(Entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. Starting with the painting that set this posting off when it appeared in today’s Pinterest mailing for me. Which has a leather jacket, a jockstrap, boots, and an a in it; we’ll get to the d in the fourth and last painting in today’s series)
The painting is Man Wearing Leather Jacket (n.d.) by Bruce Sargeant, a prolific wildly homoerotic artist who is also entirely fictional (but died in 1938 in his timeline). Sargeant is the creation of Mark Beard — who is even more prolific, queer as fuck, plus he’s a real person (still living, now aged 69).
Pinterest has been offering me this painting every so often for a long time, but without any identification; today, I was finally intrigued enough by the tough and direct offer of the model’s muscular ass for sex to use Google Images to dig out the source. Who turned out to be an artist we’ve seen on this blog before, in my 7/18/23 posting “A homerotic painting by Bruce Sargeant” (the painting is Locker Room Scene — Charlie in Three States of Undress).
I’ll look at that first, to establish an important characteristic of Sargeant’s work: it might drip homoeros, but it’s also intended as commentary on art-historical genres, styles, and themes (in Locker Room’s case, with a bow to Marcel Duchamp’s studies of bodies in motion). Then I’ll move to four closely related paintings, transportations of the classic male nude study to the subterranean world of man-on-man sex, in this case leathermen offering or soliciting dick or ass (in popular art, the standard sexual display of women for a male audience being t&a, tits and ass; of men for a male audience, d&a, dick and ass).
“A homerotic painting by Bruce Sargeant”.
… appearing on Pinterest yesterday. This led me to a most remarkable story about the painter. Who, as it turns out, is a fictitious artistic personality (complete with a complex life history and a substantial body of works) created by the prodigiously creative American artist Mark Beard.
(#1) Locker RoomIn canvases such as Locker Room Scene — Charlie in Three States of Undress, the artist experiments with the concept of narrative time. Not unlike Marcel Duchamp’s then already infamous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 of 1912, Sargeant simultaneously portrays the same figure multiple times in different positions surrounded by a group of other athletes from the gymnasium. The effect is one of a description of movement or the passage of moments.
Note the face of the character Charlie; this, or something much like it, is the face of the character in the four leather-jacket paintings, a character not named in two, called Christopher in one, and Calder in another (all with C names). These might be the faces of actual models (chosen because they represented one of Beard’s favored “types”); or they might be entirely imagined men, Beard’s fantasies; or they might be imaginative riffs on a real-life prototype — specifically, Beard’s partner James Manfredi, as represented in the tough butch character of Sargeant’s Jim Manfredi in Black / Yellow Singlet (1996):
(#2) Photos of the actual Jim Manfredi show a much more amiable guy (but this is Manfredi as Bruce Sargeant sees him)
Beard and Sargeant. From the artsy net site:
Mark Beard [born 1956] is an accomplished artist and set designer, best known for creating artworks under aliases like Bruce Sargeant, Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon, and Brechtholdt Streeruwitz. Beard imbues his artistic alter egos with complex biographies and individual styles, a conceit that allows him to explore the styles of German Expressionism, Impressionism, Postmodernism, and other genres. His most recognized persona is that of Bruce Sargeant, a fictional 20th-century British painter [(1898-1938)] whose homoerotic works celebrated an idolized male physique. Named after John Singer Sargent, Beard’s character was created as a way to insert an explicitly queer agenda into the (predominantly heteronormative or closeted) art historical canon. Beard’s paintings, prints, and sculptural works are included in the MoMA and Whitney Museum collections as well as at Harvard and Yale universities.
The leather-jacket paintings of Bruce Sargeant. Leather jackets, sometimes jockstraps, sometimes big butch boots, either ass or dick. I start with the painting that provoked this posting:
(#3) Man Wearing Leather Jacket (n.d.): an ass shot, with the character’s buttocks outlined by the straps of a white jockstrap; and with the character turned to make eye contact with a prospective partner
Then another angle, but still from the rear:
(#4) Christopher From Behind with Leather Jacket Over his Shoulder (n.d.)
On to a front shot, with the dick in the pouch of the jock:
(#5) Man in Leather Jacket and Jockstrap (n.d.); jacket coming off
And to full frontal, dick and balls pulled out of a gray jockstrap:
(#6) Calder Posing in a Black Leather Jacket (n.d.)
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