Hammond's approach is so broad and anthropological. She's refreshingly unconcerned with canon-building, a reminder of the strategic high-stakes game many overview-book-authors unthinkingly adopt. It's simplest to see Lesbian Art in America as a collage or archive-in-distilled form. Like an archive, it's sometimes difficult to navigate. The book's profiles, for instance, are interspersed with the historical text, and even printed on identical paper in identical type, making it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The confusing design functions almost as an emblem of the subjectivity of the art-historical enterprise, especially when the author is so intimately involved with her subject. Still, I was sorry to read in the notes that a timeline describing lesbian art events (in perhaps the most objective of all narrative forms) was axed from the book due to considerations of space. It's a shame, because Lesbian Art in America is a brilliant beginning for a field that demands more intense scrutiny. Hammond's liberation-minded work will help make that needed study possible.