IN 2014, The National Gallery Of Victoria presented an exhibition of the explicit art of Australian pop artist David McDiarmid with all its cocks, arseholes and rainbow AIDS-awareness posters. In the same year, Bendigo Art Gallery featured a collection of ancient Greek and Roman artefacts from the British Museum. The main feature was the museum’s glorious marble discus thrower, but some pieces of Greek pottery had paintings of sex, one of which showed two young men about to fuck. In 2009, the London National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition called Gay Icons in which ten eminent gay men and women named the icons who most influenced their gay sensibility. One hundred years ago, English-speaking gay artists may have achieved great recognition through their works and enjoyed success, but there was no public acknowlegement of the sexuality inherent in their work. Erotic implications were carefully directed, with any sexual suggestiveness supressed. They would be amazed at the degree of acceptance and freedom of expression that artists enjoy today. For the knowing viewer, however, the coded images suggested a great deal going between the brush strokes.
Eakins’ The Swimming Hole is a masterpiece in homoerotic art.
The painter most frequently cited as representing the late-Victorian to World War I period is American Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). Typical of US artists, he painted realistic scenes of everyday life. Little is known of his personal sexual inclination but one biographer, William McFeeley, notes that during his stint in Paris, all his friends were homosexual, and the married Eakins was once slandered, accused of having an affair with a male student. McFeeley speculates that Eakins may have preferred the romantic company of men, but that he little acted upon this, and instead used his art as a silent cry for a more perfect world.