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Kevin Clarke

Art of Looking, The: The Life and Treasures of Collector Charles Leslie Hardcover – Illustrated, 30 Oct. 2014

by Kevin Clarke (Author)

4.8 13 ratings

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Gay history firsthand: Charles Leslie, founder of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, is an inspiration. His exceptional life, experiences, and achievements are carried together in a visually stunning, eloquent illustrated book by Dr. Kevin Clarke, best-selling author of Beards and Porn-From Andy Warhol to X-Tube. The Art of Looking includes imagery of one of the world's greatest male erotic art collections, interviews and background stories. It is a chronicle of gay cultural history.

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Review

This is the book I have been dreaming of all my life. Christopher Harrity, The Advocate"

About the Author

The German-Irish curator, researcher, and publicist Dr. Kevin Clarke was born in 1967. He studied musicology and English literature at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Milan. He has published extensively on LGBT topics, from music (Glitter and be Gay: Homosexuality and Operetta) and film (Porn: From Andy Warhol to X-Tube) to lifestyle (Beards: An Unshaved History). He is a board member of the Schwules Museum* in Berlin where he curated exhibitions on Erik Charell, as well as the blockbuster show Porn That Way. His other exhibitions have been seen at the Theatermuseum Wien and the theater museum in Munich. He regularly lectures in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Austria, and the United States. He is the director of the Operetta Research Center with its special focus on Gay & Lesbian studies.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 3867877637
Publisher ‏ : ‎ BRUNO GMUNDER VERLAG; Illustrated edition (30 Oct. 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9783867877633
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3867877633
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 21.59 x 2.79 x 28.58 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 1,181 in Permanent Art Collections
- 1,624 in Erotic Art (Books)
- 1,875 in Gay Biographies

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4.8 13 ratings

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4.8 out of 5

13 global ratings

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Richard Brown

A sumptuous celebration of a pioneer in the field of homoerotic art

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 10 August 2015

Verified Purchase

Published in conjunction with the Leslie+Lohmann Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, this sumptuous coffee-table book is a celebration of the life and work of one of the museum's two American founders, Charles Leslie. Perhaps to set a tone of unabashed frankness, one which the museum is criticised for by the Puritans and praised for by the rest of us, the book opens with a 1963 close-up photograph of a blue penis: you know what you're in for from the start. The text opens with an essay by Elisabeth Raether pointing out that while female nudity is the standard, the male nude has struggled to establish itself in the art world, despite the inspiration of Classical times, and she has some interesting ideas about why. Straight male viewers of the male nude, she says, are discomforted by it, fearing that if they find it attractive their masculinity is challenged: fear of the male nude takes over. This helps to explain why the work of Leslie and his partner Fritz was so pioneering, why their museum - and earlier their galleries - are so rare in the art world and so needed (though less so now that the male nude has come out of the shadows and is ubiquitous in books, commercials, films, pornography, as well as in art). The Preface also includes short appreciative essays by well-known critics and fans of Leslie, James Saslow, Peter Weiermair and Jonathan D. Katz. The rest of the text takes us through the biography of Charles Leslie, from 1933 to the present day, through the by now familiar phases of gay history in the USA - pre- and post Stonewall, the military, the emergence of gay liberation, sexual promiscuity on an industrial scale before the onset of AIDS, and into the present era. During this time Leslie collected homoerotic art wherever he could find it, on a shoe-string budget, having to keep it hidden for fear of arrest; and this collecting habit grew with the help of Fritz Lohmann into a lifelong career. He and Fritz were the first to set up an art gallery dedicated to the male nude, to gay sex and to gay art, in defiance of all the established art galleries and museums who were afraid to feature the male nude (and still are to this day). It flourished, if with a limited clientele, until AIDS closed it down, only to be re-opened with ever greater success and a wider appeal later. Today, the museum's extensive collection of male art can be viewed on-line. Leslie's life as a gay man reads like the history of gay liberation in miniature, and in this respect too his life is worth the retelling. On every glossy page of this handsome book there are artworks, many very graphic and raunchy as one would expect in such a survey, and photographs, some of a historical nature, some of the partners' extraordinary apartment which is stuffed full of homoerotic delights. It's a gorgeous book that satisfies on many levels. What I would like to see now is a companion volume featuring a selection of the works in the museum - seeing them on-line is always second best for book lovers like me.

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