Watercolor by Charles Henry Demuth (1883-1935)
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has launched an exhibit dedicated to gay and lesbian portraiture. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture is on display through February 13.
The oldest image dates from 1871, showing a bearded Walt Whitman, who spent the days before and after the civil war with his lover, Peter Doyle, a confederate deserter.
Hide/Seek is one of the biggest and most expensive shows the National Portrait gallery has ever launched, with over a hundred works of art. The show includes an ad for Arrow dress shirts from 1914 that pictures a pair of handsome bachelors enjoying domestic bliss. The illustrator, J.C. Leyendecker, used his boyfriend as one of the models.
Leyendecker's "Men Reading" is the original painting for an Arrow shirt ad that appeared in 1914
Other pieces in the exhibition include a pair of somber grey paintings by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Lovers for six years, the artists completed the paintings during their breakup. And a moving conceptual piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), is a pile of candies that weighs 175 pounds. That was the weight of his lover, Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS-related complications. Viewers take candies until the piece vanishes, evoking the subject's slow passing, and his sweetness.
http://npg.si.edu/exhibit/hideseek/index.html
This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
The National Portrait Gallery is housed in the Donald W. Reynolds Center at 8th and F Streets NW, Washington DC. Metro stop: Gallery Place/Chinatown. Open daily 11:30a-7:00p. Closed Christmas Day. Free admission.
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