Reference: James Gleeson - The Cosmic Erotic
Curated by Jeremy Eaton, 14 September - 5 October 2024.
Essay by Jeremy Eaton:
The most prevalent art historical writing on James Gleeson’s oeuvre dances around erotic and sexual characteristics in his work. Writers nimbly waltz around these to avoid ‘awkward’ discussions, while those who do broach sexual themes worry about the impact they have on his artwork’s universality.i Researching Gleeson’s practice, I often encounter ellipses and caveats, residues of the artist’s own ambivalence towards sexual narratives – lest he be pigeonholed a gay artist – and the homophobic conditions underpinning much of the discourse.ii There is also concern that an erotic focus will overrun the predominant (and, at times, atrophied) high-minded narrative that frames the artist for our times. However, as the 1940s to 1970s works on paper in The Cosmic Erotic elucidate, erotic – and by extension sexual – themes allow a deeper dive and broader understanding of his work and life.
In 2022, while researching James Gleeson’s archive at the National Library of Australia, I opened a collection of manila folders that had until recently been sealed. They held many explicit and intimate photographs Gleeson had taken of lifelong partner Frank O’Keefe, as well as the erotica collection that sustained his practice for nearly four decades. It seemed Gleeson had determined that these works could be explored and better understood twelve years after his passing.
While Gleeson’s early practice adhered to European surrealism’s core tenets, and his later cosmologies of seascapes, bodies and art historical references are well documented, his 1940s to 1970s works, which The Cosmic Erotic focuses on, are relatively unexplored. These works – including his diminutive Psychoscapes; symbolist–laden Moureau-esque paintings such as Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1953) and Tristan (1952); and a swathe of drawings and collages – signify a different Gleeson to the one we are familiar with. Unlike the subconscious and dream-like aesthetics of his better-known surrealist work (although its traces are present), he instead draws on the male form from fin de siècle aesthetics and pornography to heighten the erotic and Platonic, establish symbolic dramas, test historical reference points and experiment with stylised approaches to figure-ground relationships.
The works on paper in The Cosmic Erotic focus on Gleeson’s diverse experiments with the male nude, exploring the salient threads that showcase his sensualist eye and the sexuality underpinning his practice. This highlights some of the dynamic ways he images desire alongside a queer iconographic genealogy, a new image culture, his relationship with partner Frank O’Keefe and experimental expressions of the libidinal. We also glimpse into Gleeson’s more private and foundational work: preparatory sketches; quick works in biro; humorous caricatures; refined collages; and experimental takes on the figure and eroticism. One imagines many of these were for Gleeson’s own private pleasure, unintended for exhibition. To see and appraise now how they fit into his broader practice is an opportunity to reevaluate Gleeson’s artistic contribution to Australian art as well as to local and international LGBTQ+ art history.
From Plato to Pornography
Whilst a noted artist, critic, author, poet and administrator, Gleeson is best known as Australia’s most committed surrealist and central figure in the movement. Coagulations on the Maintenance of Identity (1942) once graced the cover of Angry Penguins, and his seminal article What is Surrealism? was published in Art in Australia in 1940.iii He was elected president of the Contemporary Art Society in 1943, was one of few local artists to own important surrealist publications, and for a brief time even lived with Frank Brown’s painting by Giorgio De Chirico.iv Even though Gleeson’s work oscillated towards and away from surrealism over the decades, the label stuck with him for sixty years.
After his initial trip to Europe in 1947–1949, commentators such as Renee Free and Gleeson himself describe his turn to the male nude as a Neoplatonic enquiry influenced by Michelangelo’s artworks.v However, a number of early 1940s paintings – such as Fête Champêtre, a lethal regulation (1944) – proves his interest in muscular male figures preceded his travels. Given Gleeson’s prior commitment to surrealism’s capacity to liberate the senses from the rationality that led to war, his turn to symbolism and quasi-classical figurative painting seems remarkable.
Like for many early twentieth-century gay men, classicism and Christianity functioned like alibis to deflect from the eroticism on show. For Gleeson they also formed deeper historical connections to Eros (erotic love) and homosexuality extending from antiquity. Unlike André Breton’s homophobic tenets of surrealism, Plato’s musings on Eros and desire across The Symposium and Phaedrus are emphatically open to homosexual love, particularly between his Achilles and Patroclus. For the philosophical and literary Gleeson, representing Plato’s Dialogues using two characteristically nude figures in his Psychoscapes is unsurprising, likewise in the collage Achilles bears the body of Patroclus to the camp of the Myrmidons (1976) shown here [illus previous page, cat.no.22]. In Plato’s – and presumably Gleeson’s – musings on homosexual love, the role of Eros is sexual but also a powerful desiring force leading to the contemplation of ‘Form’ to gain deeper insight into both physical and sensual reality.
Gleeson draws from historical sources such as Plato, Wagner, classical mythology and religious iconography, at times mashing them into rich pastiches, through the 1940s to 1970s. The Cosmic Erotic contains, for example, a preparatory sketch for Gleeson’s painting Tristan (1952), a triptych with nude figures flanking the left and right panels and a central totem that evokes a three-faced Trinity, or the primordial human form with multiple faces and three genders, described by Aristophenes in Plato’s Symposium. In the centre panel to the left of Tristan is a bound, semi-submerged figure, yet in the preparatory sketch this figure is not bound like in the painting [illus previous page, cat.no.13]. This is likely a depiction of Tristan’s devoted servant Kurwenal, who is bound by rope after defending Tristan’s body in Act III of Wagner’s opera. While not overtly erotic (although each to their own), this sketch precedes some of Gleeson’s more elaborate musings on male bonds, Plato’s Eros and Wagner’s works.
Gleeson’s men, drawn more from contemporary erotica of the time than the youthful athleticism of a Greco-sanctioned pederasty typical of his neoclassical forebears, are comparatively buff, or as Cedric Flower once described, ‘aggressively naked’.vi Drawings, collages and paintings from the 1940s to the 70s reference either his photographs of Frank O’Keefe or slicked-up, muscular models copied or traced from his collection of photographs and slides by Bruce Belas (Bruce of LA) and Don Whitman that are now in his archive. Many of these models wrestle and pose, such as in Untitled (Two male nudes wrestling) (1940s-1950s) [cat.no.6] and Untitled (Male figure, knees bent) (1940s-1950s) [cat.no.9], possibly to be translated into Gleeson’s mythological Psychoscapes that frequently depict two nude men; Achilles and Petroclus, Hercules and Diomedes, and Icarus and Daedulus, amongst others. Gleeson’s process can be seen here in Untitled (Young male nude) (1950s-1970s) [not illustrated, cat.no.17] as the drawing from the Gleeson O’Keefe Foundation retains the source pornographic-magazine image he has copied.
Ever since the 1800’s, photographs of body builders (such as Eugen Sandow) donning white paint and posing as statues preface a classical, performative tradition in male nude photography. Yet Gleeson is unique in Australian art history, and possibly international art, for deploying contemporary iterations so early and explicitly in his paintings, collages and drawings. The early-twentieth century distribution of Physique magazine developed the form, and Gleeson was an early adopter in Australia as his slide collection and use of figures cut from magazines in his collages attest. As an art historically aware person, Gleeson’s reference to contemporary print media marks his unashamed exposition of (and investment in) the progressive visibility of homosexual desire in the public realm at a time when such images were censored in Australia and before the murmurings of gay liberation in the 1970s.vii
Writers such as Christopher Chapman discuss the availability of new print material as the progenitor of surrealism’s adoption on these shores, and rightly so.viii An avid collector of books and responsive to Euro-American developments in art and culture, Gleeson’s practice frequently followed this print trail. He was the antipodean filter, nay appropriator, of international styles. Bruce James highlights that between the 1950s and 70s, Gleeson’s work could be equally indebted to pop art and surrealism, citing Richard Hamilton’s painted figures as akin to Gleeson’s collaged figures.ix More broadly, Gleeson’s work could be associated with Jean Cocteau’s lithographs and Andy Warhol’s early illustrations of gay men. Gleeson’s Untitled (Study of male nude, side view) (date unknown) [illus front cover, cat.no.2] and his startling Untitled (Reclining couple of male nudes) (1950s-70s) [illus previous page, cat.no.18] mirror the fine linework of these two artists. Untitled (Reclining couple of male nudes) is particularly overt as Gleeson sensuously traces the contours of two men from the lower portion of the body, up the legs, past the genitals and peaking in a partially shrouded embrace by one of the figure’s arms. It is a tender and delightful encapsulation of desire for the artist.
Acknowledging sexuality and the erotic stride in Gleeson’s art is integral to recuperating the central presence of Frank O’Keefe in his life and work. As David Lomas describes, Gleeson’s 2004 exhibition catalogue practically ‘obliterated all trace of the relationship’.x Meeting in 1949, they soon lived together in Northbridge, Sydney, where they stayed until O’Keefe passed in 2007 and Gleeson in 2008. O’Keefe, a readily available Platonic subject, became the model Gleeson dressed and posed to create his own photographic tableaux. He appears in two of the drawings here: Untitled (Male figure, knees bent, arms behind) (c.1950-1955) [cat.no.10] and Untitled (Standing male nude, right arm before his mouth) (c.1950-1955) [cat.no.12]. These likely developed from photographs the two men concocted: in one, Frank stands with a cigarette in hand, like in a number of Gleeson’s images; in the other he is poised on his knees on the ground. Frequently in the photographs Frank poses as a classical sculpture or a St Sebastian character bound in rope or draped with fabric. As model and muse he frequently appears in Gleeson’s paintings and collages, most prominently in Covenant with Revenant (1966) and Crucifixion (1952) – the latter a direct transposition of an original photograph with Frank standing, holding a painting palette in hand and dressed as in the painting with two floor lamps illuminating him from below.
A range of Gleeson’s archival photographs contain a playfulness and humour one doesn’t necessarily associate with the artist. Literary, philosophical and urbane, we glimpse a more liberated Gleeson. His photographs of O’Keefe wearing studded thongs and mesh tops reveal the play acting behind some of the masochistic elements in Gleeson’s work. Drawings in the exhibition such as a cartoon-like erection and a nude figure in a naval hat [Untitled (Seated male figure with an outstretched arm) (1953) cat.no.14] elaborate on this playfulness, as do collages such as Untitled (Landscape with male nude and dark figure) (1976) [illus next page, cat.no.34] and Untitled (Figures and insects) (1976) [illus next page, cat.no.33] which rearrange the male form with a penis-as-head and a butt-as-abdomen and are surprisingly funny and oddly sexy. When Platonically contemplating the well-endowed youth in Landscape with male nude and dark figure or the half-turned figure donning only a jacket in Untitled (Standing male nude, side view) (c.1957) [illus next page, cat.no.16], we are confronted not only by their beauty but an outward looking gaze that both challenges and invites; Gleeson’s men here provocatively peer out and entice a sexual imaginary.
An Erotic Osmosis
Although Gleeson made overtly homoerotic work that keyed into a genealogy of gay representation, as Study for ‘The death of St Sebastian’ (1940s) shows [see illus previous pages, cat.no.4], it is remarkable – given his engagement with Australian art history in this area – it was not until 1997 that his work appeared in an explicitly gay context. James Gleeson: Male Figure and Fantasy – 30 Poem Drawings from 1976-78 was held at Olsen Carr Gallery as part of the Sydney Mardi Gras program. Prior to this (1950-1980), Gleeson’s erotic work was exhibited in commercial galleries including Watters, Macquarie and Holdsworth Galleries. Cedric Flower’s risqué Erotica: Aspects of the Erotic in Australian Art (1977) also included his work. But there have only been two other instances when his work was exhibited in gay or queer contexts since then.xi
In a 1997 article for Outrage magazine, Ted Gott responded to the Male Figure and Fantasy exhibition and the new ‘complicated’ framing of Gleeson in Mardi Gras. Recounting his youthful response to Gleeson’s large-scale works exhibited at Melbourne’s Pinacotheca in 1986, the following quote is noteworthy:
These [works] struck me at the time as capturing perfectly in paint the physical and psychic transformations I experienced during sexual penetrations under the influence of amyl nitrate – their pulsing phallic forms and Wagnerian stretches of palpable ‘internal’ textures transported me, through a kind of synaesthetic
osmosis, directly into a personal sexual reverie.xii
After poetically enfolding amyl nitrate and Wagner, Gott derides his youthful encounter as emerging from an ‘incredible naivete and scopic separatism’. Denigrating being ‘stimulated’ by Gleeson’s work, he instead appeals to a ‘higher’ reading through art historical references and existential exploration. While Gott’s quote is from nearly thirty years ago and his perspective may very well have changed, reading it now I see his encounter and what Gleeson’s work can elicit as something to be celebrated. To denigrate this experience reflects the shame and symptomatic avoidance of a modernist conservatism at the time that sought something grander, more heroic or intellectual to discuss Gleeson’s work.
Untitled (Abstract figure with male sexes) (c. 1973) [illus next page, cat.no.19], Untitled (Reclining, reading male nude) (1940s-1950s) [illus next page, cat.no.8] and Untitled (Abstract male nude) (1940s-1950s) [illus next page, cat.no.7] capture interpenetrating forms – figures, phalluses, assholes and limbs – in an interplay of smudged pastel, charcoal and languid linework to create internal and external body topologies that coalesce into an orgiastic repose. They elicit the sensation of intense sexual encounters, especially with multiple partners, when one’s ‘edges’ blur. Figural and sensual, these drawings evoke Gleeson’s later mutable figure-cum-seascapes paintings and corroborate Gott’s youthful osmotic ‘sexual reverie’ from 1986.
Gleeson believed his 1970s collages had clarified and resolved his visual language. Letting go of the symbolic and classical pretext of prior explorations of the nude, he focussed on placing cut-out male figures amidst scapes of print, ink wash, charcoal and frottage. Continuing his automatist combination of mediums and materials, these works express an explicitly sensual engagement with erotica; collaged figures in passive and dominant roles are bound, or float in states of reverie amidst morphologies of dramatic, cosmic and machine-infused backdrops.
Developed post-Stonewall (New York, 1969), with growing recognition and discussion of overturning laws inhibiting homosexuality in 1970s Australia, images of metamorphosis – such as the symbolic butterfly – began circulating in queer culture. Untitled (Nude on rock) (1976) [illus back cover, cat.no.29], for example, entails a tan-lined, surfer-looking man with a spread of Rorschach wings sitting on a rock as a swill of limbs circulate beneath. The frottage and print impressions on most figures appear like tattoos and, as Christopher Chapman highlights, the material connection between the figure and the paper plane heightens their tactile sensuality.xiii Redolent of emerging queer imagery at the time, they also speak to countercultural, hallucinogenic 1970s design and hence appear as some of the most contemporary of Gleeson’s frequently anachronistic and appropriative works.
From early on, Gleeson was predisposed to think there was more to what we see. While surrealist approaches to automatism and dreams satisfied his exploration of an extant reality, his subconscious inquiries turned to Neoplatonism. Uniquely, however, his pursuit of the figure in his drawings, collages and paintings intersect with a burgeoning print culture aligned with increasingly visible homosexuality; and it is perhaps no coincidence that it began around 1949, when Gleeson established his relationship with Frank O’Keefe. Whilst Gleeson’s life and his literary and visual interests underpin his use of classicism in a contemporary idiom, this approach coalesces a search for a better understanding of homosocial and homosexual desire from antiquity through to the political expression that challenged the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in Australia at the time. We can perhaps only now begin to understand the impact Gleeson’s erotic explorations had on subsequent Australian artists, from Richard and Pat Larter, Brett Whiteley, Scott Redford, William Yang and Mike Brown; the list goes on. Whether directly or indirectly, Gleeson has been central to opening art’s capacity to break down high and low forms of sexual expression. With less indignant attitudes towards sexuality on our side, looking into this aspect of Gleeson’s work allows us to delve deeper into his cosmos to explore, celebrate and reappraise its bountiful plenitude.
Jeremy Eaton, 2024
Jeremy Eaton is an artist, writer and curator based in Melbourne. He is Managing Editor of Art + Australia and Deputy Chair of un Projects. He is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne; the subject of his research is James Gleeson and Australian queer history.
i. In a meta commentary about Gleeson from 2005, Ross Moore articulates this condition. See: Ross Moore, “A Most Sensitive Man Who Lives Ideas: Gleeson, The Closet and Art Criticism,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 6, no. 1 (January 2005): 62–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2005.11432753.
ii. Ted Gott, “Figure of Fantasy?” Outrage 165 (February 1997).
iii. This issue of Angry Penguins can now be found on TROVE: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-3084411245/view?partId=nla.obj-3084486272 and Gleeson’s Art in Australia essay can be found here: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-352940747/view?sectionId=nla.obj-354572341&searchTerm=what+is+surrealism&partId=nla.obj-352960466
iv. These details are well documented in James Gleeson: Beyond the Screen of Sight, ed. Lou Klepac (Sydney, The Beagle Press, 2004)
v. Renee Free, James Gleeson: Images from the Shadows (Sydney, G+B Arts International Limited, 1993), 42-43.
vi. Cedric Flower, Erotica: Aspects of the Erotic in Australian Art (Melbourne, Sun Books, 1977), 15.
vii. Peter McNeil, ‘Friday essay: hidden in plain sight — Australian queer men and women before gay liberation’, The Conversation https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-hidden-in-plain-sight-australian-queer-men-and-women-before-gay-liberation-155964
viii. Christopher Chapman, ‘Surrealism in Australia’, in eds. Michael Lloyd, Ted Gott and Christopher Chapman, Surrealism Revolution By Night (Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, 1993), 216-301.
ix. Bruce James, ‘James Gleeson: Notes in and around the period 1958-1970’, in James Gleeson: Beyond the Screen of Sight, ed. Lou Klepac (Sydney, The Beagle Press, 2004).
x. David Lomas, ‘James Gleeson’s Desiring Production’, Papers of Surrealism, Issue 6 Autumn 2007, 16.
xi. His work was included in James Gleeson: Male Figure and Fantasy – 30 Poem Drawings from 1976-78 (1997), Hung drawn & quartered : 25 years, 25 artists : a celebration of the silver anniversary of Mardi Gras (2003), and QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection (2021)
xii. Ted Gott, “Figure of Fantasy?” Outrage 165 (February 1997) 57.
xiii. Christopher Chapman, “The Body of the Text: James Gleeson’s Poem-Drawing”, Art and Australia, 28.2 (Summer 1990), 229-34.
Publishing details: Charles Nodram Gallery, 2024 [cataloguebdetails to be entered]
Location: 1000