Simeon Solomon
Hello. I’m Paul P.
The Latin title of this exhibition reverses the title of Simeon Solomon’s Mors et Amor (1865). Solomon’s delicate ink drawing depicts a couple about to be irrevocably separated by angels: the stoic Angel of Death gently pries a woman from a man, while the man’s own hand grips that of the downcast Angel of Love. As a work of its era by a homosexual artist, the drawing is open to interpretation: every element, including the ostensibly heterosexual couple, can have an alternate meaning. The door through which the Angel of Death ushers the woman may be read as a symbol, not purely of the parting death ensures, but the severance that homosexuals experience from normal life. In Solomon’s London, queer people were divided selves, forced to dwell in shadow-land and under conditions of fantasy if they were to keep their dignity and also love those whom they were compelled to love. Beyond the opened door is a radiant, void-like sun above a woodland, suggesting that the territory outside is neither heaven nor hell: in my mind it is an aberrant facsimile of normal life, a place of isolation and transformation, but also pleasure.
Charles Shannon
Hello. I’m Paul P.
In The World of Charles Ricketts (1980), Joseph Darracott wrote unconvincingly about Ricketts and Charles Shannon: “some questions about the artists remain unanswered. One of the unsolved questions, in my view, is the nature of the friendship between the two men. That they loved each other is certain, but from that fact no conclusion can be drawn.” Fortunately, in 1998, Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue provided a delightful counter description of the two men as a “couple” in her biography of Michael Field – the collective nom de plume for the plays and poetry of two English lesbian lovers who were dear friends to Ricketts and Shannon. She wrote: “Ricketts was barely five foot, with hair like a dandelion puff and a devilishly pointed beard; he was an oil painter, a sculptor, a designer of books (including several of [Oscar] Wilde’s), jewellery, embroidery, stage sets and costume … Shannon was best known for society portraits in oil, but he specialized in lithographs, mostly of sensuous bare-limbed women with trailing hair; he was tall and golden, and much quieter than his ‘fellow.’ They tended to wear shiny old blue serge suits that got speckled with cigarette ash, preferring to save their money for the truly necessary beauty of flowers, Greek statues, Old Master drawings and Japanese prints. They had met when Ricketts was only sixteen and had never been apart for more than a holiday since.”
Both artists were excellent practitioners of the implicit expression of homosexual desire, demonstrated by the art they created and the art they collected and surrounded themselves with; their covert intentions wrought into a filigree of melancholy and dazzle borrowed from the pageantry of antiquity and the theatre, which they revered. In my own practice, I have devised a way of acknowledging the defunct strategies found in the work of other artists: over the past decade I have intermittently developed a series of ink drawings of Neoclassical statues drawn from life – in museums and public gardens – using a fountain pen as if I were continuing a correspondence. Repeatedly drawing slightly shifted views of the same subject, I reinforce my attachment to the qualities of a few very select works, making a record of captured and passing time. This exhibition includes four such drawings: a sleeping figure, a faun, Narcissus (seen posteriorly in contrapposto), and the clutching hands of the Christian martyr St. Tarcisius. All of them are keepers of secrets; a prevalent currency in Neoclassical statuary.
Escritoire Nancy
Hello. I’m Paul P.
Escritoire Nancy (2013) – a mahogany desk and stool – is the idea of a writing desk, a nearly impractical, immaterial island not bound to functionality. It is dedicated through its title to the irreverent author Nancy Mitford. Mitford belonged to the Bright Young People, a group of by-and-large privileged women and queer people who came of age in 1920’s London. They were known for their prodigious aesthetic output, for their dandyism, and in retrospect, for the tragic fading of their promise. Their generation was caught between the shadow of the First World War and the impending threat of the Second: a transitory period and place where homosexuality was temporarily permitted to thrive. Mitford wrote in her essay Reading for Pleasure (1952): “I still read more biography, memoires and letters than anything else; I like to get into some lively set, and observe its behaviour. The Encyclopaedists or (Lord) Byron and his friends are supreme entertainers, but any small society will provide an interesting study in human relationships if one or two of its members can write.”
Like Mitford, I am interested in the impulses of intimate milieux, whether dandy, Aesthete, AIDS activist, or others, which prioritize aesthetic and social ideals – often to the point of fantasy – as an expression of contempt toward the general sway of philistinism and moral indignation that dominates our culture. When I find it, I see it as an impulse toward a true and compassionate civilization.
Nancy Mitford is, in my estimation, responsible for creating the first unpunished homosexual character in popular literature. In Love in a Cold Climate (1949), a novel that has never gone out of print, Cedric Hampton not only survives, but enjoys acceptance and success. The character is an amalgam of Stephen Tennant and Brian Howard, both poets and dandies who retreated from society: Tennant into extreme isolation and Howard into drug use leading to suicide. Mitford absorbed their loose magic and, as a middle-aged heterosexual woman – a sly vessel for the relay of queer insolence – gave it enduring and optimistic form.