Claude J. Summers - The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts

THE QUEER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE VISUAL ARTS surveys and introduces a remarkable cultural achievement, one that includes both the contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people to the visual arts and their representation in the visual arts. That is, this work is interested in glbtq individuals not only as makers of art, but also as subjects and objects of art.

Presenting nearly 200 articles on individuals, artistic movements, periods, nations, and topics such as AIDS activism and censorship, The Queer Encyclopedia of theVisual Arts offers a revisionist art history, one that places the achievements of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer artists in historical contexts and that privileges the representation of subjects that have traditionally been censored or marginalized.

Celebrating the richness and variety of queer contributions to the visual arts, this book presents that achievement as a significant cultural legacy. This legacy includes accomplishments as diverse as the homoerotic images on Greek vase paintings and the sometimes graphic depictions in ancient Indian temple sculpture; the works of Michelangelo and Caravaggio; the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo and the screaming popes of Francis Bacon; the architecture of Julia Morgan and Philip Johnson; the photography of Claude Cahun, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Tee Corinne; the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and the narrative paintings of George Dureau; and the contemporary art of Bhupen Khakhar, David Hockney, Flix Gonzlez-Torres, and Janet Cooling. It encompasses the religious expressions of El Greco and the pornographic fantasies of Tom of Finland, no less than the naturalism of Winslow Homer, the Art Deco nudes of Tamara de Lempicka, and the anthropomorphic graffiti drawings of Keith Haring.

The queer presence in the visual arts is so various and pervasive that it resists neat summary. Indeed, it is an

integral part of humanitys artistic expression, and as diverse as humanity itself. It can scarcely be divorced from mainstream art, for so many of the worlds most prominent artists have in fact been of alternate sexualities. Yet there is real value in seeing queer art in its own terms as an expression of a queer artistic impulse and as a documentation of queer experience.

Queer art has so often been denigrated, suppressed, or robbed of its specificity and roots in efforts to render it universal that it has very infrequently been seen whole and in the contexts that gave it life. The aim of The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts is to help remedy the effects of an old but still active, homophobic project of exclusion and denial, by in fact presenting queer art whole and in the multiple contexts that helped shape it. Doing so yields new insight into the creation of art and increases our understanding of a wide range of artistic achievements.

Recovering our cultural heritage is a crucially important endeavor for everyone, but it is especially significant for gay men, lesbians, and others who have grown up in families and societies in which their sexual identities have been ignored, concealed, or condemned. They often come to a realization of their difference with little or no understanding of alternate sexualities beyond the negative stereotypes that pervade contemporary society, and they usually feel isolated and frightened at the very time they most need reassurance and encouragement.