gay-sculpture blog: May 2014

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

St Sebastien, gay icon (4) in contemporary sculptures

To close this chapter on the art représentations of St Sébastien as a gay icon, here are a few more contemporary sculptures, ie after the Renaissance period.

Alexandre Louis Charpentier (French) late 19th century, Bronze. Metropolitan Museum NYC, USA.

Damien Hirst, British artist, created his work entitled 'St Sébastien - Exquisite pain' in 2007. Here is the Damien Hirst website.

Damien Hirst

Marcel Julius Joosen, Dutch artist already mentioned on this blog, and born in 1943, he did this first plaster sculpture in 1992.

And the following one.

Marcel Julius Joosen

The next two sculptures are from Marc Alberghina, French contemporary artist, who spends lots of time fighting against mass art production with cheap material or clay and poorly done.

St Sébastian 1 - 2012 - Enameled faience

St Sébastian 2 - 2012 - Enameled faience

Michael Richards (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada)

Italian family near Lucca, Italy (Catholic Store)

Steven Beyer

Thierry Delorme

Misztal Tomasz

David Pelletier - Bronze - 2002

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Sources and more info:

A stunning collection of contemporary representations in these 2 blogs:

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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

St Sebastien, gay icon (3) in contemporary paintings, photographs, stained glass etc.

Today, ie during 20th & 21st century, Sebastien's portrays continue to show him often in a kind of submissive, young muscular body. Look at some photographs from F. Holland Day (USA), who imagined the martyr based on working-class youths, and those of David Vance, von Gloeden, Mishima.

F Holland Day

David Vance

Wilhem von Gloeden

Yukio Mishima

And the illustration for the movie Sebastiane by Derek Jarman, in which the only language spoken is latin.

Also the paintings from Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau (France), Anto Carte below.

Odilon Redon

Gustave Moreau

Anto Carte (1886 1954) c.1934

Interesting are the works of Salvador Dali, Egon Schiele, Keith Haring...

Salvador Dali

Egon Schiele - Self portrait as St Sébastien 1915 Vienna Austria

Keith Haring

And the other various contemporary artists that you can see below also contributed to make St Sébastien a real gay icon.

Soungouroff (1911-1982) c. 1947

Demard Philippe (1959- ) French.

Diego Tolomelli, Italian artist, has created many religious stained-glass works, and also many homoerotic subjects, including the below St Sébastien. Last month, the Dutch art gallery Mooiman, mentioned previously on this blog, displayed a full exhibition about these homoerotic stained-lass works, mainly young men, some embracing passionately. The Avocate interviewed him last month.

Diego Tolomelli aka Iko

Ernesto Lozano (Mexico)

Kinu Sekigushi (France)

Maurice Heerdinck (Dutch)

Peter Colstee (Dutch) 1991

Alfred Courmes (1898-1993) French painter

In this selection, lets not forget Pierre et Gilles, the famous French artists (each piece is a unique painted large photograph) who created a serie of St Sébastien (6 of them are below). One of them also appeared on the cover of the recent exhibition catalogue 'Masculin Masculin' in Paris.

Pierre & Gilles artists in front of one of their St Sébastien. (retrospective in Berlin, Germany).

Some more artists representations of St Sébastien.

Sadao Hasegawa

Sven de Rennes

In the next post, and to close this chapter, we will see some contemporary sculptures of St Sébastien.

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Sources and more info:

A stunning collection of contemporary représentations in these 2 blogs:

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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

St Sebastien, gay icon (2), Renaissance and other paintings

Lets continue our discovery of St Sébastien as a gay icon, with some of Renaissance paintings.

In terms of paintings, Guido Reni achieved his St. Sébastian (see below) around 1615/1616, and it was described as "... a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair & red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree & through pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine impassioned gaze toward the Eternal Beauty of the opening Heavens," by Oscar Wilde when he saw it at the Palazzo Rosso, in Genoa, where it still belongs.

Guido Reni paintings of St Sébastien reportedly captivated Yukio Mishima.

St Sébastien by Guido Reni - 1615

During the Renaissance, male nudes were not so frequent on paintings, other than the Christ. Sébastien was probably next, so he began to appear in many paintings by other artists like Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, Giuseppi Cesari, Carlo Saraceni, Giovanni Bazzi (known as “Il Sodoma” as he was known to paint, and maybe more, young men), Tintoretto, Titian, Girgione, Perugino, and more.