Her work inspired me to compare female nudity seen through her eyes in 1906/07 to those painted by males between 1918 and 1570 – Modigliani, Gauguin, Renoir and Tintoretto.

I. Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1918) Paula Modersohn-Becker (1906)

II. Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin (1891/94) and Paula Modersohn-Becker (1906)

III. Tintoretto (1570) and Paula Modersohn Becker (1906)

IV. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1875) and Paula Modersohn Becker (1907)

In response to the first comment, I am adding two pictures:

Angela Ferreira – ‘Punica Malum’ 2007 and

Henri Rousseau – ‘The Dream’ 1910

Any further comments?

Below is a table with images from A&P and a 20th century painting.

Is there a trend?

Since I last checked in with Art & Perception, I’ve been exploring the synthesis of two of my most persistent obsessions: Manhattan and beatuiful men. I was partly motivated by comments on this blog questioning my lack of people in my city views and details. As a result of that, I have of late gone in a completely opposite direction.

Truth be told, I rarely enoy nude male photography, it leaves me cold. Too obvious. On the other hand the naked city in all of its hardness, rigid angles and cubist statements is to my eye powerfully masculine and quite arousing. So I wondered if I could use my camera to create some kind of visual and emotional communication between the stone, steel and glass architecture, textures and colors of my adored metropolis and the architecture, textures and colors of beautiful men.

I’m not sure I’ve succeeded quite yet, but I do feel I am on the right path. And I must confess–not surprisingly–the exploration has been great fun.

Perhaps the strangest part of this experience has been that the sexual and visual pleasure that I’ve been experiencing during this process of of exploration has been unique and extraordinarily intense in ways I had not imagined. Furthermore, the experience has given rise to intense personal feelings that I’ve not experienced during the actual act of sex. Partly, this is because–with one exception–I have not indulged in sex with my models despite the fact that one of the criteria I’ve used to select my models has been powerful sexual attraction. Limiting myself to the visual experience has opened the door on new sensations and much more powerful visual experience than I’ve ever had before.

Have I discovered my inner voyeur? Perhaps, but it is something much more. The combined beauty of the male form and texture and elements of the city has taken me to a very new place emotionally, sexually and aesthetically.

If readers show enough interest in this work, I’ll post more next week.

Keystoning or the distortion of vertical lines was a concern last year when I photographed paintings. On dpreview.com, I learned that to avoid keystoning one should hold the camera on a parallel plane to a painting and then shoot at the longest zoom setting.

However, this summer, I blithely rotated the camera on the ballhead of my new tripod whose three-legged presence felt strangely comforting in the solitude of the dunes. Most of my recent images of the dunes were shot pointing the camera downwards.

One of my goals is to capture the steepness of the dunes. But, so far, I have failed to image the dunes at their steepest slope as shown by my recent post Fall-off.

I have come to terms with the problems of my slope photography – human frailty. Fear had prevented me from stepping close to the edge of 450 feet elevations consisting of loose sand and gravel.

The images selected for today were shot at a safe distance from the Fall-off, again pointing my camera downwards.

Are you concerned about the keystoning issue when you do nature photography?
Do I make downward slopes appear steeper by pointing my camera downwards and shooting at a wide angle?
Do you do perspective crops in Adobe Photoshop of nature photographs?

The rock formations in Arches and elsewhere are of many shapes. Among them are ones that can’t help but bring the word phallic to mind. The first picture I took that first morning (first image below) already fit into that category. That’s not why I made the photograph — at least not consciously — but it’s something that occurred to me at roughly the same moment I decided to set up the camera. And although the rock can certainly stand on its own as subject, it’s possible that the subliminal association helped draw my attention to it.

After wandering through the area and making a number of photographs along similar lines, I was beginning to wonder if this had to be considered an exclusively male landscape. Very shortly after that, the following rock caught my attention, though I think it took a few moments to figure out why.

That turned out to be the first of many, so perhaps this landscape was not so gender-skewed after all. But if anything, it underlined the question of how much our attention, whether considering a landscape or an artwork, might be directed by sexual associations, unconscious or not. This is not unlike the face recognition discussed in a previous post, where it is well known that the brain has special regions for the task. I suspect that with abstract art, where obvious subjects are missing or minimal, this kind of subliminal processing has a much stronger affect.

Have there been times when sexual associations played a role in either your art or your viewing of someone else’s art? Are there artists, abstract or realistic, who deliberately manipulate our reactions using such perceptual tendencies? I guess one example, at least, is Edward Weston’s gorgeous pepper.

The cover story that allowed the authorities to turn a blind eye to these whorehouses was simple.  They were not whorehouses; they were burlesque houses where boys would strip, dance and display their merchandise.  No liquor was served and the”theaters” fell under the protection of Off-Broadway regulations.

The shows ranged from Broadway quality choreography to raunchy simulations of sexual prowess.  But during “intermission” and between shows, the performers would retire to the lounge to mingle with audience members. Depending on the price, services were rendered in hallways, backstage, in local hotel rooms or at the residence of the more well-heeled patrons.

Each house also catered to very specific tastes and wallets.  The Eros and the Show Palace were on low rent Eighth Avenue in the shadow of the main bus terminal.  The Gaiety was only just around the corner from it’s sleazier cousins , but the Gaiety was on Broadway. For better or worse, The Gaiety was part of the Great White Way.

At one point the Gaiety even achieved a bizarre degree of chic and became a regular haunt for Madonna–who eventually did much of the photography for her notorious SEX book (1992) at the Gaiety with many of the more popular Gaiety dancers.

Gaiety dancers were mostly very beautiful white boys, ranging from serious Midwestern white bread types to South American hunks with a very large contingent of French Canadian studs (the Brazil of the North.)  These boys were right off the pages of fashion and muscle magazines.

Show Palace dancers were almost exclusively African-American tripods.  Many were downright ugly but all of them had the most freakishly enormous penises imaginable.  Thursday afternoons were a special treat.  The dancers would compete to see who could jerk off on the audience first.  The music would blare and the dancers would call on willing audience members to provide a helpful hand, finger or tongue.  It was gross, disgusting, vile and stinky.  A great time was always had by all.

Eros dancers were stereotypical El Barrio types.  Unlike the Gaiety dancer who’s primary prop was an erection, Eros dancers would perform theme shows incorporating props such as chains, ponchos, “Indian garb”, chaps and whips. Some of them would even have little sets depicting some kind of scene like bullfights and prisons.

But I digress.  This story is supposed to be about art and muses. My apologies.

Within this 20th Century Toulouse Lautrec gay world I met a prostitute who would become one of my favorite artists and good friends.  Actually, it’s unfair to call Jose-Luis Cortes a prostitute.  He is a successful painter with a very dark muse.  Jose-Luis’s work hangs in New York’s El Museo del Barrio, a prominent art museum in Puerto Rico and is shown in galleries in Manhattan, Tokyo and Vienna.

Jose-Luis paints within the framework of an odd lifestyle pattern.  He performs intense gay S&M scenes for public audiences (Eros, gay clubs, private parties, etc.) that incorporate his art.  At the end of each show he sells himself as a gay sex slave and disappears with his purchaser/master for at least three days and sometimes up to two weeks. Crack and coke play a large part in these experiences. He then emerges from these episodes and paints without interruption for several weeks. We (his friends) never expect him to return assuming this will be the time he will permanently disappear only to wash ashore dead on the banks  of the East River.  We make him promise to never do this again; he promises he won’t. The false promises and pretense are, I suppose, part of the scene and the muse.

At one point he was invited to stage a series of such S&M sex shows in a Viennese art gallery. He remained in Austria for three months, sold a ton of paintings, and became the most famous Puerto Rican in Austria…probably the only Puerto Rican in Austria.  Certainly, he is the most famous and successful graduate of Eros.

Jose-Luis is also HIV+ and has been waiting to die for over twenty years.  This has very much driven his habits and his art.  He goes on and off meds, on and off crack and cocaine and as of today, he is alive and well and still contributing his unique perspective to the world of art.  I’m not saying I approve of any of this, I’m just saying it is.

He works in a disturbingly fragile medium, painting on newsprint–primarily The New York Times. He very much enjoys the idea that his paintings will mostly age and crumble leaving little record of  his life. He paints his life and has captured glimpses of the lost and almost forgotten sex trade of Times Square, dark nights at an S&M sex club called The Lure, and the rough world of crack and prostitution.