A Museum Man

Gayletter Issue 9

“Alongside the Iggy Pop Life Class drawings, I have selected some objects from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection featuring the male nude. The naked form here sometimes appears as an object of worship, sometimes as a disruptive presence. Certain of these objects if made now would be considered shocking or even obscene, but in their original context were seen as devotional. The tension between the sacred and profane has inspired artists and storytellers for thousands of years, including the creators of rock and roll music.” —Jeremy Deller

This image is from Jim Steinhardt’s series Homage to the Working Man, a fine combination of street photography and homoerotic pin-up.

Eugène Pelletan by Nadar, The Met’s Photography Department

Medium: Salted paper print from glass negative

Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift and Rogers Fund, 1991 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

“One doesn’t need a contemporary sense of gay identity to see that there is something wonderfully queer in Wood’s world. Lay aside the many images with overtly homoerotic subject matter, and you still have a large body of work in which lines are being crossed, categories jumbled and expectations confounded.” Read more on Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables in the Washington Post.  

[Frustules of Diatoms] by Julius Wiesner, The Met’s Photography Department

Medium: Cyanotype

Purchase, Steven Ames Gift, 2012 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Submission Friday:

Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1671-72, by Antonio Giorgetti 

[Nude Men in the Garden] by Thomas Eakins, The Met’s Photography Department

Medium: Platinum print

David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1943 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

British landscape painter, etcher, and printmaker Samuel Palmer was born on this day in 1805.

Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain. He was introduced to William Blake at the age of 19, and it is thought that he was one of Palmer’s most significant influences in his work.

Palmer produced many visionary pastoral paintings over the course of his career. Here is a self-portrait of Palmer that was painted when he was only nineteen years old, as well as three of his landscape works from our collection.

Self Portrait, Samuel Palmer, 1824. Age 19. Black chalk heightened with white on paper.

Pastoral Scene. Samuel Palmer, 1833-1835. Oil on panel.

Christian descending into the Valley of Humiliation. Samuel Palmer, 1848. Watercolour and bodycolour.

“Mental health problems commonly affect men. Ten percent to 15 percent of men will experience a major depressive episode in their lifetimes….Men often express less emotion than women do, are hesitant to express weakness, and seek professional help much less frequently than do their female counterparts… Many men think that clinicians are ill equipped to help them, that feelings of depression and anxiety are normative for men and cannot be changed through therapy, that they are misunderstood because of the language they use to express their emotional concerns, and that they are unwanted as clients.”

Gender and Attitudes about Mental Health Help Seeking: Results from National Data

Explore the Mental Health collection from the NASW journals