EXHIBITION REPORT
“Love revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites”
Report by Roberto C. Ferrari on the exhibition at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery,
curated by Colin Cruise and Victoria Osborne, with accompanying exhibition catalogue
[Some of you are aware of my own work on the gay Pre-Raphaelite artist Simeon Solomon. I mention this because I am the author of one of the essays in the exhibition catalogue. As a result, the following is a report, not a review, on the Simeon Solomon exhibition and the accompanying catalogue.]
The life of the artist Simeon Solomon reads like the rise and fall of a celebrity, with his comeback only taking place in recent years with the rise in queer studies. When he died in 1905, Solomon was largely forgotten but for a small group of friends and family members. His proverbial fall from grace took place in February 1873 when he was arrested with another man in a public urinal and charged with indecent exposure and attempted sodomy. Despite serving only a two-week sentence, Solomon’s public career was over and many of his former Pre-Raphaelite friends eschewed him. It was a sad ending to what promised to be a lucrative career. Solomon was born in London in 1840, the last of eight children in an artistically-inclined middle class Jewish family that included his elder siblings Abraham Solomon, A.R.A., and Rebecca Solomon. He became a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy and the Dudley Gallery exhibitions, and was cited early on in his career by William Michael Rossetti in The Spectator as “an artist of endless invention and fantasy” (8 November 1858, 1172).
Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites is a retrospective exhibition of the work of Solomon on the 100th anniversary of his death. The curators for the exhibition are Colin Cruise and Victoria Osborne. Cruise is a professor at Staffordshire University and a Solomon scholar. Osborne is a curator at the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery (BM&AG). It is appropriate that the exhibition was based in Birmingham, not because Solomon had a connection to the city, but for a practical reason: the museum houses the largest public collection of individual works by Solomon, as well as one of the leading Pre-Raphaelite art collections. Love Revealed follows the progression of a few earlier exhibitions of works by Solomon, including the 1985 Solomon, a Family of Painters show at the BM&AG and the Geffrye Museum (London) that highlighted the work of all three siblings, and the small 2001 exhibition of Solomon’s work at the Jewish Museum (London). Love Revealed is a culmination not only of these earlier exhibitions, but also of the new appreciation of Solomon that has taken place over the past twenty years.
The exhibition is arranged in six sections. The first, “Juvenilia and First Exhibitions,” details Solomon’s early works as evidenced in his surviving sketchbooks and first Biblical-themed subjects. “Pre-Raphaelitism and Early Success” explores the influence on him of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others in the circle, as well as the first wave of public interest in Solomon’s work. The section on “Experiments in Beauty” highlights Solomon’s interest in the Aesthetic Movement and Victorian Classicism, demonstrating Solomon’s heretofore overlooked pivotal role in these movements. We see in this section Solomon’s first obvious interest in homosexual subjects with the watercolor Sappho and Erinna in a Garden of Mytilene (1864), where the ancient Lesbian poetess makes overtures towards another poetess. “The Dudley and Notoriety” explores Solomon’s interest in the male figure as an object of beauty, including stunning priest-like figures seen in A Deacon (1863) and classical subjects such as the god Bacchus. This section is complemented by “Visions of Love” which highlights Solomon’s interest in the ephebic beauty of Eros in Love in Autumn (1866), Dawn (1870), and other works, and ultimately culminating in his paean to queer love, the prose-poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1871). The final section of the exhibition, “The Late Works,” provides an overview of the Symbolist motifs evident in Solomon’s work from his arrest to his death 32 years later. Accompanying each of the sections in the exhibition are works by his colleagues and friends, such as Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Frederick Sandys, all of which assist in providing a context with which to look at Solomon’s work.
The exhibition brings together over 100 of Solomon’s works, some of which have not been seen publicly since they were exhibited in his lifetime. As a result, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to experience so many of his works in one location, but also to see his diverse interests in watercolor, oil, printmaking, and photography. Those interested in queer studies will not be disappointed by the exhibition. Cruise and Osborne have taken what I perceive to be a progressive approach to Solomon’s homosexuality. Rather than focusing exclusively on it (or on his religion for that matter), the exhibition instead reveals his homosexuality (and his Jewishness) as an obvious and accepted part of his life and oeuvre.
The exhibition closes in Birmingham on January 15, 2006. It moves to the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (March 9 to June 18, 2006), where Solomon’s work will be seen as part of the European Symbolist tradition of Franz von Stuck and others. The exhibition then moves to the Ben Uri Gallery at the London Jewish Museum of Art (September 11 to November 26, 2006). For those unable to visit the exhibition, the accompanying catalogue published by Merrill is worth purchasing. There are six essays written by some of the leading art historians in Solomon and Pre-Raphaelite studies, and the images are printed in full-color, providing the reader with a vivid recreation of Solomon’s works. Still, a visit to one of the exhibition venues will introduce to the queer art historian the true talent of this once-forgotten artist, now on his comeback tour.
Letter from Vienna
by Sherman Clarke
25 November 2005
Visiting Vienna to see art and architecture is like Art History 101 come to life. So many works that are so familiar and wonderful to see in person. This was my first time in Vienna. The Mantegna “Sebastian” in the Kunsthistorisches Museum is much smaller than I would have anticipated, but it is beautiful. There is also a sculpture of Marsyas or Sebastian that is attributed to Mantegna in the Liechtenstein Princely Collections. I haven’t studied the iconography of Sebastian closely but twice there were works of Sebast ian that were not the normal standing figure with arrows (not necessarily to be confused with eros). A mid-17th century bronze of Sebastian at the Liechtenstein as well as a painting (ca. 1746) by Paul Troger at the Österreichische Galerie show Sebastian slumping with one arm attached to a tree and the full weight of his body stretching toward the ground. A fine opportunity to show a lovely nearly naked male body.
Today, back home in New York City, while visiting Wessel + O’Connor’s 20th anniversary show, there was a photo by Steven Klein called “Two boys by pool” which showed a similar pose in that one boy, body slumping, is being held by his wrist by the other boy. Probably no link to the Sebastian iconography but a compelling parallel when seen in the same week.
Of course, the joy of seeing new collections, especially when not in one’s home country, is also “meeting” the work of unknown artists and seeing new works by those artists that are known. At the Leopold Museum, I met the work of Anton Kolig (1886-1950). The works in the gallery included three paintings of naked men: one kneeling, one prone, and two men together. I was getting all excited about a new “gay” find when I happened on the portrait of his daughter and sighed. A couple days later, I went to a gay show entitled “geheimsache:leben” on gay and lesbian life in 20th-century Vienna. The show was primarily documents but included one space with art works by a number of artists. In that show were some drawings of naked men by Anton Kolig. Hmm. And in the exhibition bookshop was a book on Kolig and his last male models. Maybe we do have a new find; my German is not good enough to do a skim in the bookshop but you can rest assured that I’ll find the book and get out my German dictionary. Either the book or the label in the exhibition said that Kolig did 3500 drawings of nude men.
Also in the “geheimsache:leben” show was a work entitled “s.exe sexed” by Christina Goestl, a video of vaginas flashing past. It was like Tee Corinne’s Cunt coloring book on video fast forward. And already colored.
Also at the Österreichische Galerie was a painting entitled “The fool’s cap” by Richard Hausner, described in the label copy as Fantastic Realism, not a style I normally fall for. But this painting captured my eye with the oddly elongated and curved neck and the askew cap, as well as the finely worked surface. Then, at “geheimsache:leben,” there was a work that was signed R. Hausner. Was it gaydar that caused me to gravitate to “Fool’s cap”? And what about the river figure in the Mehlmarkt fountain by Georg Raphael Donner (1693-1741), now in the Österreichische Galerie? He is lying on his belly, naked, with one leg draped outside the perimeter of the fountain and a little “figleaf” for his butt. No, I don’t think all male artists that paint or sculpt or draw naked men are gay but there sure was some appealing eye candy in Vienna for these gay eyes.