Guy pride

Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art, by Jonathan Weinberg, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2004; 208 pages, $50.

Jonathan Weinberg's genial Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art seems like a lavishly illustrated transcription of a Slade lecture series or any program designed to make public a scholar's meditations on a subject of personal interest. Weinberg's book did not, in fact, originate this way, but like the best lectures, Male Desire both entertains and enlightens. Each of its seven chapters is witty, erudite and narrowly focused--at least in terms of the brief time span it covers. The first chapter, "Water," for instance, embarks from Thomas Eakins's iconic Swimming (1884) and concludes--offshore--with Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream (1899). Traversing little more than a dozen years--and a similar number of pages of text--it summons up a remarkably broad range of concerns.

Weinberg mentions Whitman, Twain and Melville, touches on the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, the bodybuilder Eugen Sandow and the physical culture movement of the late 19th century, cogitates about boxing and the brawny athletes depicted by George Bellows, and considers the female gaze as well as the representation of race in turn-of-the-century art. It's a bravura performance, and the richly textured cultural backdrop against which he sets his subjects invariably intrigues. His approach reaffirms, too, the wisdom of the book's chronological structure, which allows for such filigreed evocations of time and place. Occasionally, social context recedes too far into the background, as with Weinberg's discussion of photographer F. Holland Day's Ebony and Ivory (1897), an allegorical depiction of "An Ethiopian Chief" (as the sitter is designated in the subtitle) contemplating a Classical male nude figurine. But far more surprising, the author also chose not to fully engage, in this--or any other--chapter, the matter of homosexuality.

Weinberg dismisses the subject in the book's brief introduction: "Male Desire is not a history of gay art, although gay artists play an important role in its narrative," he writes. "Unless I feel that the issue of the artist's sexual identity is crucial to understanding the meaning of a particular image, I do not raise it." (This perspective did not deter the Library of Congress from classifying Male Desire first under "Homosexuality and art," second "Gay erotic art" and third the "Male nude in art.") Weinberg insists that the book's actual focus is male bonding: "The strong connections formed between men are sometimes attributed to unconscious homosexual urges. I prefer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's concept of the 'homosocial' as a means of describing the all-male interchanges and negotiations that exclude women."

This is as close to a theoretical position as Weinberg gets, which is a pity. Given his biographically oriented bent, and his dual expertise in early modernist art by gay painters and in the emotional lives of artists--he's written Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and the First American Avant-Garde (1993) and Ambition and Love in Modern American Art (2001)--he would seem exceedingly well suited to confront the methodological challenges of a queer art history that must take into account artists' unconscious (sexual) desires and society's generally repressive cultural constructions of homosexuality.

Instead Weinberg sidesteps this challenge--admittedly one that is difficult to engage, much less meet--and offers another disclaimer: that Male Desire is not a "grand survey" of the male nude in American art, because it excludes works of art by women. What is it then? "A selection of art that addresses the theme of the homoerotic in vivid and often contentious ways." But as Weinberg points out, the term homoerotic is problematic for its "vagueness," in which he nonetheless sees an opportunity to "widen the discussion so that the question of an artist's sexual identity is only one possible context that might explain a work's erotic content." Although this is an important distinction for the interpretation of eroticism in art, Weinberg's project itself seems to diminish in importance with each passing paragraph of the introduction. Near its end he notes that "a simple criterion for inclusion of several of the works in this book was whether I found them sexy, or at least could imagine others finding them sexy." Ultimately, nothing much seems to be at stake but Weinberg's taste. We're left without a forest, only trees.

After "Water" come six more chapters plus an epilogue. "The Man in Uniform" extends from the coded canvases of Marsden Hartley to sexually explicit works by Charles Demuth and Paul Cadmus; "I Want Muscle" encompasses two- and three-dimensional images of workers both heroic and plebeian, many produced for public art projects commissioned by Depression-era federal agencies; and "Measurements and Circles" offers an extended riff on the interactions between vanguard sexologist Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, questing for homoerotic "documents" such as George Platt Lynes's glamorous photographic nudes, and a "gay intelligentsia" that included Kenneth Anger, Ned Rorem and Gore Vidal. (Kinsey's contacts soon extended to Lynes himself, along with New York City Ballet founder Lincoln Kirstein and Surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew, among many others.)