From Beefcake to the Most Delicate Silhouettes

There was a happy day when, without thinking much about it, I could count on the publishers of photography books to provide me with my husband's birthday and Christmas presents. I needn't worry if I hadn't seen anything appropriate in the department stores or heard him mention a menswear designer he admired. Back then, he was an executive-type, always in need of something from Brooks Brothers. Easiest thing in the world. Whatever I spent on what seemed to me rather anonymous business gear, it was always money well spent, almost a business expense, so far as dear A. was concerned. As an hourly clerk working in a bookstore, I could ill-afford his good, if conservative taste in middle-class habiliment, but I could just manage a new shirt, an alligator wallet or a new silk tie. Hardly the stuff of romance, these pieces of practical finery, but I always felt, as when I saved to buy him a new briefcase he'd admired, that in some small way, I was doing my part to maintain his dignity and our primary income. But I'm not a wife, and back then, the word "husband" still had an irony attached to it for us that usage and experience have subsequently, surprisingly, worn away. (Who would have guessed?) The term one used most often then, perfectly acceptable amongst ourselves, if rather provocative in mixed company, was "lover," and I could hardly be satisfied giving my lover a tie, however happy it made him, now could I? After a few less than successful experiments with flowers, candy, beribboned champagne flutes -- as it turned out, neither of us ever became a wine aficionado, even at New Year's, pop records, comic aprons, and supposedly sexy silk drawers, I finally hit on something that perfectly suited his more salacious side, my budget and my line of work and started getting him nudes.

There was, back then, something of a boom in fag photography. In addition to the more refined offerings of the major art publishers in which establishment fashion and art types felt themselves finally liberated to share the record of their tricks and or print their blue studies of rent-boys-as-fawns, openly gay photographers were finding their more erotically and politically charged work collected and published in book form for the first time. Mapplethorpe having made hard-ons fashionable for the gallery set, there was also an ongoing effort to reclaim the gay cultural past by reprinting in large, handsomely made books, the lost studio-snaps of the likes of "Bruce of Los Angeles," and other quaintly camp pornographers from the Age of the Physique Pictorials, as well as the pioneering smut of the ancients, such as the exiled pedo-aesthete and dilettante photographer, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, whose pictures of naked Sicilians with dirty feet were rediscovered and, long after all parties involved had probably passed over into forgetfulness, reborn as a indispensable record of lost, well-hung innocence. With the boom in respectable, book-bound porn, finding something for my lover in the way of artful ass to wrap up and slip under the tree come Christmas became as easy as buying the man cuff links. True, often as not, there was quite a bit of gushy, introductory academic prose made to justify the whole enterprise of making coffee-table-books out of "Old Reliable" excons flexing their tattoos and exposing their rather touching tan-lines, but one only read these books as an afterthought. I don't think anyone in the target market had to endorse all that windy historicism to enjoy browsing through a review of Korean War veterans in their bashful black and white all-together, or color Polaroids of drug-addled hippies slipping out of their cut-offs and tube-socks and grinning at the discovery of their tumescence as at an unexpected vision of love, peace and understanding. It was all such fun! True, there was the occasional grim beauty of a Nan Goldin junky, or an interleaved image or two of some sad adolescent girlfriend, but for the most part, the books I bought for A. provided us all -- and here I include all the friends who gathered over the years for various holidays at our house -- with hours of blameless quiet, which gave dear A. time to finish baking the pie.

But all good things come to an end. The day came when, bookshelves groaning under the weight of over-sized art books, and the Internet less expensively and more conveniently providing us with eye-candy, dear A. said, "Enough," and suggested he would rather have the new Josh Groban recording, or a porkpie hat for his birthday, or nothing at all for Christmas, as it would just be the two of us, and we really wanted to buy a flat-screen TV this year, or fix my shower floor, or finally get a back-splash put in behind the stove. (And that, my dears, is when one knows that one is married, for richer, for poorer, etc. and for life.)

So I seldom buy art books of any description anymore. My excuse for acquiring big, expensive books of nude photography has been taken from me, and sadly, not a moment too soon, as the boom has long since bust. Pickin's these days are slim.

But there are still beautiful, big art books that I still covet, books that fill me, for whatever reason, with something like the excitement of those other, earlier visual feasts of flesh, but that could not be more remote from that subject matter. A book published by Rizolli, just last September, Silhouette: The Art of The Shadow, by the art historian, Emma Rutherford, at $65.00, is really well beyond my present means, but that hasn't prevented me from keeping it for a week at my desk, carefully turning the pages in any spare moment and marveling at the treasures the author has collected up.

I've cut some silhouettes myself. I decorated my first college dormitory room with facing images in black and white of Balinese dancers I'd cut just for that purpose. My first roommate, a baseball scholarship freshman, named "Spike," failed to sufficiently appreciate my efforts, I thought. A couple of years ago, I cut profiles of some famous poets for a contest at the bookstore during National Poetry Month. I thought these not bad.

I can only appreciate how little I've mastered of the art now that there is, in Rutherford's book, a real record of just how extraordinarily well this sort of thing was once done, even by such rank amateurs as myself. Such beauties in this book! And such variation! A whole school of silhouette making, in which "bronzing" and gold paint and leaf were used to elaborate the features, or black ink was added in the most delicate flourishes to describe lace and elaborate hairdos, was previously unknown to me. The most amazing scenes of multiple characters and crowded setting, full of activity and motion, were done in silhouettes the like of which I'd never seen, or certainly never seen in such abundant example, before. This book is a remarkable record of a largely lost art, and a priceless bit of good curatorial scholarship. It would be a priceless prize for my library, had I the money to buy it before it is inevitably remained someday.

The story told in it is as interesting, in some ways, as the art itself, tracing what was a fad of an earlier century all the way back to Greek vases and the like. If Rutherford's prose is rather dry and without fuss, she has had the sense now and again to quote more amusing historical criticism of the form, such as in this:

"In his 'Shades: An Essay on English Portrait Silhouettes,' Sir David Piper (1970) describes how the silhouettist, bored with the painted black profile, 'went whoring after the third dimension.'"

And those gilded flourishes I find so fascinating? They are described in a quote from a contemporary craftsman as being "niggling, tortured," and a disservice to the sitter, so there we are. There's no accounting for taste. But the words aside, the book itself is a beautiful thing, and crowded with examples of amazing variety, from the most elaborate and artful aristocratic portraits, to the sweetest little silhouettes made as inexpensive memorials of common people, and, in one particularly charming example, even Queen Victoria's dog, Dash.

Emma Rutherford's is one, had I room on the shelf, and money in my pocket, I would happily add to our somewhat eclectic collection of oversized art books, and should it indeed make its way someday to one of the bargain tables, I will. The author needn't blush at the thought, as I'd put her next to Edward Lear's beautiful birds, maybe, or on the table with the volume of Cecil Beaton portraits and a collection of Phiz drawings I bought used for myself a Christmas or two ago. I'd promise not to put her in the steamroom atmosphere of most of the books I bought dear A. over the years. I fear all those glorious pages of Georgian ladies and gentlemen in profile would curl in such company.

Though some of those gilded old roués, and not a few of the ladies, might feel right at home in our collection.

Angus McBean, Never Before Seen

One of the lesser, but none the less persistent temptations of the Bargain Books tables in the bookstore where I work are the art books. I have never been a collector of these. The size and subjects of these tend not to lend themselves to a library such as mine. Photography though has always had an appeal. For many years, during what was a kind of renaissance of gay culture, it seemed that no gay photographer, past or present, wasn't being celebrated between covers. This was a wonderful opportunity for a humble bookseller such as meself, to contribute rather spectacular gifts to the gay Christmas revels, as these, as with all photography books not by Ansel Adams, had the shelf-life of peaches and were sure to end sooner rather than later on remainder tables, often as not still sealed in their original shrinkwrap; unopened, unmarked and pristine. Dear A. acquired quite a library of glorious queer smut in respectable hard covers in just this way. Eventually, I was warned off, as shelf space in out house became increasingly tight and as our fellow celebrants diminished in number, so that there were fewer and fewer gay boys sprawled, come Christmas morning, on our carpet, each with his nose in a book of nudes. Nowadays, There are fewer temptations on the tables too.

But now and then a book will catch my eye. Angus McBean: Portraits, originally from The Monacelli Press was such a one. So far as I can see, this division of Random House tends to print the kind of glossy interiors and travels that always make me think of the disappearing rain forests, rather than of luxuries denied the likes of me. No matter. Three years ago, someone with the wonderful name, Terance Pepper, the curator of photographs, at The National Portrait Gallery, London, produced this wonderful book for said publisher, and did it wonderfully well.

At roughly eleven and a half by nine and a half, the book is not so huge as to be unmanageable, and the production values throughout are splendid. If the biographical detail of the artist provided is slim and a bit prim, considering the hints at all sorts of fun he had photographing theatricals and celebrities, making theatrical masks and shoes, and getting nicked -- no fun, that -- for cruising the cottages, this is, after all, a quite serious sort of presentation. (I will have to look for a copy of the autobiography referenced in the text, Look Back in Angus.) For what it is though, this is a delightful book about an artist heretofore unknown to me. And at a bargain price of ten bucks, I could not pass it up.

Angus McBean, it seems, was a gnomish little queen with a square beard, a twinkling and discerning eye, and a penchant for whimsicality that first found expression in making rather wonderful masks, puppets and the like. At the same time, he became an accomplished photographer, bringing to his theatrical work, and his portraits for fashion and art magazines, that same sense of grandly goofy invention; using elaborate props and sets to layer his images, comment on and identify his sitters, and express his delight in the recognizability, as well as the beauty of the famous actresses, producers and comedians he photographed. Bea Lillie, for instance, poses on a huge keyboard, behind her, like a constellation against the black of the piano, a caricature of her profile, in chalk or paint, or again, later, Miss Lillie posed using the cups of two lilies like the mouth and ear pieces of an old phone. Many of McBean's portraits are far more elaborately staged, requiring full sets, to put Peggy Ahscroft, as Portia, into a surreal landscape, Flora Robson bursting through the dry earth, or Diana Churchill's head, seemingly misplaced by the leg of a kitchen chair. Many of the portraits are straightforwardly beautiful shots, of his friend and regular subject Vivien Leigh, for instance, or Audrey Hepburn. The photographer seems to have been very much committed to making even his less beautiful subjects look glamorous, but whatever the subject, setting or pretext for a particular photograph, McBean seems very much to believe in glamour as an absolute value. No one is left unflattered. His portraits are like Beaton's in this, but none is as cold as Beaton's photographs tend to be, and the best of McBean's are touched with an impish humor wholly absent from Cecil Beaton's studio photographs. McBean took glamour quite as seriously, but perhaps not himself.

As if to prove this, and to provide this book with it's most delightful surprise, there are reproduced here Angus McBean's annual self portraits, sent out as Christmas cards. In each he has staged some fresh silliness; his own head seemingly abandoned on a back stair, himself in pajamas with an open umbrella, sitting in a fish tank, or, my favorite, from 1982, when he was already quite an old fellow, lifting the globe from off a miniature tea party, where he is also the host, his guests, elaborately coiffed and costumed Edwardian dolls, doubtlessly of his own making. I would want to own this book just for the self portraits.

The wonder, for me, of finding such a book in the Bargain Books, besides the affordable price, is that I can still, in this way meet some unknown but congenial spirit, be introduced to the work of a delightful artist, and carry him home with me, to pour over his pictures at my leisure. Happy chance.