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The
current show...is
closed. LLGAF will reopen on March 9.
See upcoming schedule for details.
Click here to view 10 drawings by Patrick Angus.
Click here to view 10 additional paintings by Patrick Angus.
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1.
The Apollo Room I, 1986
2.
The Mysterious Baths, 1984-85
3.
I Get Weak, 1991
4.
Flame Steaks, 1985
5.
Boys Do Fall in Love, 1984
14.
Slave to the Rhythm, 1986
17.
In Central Park
19.
The Lovers, 1989
22.
Dancer in Green and Yellow Light
29.
In the Subway, 1987
38.
A Shower at the Baths, 1984
67.
It's My Perogative, 1988
68.
My Heart Goes Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang
69.
All the Love in the World, 1987
70.
The Apollo Room II |
Slave
to the Rhythm An unknown master's epic journey through the bars, baths and the boy burlesques of New York City's steamy gay underground. Jan. 6 – Feb. 14, 2004 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, 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." * * * * * The work in this exhibition was made available by Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, Robert Stuart, Ian Robertson, and The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation. * * * * * Bibliography: The
L.A. Drawings of Patrick Angus. * * * * * The Out Art Speakers Series
* * * * *
— Don Shewey, The Gaeity Theater, 1998
— Rob Stuart |
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|
Hanky
Panky,
1990
Portrait
of Robert Patrick
Patrick
as Picasso
Self-Portrait
Portrait
of Quentin Crisp
The
Trial of Socrates, 1988 |
Featured
in the Member's Gallery Work
by Patrick Angus from the Permanent Collection.
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
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, |
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Images to come shortly. Thank you. |
Featured
in Trivero Hall
All
the Boys You've Loved Before |
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Images to come shortly. Thank you. |
and The
Drawings of J.B. Harter |
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Click here to view 10 drawings by Patrick Angus.
Click here to view 10 additional paintings by Patrick Angus.
See
the Artists Calls page for prospectus and calls for work for upcoming shows.
Comments? Questions? Corrections? Requests?
Contact us at: The Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation
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