Homoerotic Art by Straight Artists

So, before the outraged comments on this post break the internet, let’s calmly discuss a few things. 

First of all, the word "homoerotic." What we are referring to here is art that has a sexual or sensual approach to the male body, or is appealing in its masculinity and homosocial situation. 

Most of the art here was from a time when art was considered of interest only to men. Art was made for a male audience and male patronage. So any art depicting men in an erotic way was made for other men. At the turn of the last century it was thought that a polite woman would avert her eyes from any depiction of male nudity. That whole idea is false, of course, but it was prevalent for a long time, even into the 20th century, despite the number of successful female artists. But you know how men are.

Secondly, let’s talk about the term "straight." Just as many artists cannot be verified as gay — a term that had little relevance in their time — neither can someone be categorically called straight without the allowance for the hugely different cultural standpoint we have in this century. After all, Oscar Wilde was married with kids. 

So what we are referring to here when we say "straight" is that these men were assumed to be heterosexual at the time they lived. Did they have homosexual desires? Some might say that artists like George Bellows certainly seem likely to have had at least a thought or two in that direction. But other staunch heterosexuals, like Picasso, seem simply to have had an evolved sense of what was sexual and sensual without regard to gender. 

One time I asked a close straight friend if he thought a mutual male friend of ours was attractive. He sputtered that he had no idea. How could he tell if another man was attractive? 

Artists can be ahead of the curve. Maybe there would be less homophobia in the world if straight men could see the sexual beauty of other men freely and without the panic that it seems to engender. Beauty exists. Sexual orientation doesn’t logically have anything to do with being able to appreciate beauty. And finding someone beautiful doesn’t mean you necessarily want that appreciation to lead to sex.

Moreau (1826-1898) was braver than most artists of his era in the proportion of paintings that depicted sensual male beauty. He also created paintings of men that had an ethereal, androgynous appeal, as in the painting above.

Hodler (1853-1915) was a symbolist painter. This impressive figure painting was created in the first half of 1909 and takes up the then-revolutionary theme of the “Lebensreform” cult of the body. 

Bellows (1882-1925) ran with a leftist crowd dedicated to social causes. Much of his most well-known work deals with urban situations and all-male environments. This work seems to predate the work of gay artist Paul Cadmus and his painting YMCA Locker Room from 1933.

One of the greatest sensualists of all, Henri Matisse (1869-1954), paints a stolid, firmly planted male model with a rather large endowment.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is the gold standard. Besides being the leader of visual art in the 20th century, he also created many sexually explicit artworks. His mythological renderings such as this minotaur above take delight in a primitive male sexuality.

Although Benton studied art in Paris, when he came back to the States to practice, he dismissed the French school as effete and sissified. He became virulently homophobic, according the a story in The New York Times. But that homophobia did not prevent him from continuing to paint his rangy male figures, often shirtless, in all-male environments. 

Picasso's depiction of the bisexual mythological Pan is a sunlit landscape of sturdy male flesh. The music of Pan is hypnotic and seductive, and the audience for Pan's melody is another male youth.

Cézanne (1839-1906) changed the course of modern art in how he interpreted what he saw. Here: an all-male idyll in a sylvan glade.

Bellows almost seems to camp it up here with his portrait of a street ruffian in the manner of John Singer Sargent's society portraits of elegant ladies. Hauteur and buck teeth. 

An urban landscape of homosocial male nudity.

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, most widely known as El Greco (1541-1614), presents a startlingly contemporary version of Saint Sebastian that has strong characteristics of both the male and female form. 

The National Gallery of Art states:

"Forty-two Kids depicts a band of lanky, nude, and semi-clad boys engaged in a variety of antics — swimming, diving, sunbathing, smoking, and urinating — on and near a dilapidated wharf jutting out over the East River.

"A sharp observer of urban life, Bellows sketched his streetwise subjects with his characteristic vigor and economy of means, and he has carefully rendered their varied ethnic backgrounds. In turn-of-the-century slang, 'kids' referred to roaming young hooligans who were frequently the offspring of working-class immigrants living in Lower East Side tenements.

"When it was exhibited in New York in 1908, the painting was derided by many critics due to its adventurous subject and exuberant style; one writer called it a 'tour de force of absurdity.' However, Forty-two Kids was purchased less than a year after its completion, marking the second sale of Bellows's career and his first to a private collector."

Bellows is most often remembered for his muscular work depicting brutal matches in the boxing ring. 

Benton depicts himself flatteringly in a shirtless self-portrait. 

One of Caillebotte's most signature works was reviewed badly at first viewing as crude and unworthy. Depicting manual labor was thought beneath the artist's realm. The play of light on the textures of the floor and the men's bodies in motion outlived the bad reviews. 

While the erotic appeal is subtle, the painting grabs us. We are intimately sharing this boat ride with this young man, and all the compositional lines direct the eye where Caillebotte wants it to go.

Bellows's ear for slang is rich. 

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) often surprised us with a bawdy sensibility when depicting men and women together. In this boating picture, the pleasure of the sun on young men's bodies is palpable.

The horrors of war shown here were meant to evoke pity and rage, as German soldiers use naked captives as a human shield. But in Bellows's rendering it is hard to ignore the luminescent glow of the naked bodies, despite the subject matter.