Patrick Angus 1953 - 1992
American, painter

Once called the "the Toulouse-Lautrec of Times Square" by Robert Patrick, a noted New York playwright, Patrick Angus (1953-1992) is to the gay underground of New York's 1980s as the famous French painter was to the outré Paris of a century earlier. Much as Lautrec devoted his art to the risqué world of Parisian dance hall girls and prostitutes, Patrick Angus focused his incisive eye on New York's largely neglected gay underground - the hustler bars, baths and the male burlesques at the fringes of gay life.Slave to the Rhythm: Patrick Angus and the Gay 80s (Jan. 6 – Feb. 14, 2004, at LLGAF), offers the first opportunity in more than a decade to view this largely lost world through the eyes of an exceptionally gifted painter.

Unknown to all but a small circle of collectors including artist David Hockney, Angus' fluidly expressive work remains unrecognized by the artistic establishment. The reason for this neglect is not hard to find. Angus knew that the established art world had no place for a gay painter who unsentimentally depicted gay life as he personally knew it.

A scene from Jonathan Nossiter's documentary Resident Alien, vividly confirms his concern as Robert Patrick drags a reluctant Angus to show his paintings to an East Village art dealer, who recoils in horror at their explicitly homosexual subject matter. For Angus it was just one more in a sting of rejections by dealers and galleries. He retreated to continue his work in virtual seclusion.

In full command of his talents as a painter with a gift for narrative drama, Angus expressed an empathy for the humanity of his subjects that places him in the American tradition of humanistic painting by Bellows, Sloan, Marsh and Hopper. His work captures the uninhibited reality of his subjects and their mileux in a way that Quentin Crisp once described as "deliberately shameless." His internal landscapes of conmon gay venues - where many of his subjects might prefer not to be seen but nevertheless frequented - elevate collective gay underground experieces simply by making them the subject of art. Much as Hopper painted an utterly ordinary scene in his oft immitated night diner, Angus devoted himself to documenting commonplace "institutions" where gay men gathered to enjoy themselve, without judgement or sentimentality.

"Twenty years after Stonewall, gay people still have few honest images of themselves," Angus said, "and most of those occur in our literature. Gay men long to see themselves, [but] they seldom do. Obviously, we must picture ourselves." So he set out to do just that.

Angus' pictures portrayed gay men as he found them, including hustlers and Johns, some of whom were recognizable to a former Gaiety Theater dancer years later. As James Cary Parkes wrote in his June 1992 Pink Paper obituary of the artist, "Patrick Angus...belonged in a different tradition of American Art [from the prevailing pop art and expressionism]: subtle, painterly, wholly uncomplicated by hype. Like the great American painter Richard Diebenkorn, Angus' work matched realist visual composition with emotive highly introspective qualities.... Figures in Angus' pictures were at once metaphorical as well as representative of [their subject]."
Capturing scenes of gay night life in compositions of often heroic physical dimensions approaching indoor landscapes, Angus' work is a vibrantly expressive synthesis that skates equidistant between realism and abstraction. Frequently including a specific homage to the work of Matisse, Picasso, Beckman, Hockney and numerous other artists.

A compelling new book available at the exhibition, The L.A. Drawings, helps provide insight into Angus' early development as an incisive and often humous observer of the world around him. Co-published by The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation and The Schwules Museum in Berlin, with an introduction by Douglas Turnbaugh, the book features Patrick Angus' Los Angeles drawings, mostly dating from 1979, before he left the West Coast for New York.

In his prepublication review of the book, James M. Saslow, author of Pictures and Passions: A history of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts and Professor of Art History, says that "Patrick Angus treats pencil like the old master' difficult silverpoint drawing, creating a mood of deadpan whimsy reminiscent of Hockney and the great cartoonist Saul Steinberg....[Angus provides] rare glimpses in to the private and public life of a young gay man in the heady post-Stonewall years - both his enigmatic individual fantasies, and the collective rituals of sunbathing, cruising, and kissing in the surreal landscape of southern California."

It was the huge 1980 Picasso Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art that brought Angus and his incisive eye to New York. Working at MOMA by day, first as a museum guard and then in the museum's gift shop, he often spent his evenings at the Gaiety Theater and other similar gay locales where he found the scenes and the men featured in his paintings.

That Angus was an attractive man can be readily gleaned from his photographs, but his low self-esteem led him to believe that he was grotesquely unattractive. "When focus could be deflected from his low self-estimation, Patrick could be the most delightful of conversational companions," writes Robert Patrick, a close friend for whom he designed and painted scenery. "No one I ever knew had such objective aesthetic judgment nor was so eager for the aesthetic insights of others....but when the topic would return to his work, again the cloud of self-loathing would muddy and poison talk....He saw everything so clearly, so freshly, except himself."

In the last year of life, as he struggled with AIDS with little medical treatment while telling his fiends that he was seeing doctors and following their orders, Angus was astonished by a burst of good fortune. In a matter of months, he had three one-person exhibitions (one at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the Leslie-Lohman and Ganymede galleries in New York City) and sold six pieces to painter David Hockney. The New York exhibitions and a book about his work were the result of the tireless diligence of his friend Douglas Turnbaugh in promoting him in his final months.
He had not been so afraid of dying, Angus told Turnbaugh, as that his work would end up in a dumpster. On his deathbed at St. Vincent's hospital, looking at the proof sheets of Strip Show, a soon-to-be-published book of his paintings, he whispered, "This is the happiest day of my life."

— Christian Bain

In Patrick Angus' paintings there is a human exchange that can not rightly be reduced to sex alone. Men watch the dancers. Dancers and men converse in the lounge. And sometimes in the early days when it was still permitted, men had sex, but Patrick was not painting sex even though his paintings show sex. He was insistent on making that point.

He was painting a world, the gay demimonde where men share a common longing or pleasure, with humor or with seriousness, with overtures in words or gestures, or with guarded privacy. Some men sat very much to themselves, a business man perhaps holding a briefcase across his lap. Others were breezy, open, ready for something, or nothing. It was enough to be there. Angus got that.

— Rob Stuart

Patrick Angus is a New York-based latter day William Hogarth. In The Rake's Progress, A Harlot's Progress, and Marriage a la Mode, Hogarth revealed ... a slice of life, an 18th Century London beau monde gone tragically wrong. But while Hogarth is "moral" in tone, Patrick Angus is kind and indulgent, gently observing, even conveying a doting intimacy. ... These paintings and drawings do not shock; instead they convey a certain coziness. Patrick Angus obviously loved this world."

— John Wykert

I met Patrick Angus in the very last months of his life. He was pleasant looking, of medium height with a slender build, a pale young man with gentle dark eyes. He was polite, even diffident, and seemed younger than his age. To my unpracticed eye, he did not seem that ill. I had been told that he did not have long to live, but I could not tell from his quiet demeanor that he knew this.

— John Wykert

How to Find Love in An Instant

Sit as close to the stage as possible.
Look Like you're one of the kind that's buying and
like you have the wherewithal.
Look into his eyes.
Look into his lap.
Covet him as loud as you can without speaking.
Do not touch. Just worship silently.

— From Times Square Poems by Michael Lassell

Bare Essentials: The Gaeity Theater
Onstage, a young man stands with his back to the audience, his taut ass shining in the spotlight. He exits and a disembodied voice announces, "Eddie!" Eddie's really something. A solid little fireplug of a guy, he's dressed in preppy Bermudas and a Polo shirt, both of which are quickly dicarded, revealing a closely trimmed hairy chest and one of the biggest, thickest, most downward-curved uncut cocks in captivity.

Eddie's proud. He smiles, the audience hoots and hollers, and his work boots quickly fill up with dollar bills (and a couple of tens). When Eddie leaves the stage, Frederico takes over. He's a completely different type, dark and slender with a gleaming chest and magnificent arms. His dancing is hypnotic, with his hands drawing mysterious images in the testosterone-charged air, his long erect penis swaying gracefully to his inner rhythms ... the Gaiety is still one of the best rides in town.

— Robert W. Richards, HX Magazine, May 16, 1997

Mr. Hockney has said that he paints what he likes to look at. No wonder he has bought several of Mr. Angus's paintings. Mr. Angus works on the same principle and, although at first sight, his pictures seem so deliberately shameless, he is really, in this respect, in a direct line of descent from artists such as Mr. Manet, whose picture of Olympia was, in its day, considered so shocking.

— Quentin Crisp, The Diary of Quentin Crisp,
New York Native, April 27, 1992

* * * * *

The Gaeity Theater

The beat of the music matches my pulse.
The rhythm of expectation.
The excitment fills my cock with warmth.
The uncomforable lack of space in my
starched jeans.
My lips are dry, my hands wet.
My nostrils are repulsed by
the day-old sweat
and stale tobacco smell
of the shadow seated directly behind me
The excitement is mixed with a curious
punishing feeling inside.
I feel bad.
I know my mother wouldn't approve.

— Don Shewey, , 1998

Red, Red Wine

Avuncular eye meets generous cock,
Playing double the game of look, look, no socks;

It's all in that look, the catch of the glance,
To hook someone else in the thrust of the dance;

Naked the music, naked the tease,
Naked the hope - take me if I please;

Except for myself, standing with wine:
For the play of the game by design will be mine;

Invited by art, drawn there by sight,
It's my eye and my cock that have met there tonight.

— Rob Stuart 

The Los Angeles Drawings of Patrick Angus. Co-Published by The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, NYC, and The Schwules Museum, Berlin. Introduction by Douglas Blair Turnbaugh. 2003. This book can be ordered from Leslie-Lohman for $25 per copy plus $5 S/H.

Strip Show: Paintings by Patrick Angus, introduced by Douglas Blair Turnbaugh. London: Editions Aubrey Walter, 1992.

Ghetto: The Poems of Winthrop Smith. RFD Press, 1990. Contains 6 drawings by Patrick Angus.

Exhibitions:

Jan. 6 – Feb. 14, 2004
Slave to the Rhythm: Patrick Angus and the Gay 80s.
The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation.

Dec. 14 - 23, 1993
The Female Nude
The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation

May 3 - 30, 1992
Title?
Ganymede Gallery

Apr. 8 - May 2, 1992
Strip Show
The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation

Jan. 27 - Feb. 5, 1992
Title?
University of California at Santa Barbara