(A significant work of art, but, yes, a (full frontal) male nude, so not to everyone’s taste.)
Encountered on Pinterest yesterday, a striking oil painting by Duncan Grant, from about 1935, of the model Tony Asserati, self-possessed and comfortable in his body (as Grant was in his). Painted by Grant in a time in the UK when homosexuality was a serious criminal offence, so sexual relations between men — of which Grant had an astounding number (he’s reported to have maintained that he would have relations with any man who would have him) — had to be scrupulously concealed. As Grant’s were, under the protective umbrella of the Bloomsbury Group.
To which I will now turn, before going on to Duncan Grant’s life and works (featuring the Asserati portrait).
The Bloomsbury setting. From Wikipedia:
The Bloomsbury Group was a group of associated British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. … Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
… The group had ten core members: Clive Bell, art critic; Vanessa Bell, post-impressionist painter [sister of Virginia Woolf, married to Clive Bell]; E. M. Forster, fiction writer; Roger Fry, art critic and post-impressionist painter; Duncan Grant, post-impressionist painter; John Maynard Keynes, economist; Desmond MacCarthy, literary journalist; Lytton Strachey, biographer; Leonard Woolf, essayist and non-fiction writer [married to Virginia Woolf]; Virginia Woolf, fiction writer and essayist.
… Although popularly thought of as a formal group, it was a loose collective of friends and relatives closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King’s College London for the women, who at one point lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, “although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts.”
Duncan Grant and his sex life. Yes, this is relevant. From Wikipedia:
Duncan James Corrowr Grant (21 January 1885 – 8 May 1978) was a Scottish painter and designer of textiles, pottery, theatre sets, and costumes.
(#1) Self-portrait, ca. 1920 (National Galleries of Scotland)… Grant’s early affairs were exclusively homosexual. His lovers included his cousin, the writer Lytton Strachey, the future politician Arthur Hobhouse and the economist John Maynard Keynes, who at one time considered Grant the love of his life because of his good looks and the originality of his mind. Through Strachey, Grant became involved in the Bloomsbury Group, where he made many such great friends, [notably] Vanessa Bell. He would eventually live with Vanessa Bell who, though she was a married woman, fell deeply in love with him and, one night, succeeded in seducing him; Bell very much wanted a child by Grant, and she became pregnant in the spring of 1918. Although it is generally assumed that Grant’s sexual relations with Bell ended in the months before Angelica was born (Christmas, 1918), they continued to live together for more than 40 years. During that time, their relationship was mainly domestic and creative; they often painted in the same studio together, praising and critiquing each other’s work.
Living with Vanessa Bell was no impediment to Grant’s relationships with men, either before or after Angelica was born.
… In Grant’s later years, his lover, the poet Paul Roche (1916–2007), whom he had known since 1946, took care of him and enabled Grant to maintain his accustomed way of life at Charleston [his farmhouse at Firle, near Lewes, in Sussex] for many years. Grant and Roche’s relationship was strong and lasted even during Roche’s marriage and five children he had by the late 1950s. Roche was made co-heir of Grant’s estate. Grant eventually died in Roche’s home in 1978.
(If you know something about the story of my affectional and sexual life, you will see why Grant resonates so strongly with me.)
Standing Male Nude (Study of Tony Asserati). The painting:
(#2) Photographed (by Epha J. Roe) in Grant’s studio at Charleston, his Sussex farmhouse (more details on the painting will come below) — so this is a work of (photographic) art about an artwork, in a setting that is itself a work of art
About Charleston Farmhouse, from Wikipedia:
Charleston [Farmhouse], in East Sussex, is a property associated with the Bloomsbury group, [which] is open to the public. It was the country home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and is an example of their decorative style within a domestic context, representing the fruition of more than sixty years of artistic creativity.
“Duncan Grant’s Nude Portraits”. Charleston has a website. From it, on 4/19/21, this piece by Diana Tsar:
(#2) The beginning of Tsar’s piece; there are many oil paintings, and a ton of drawings, variously playful, extravagant, joyous, thoughtful, and hard-core sexy
(#3) Specifically about #2, about the portrait
Meanwhile, Grant routinely had sex with his male nude models, so he surely got it on with Asserati. And then his output over a long lifetime is enormous, and includes paintings of many sorts, including, no surprise, formal portraits of Vanessa Bell.
I point out, once again, that real people’s affectional and sexual lives are enormously varied; lives can be composed in an astonishing variety of ways.