“A Painting of a Desired, and Desiring, Subject”

Writes Anna Arabindan-Kesson on Barkley L. Hendricks' “Family Jules: NNN (No Naked Niggahs)” (1974):

While Hendricks does partly disassemble the homoeroticism of this painting – a painting of a confident gay black man, made by a confident straight black man – through his evocation of traditional portraiture in Family Jules, the work remains a painting of a desired, and desiring, subject. Jules may recall canonical forms of the female nude – such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque 1814 (Musée du Louvre, Paris) or Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra) 1907 (Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore) – yet these references cannot fully articulate the powerful eroticism projected here through the sitter’s confident self-display and the pleasure that this display brings him. Highlighting this here allows Family Jules to deviate from the passive sexuality and objectification that is often associated with the female nude and the figure of the odalisque. Nevertheless, we might find some similarity in the way the eroticism of these paintings is heightened by an attention to surface that in Family Jules is developed via the orientalising motifs he incorporates through pattern and decoration. These patterned surfaces effectively enhance our own awareness of the pleasures involved in looking, incorporating us within the interplay of sexuality and desire encoded here.

Given the rarity of depictions of the male, rather than the female, nude in art history, it is important to mention that other revisions of the male nude were being undertaken during this period. Here we might think of Joan Semmel, whose ‘sex paintings’ and ‘erotic series’ from the early 1970s reclaimed the female gaze in her explorations of sexuality depicted in the expressionistic figuration of male and female nudes (see, for instance, her Erotic Yellow 1973). Sylvia Sleigh is another significant artist who, like Hendricks, was invested in realism. Using portraiture and landscapes she explored values attached to representations of women and men, and was particularly interested in the absence of eroticised imagery of men in Western art. In several of her paintings she addressed this by inserting the male nude into situations that referenced the well-known feminising and orientalising tropes of artists like Ingres and nineteenth-century painter Édouard Manet. In this sense, her 1973 painting The Turkish Bath resonates in interesting ways with Family Jules. A direct reference to Ingres’s painting of the same name, Sleigh depicts a group of nude male art critics – including her husband, Lawrence Alloway – reclining and sitting in a well-lit room that is decorated with rugs and wall hangings that seem to incorporate both Orientalist and Native American motifs. Each body is carefully detailed as Sleigh intimately recasts the male nude through the female gaze, emphasising the figures’ beauty and their erotic power. Interestingly, the North African motifs seen here were also increasingly being used to decorate New York bathhouses that were becoming a newly fashionable space for men, both gay and straight, to spend time during the 1970s. These patterns were incorporated into murals, into fantasy environments that recreated erotic situations, or were simply installed as decorative elements. As historian George Chauncey has observed, these bathhouses, while attracting men for the sexual possibilities they offered, were also important sites for the development of social ties, and a safe place to express, perform and take pleasure in one’s sexuality.

Reading Family Jules through this added layer of signification on the one hand reinforces the (homo)eroticism of the playful, even fantasy-like staging that is carried out here: it is almost as if the studio has become another erotic space. This playful eroticism is repeated in the first part of the title: ‘Family Jules’ is a pun on the euphemistic description of male genitalia as ‘the family jewels’. Sexuality and desire are always embedded in discourses of the nude, but it is important to consider here the meaning of these dynamics with respect to the production of Family Jules. In the context of the racial relations and the political climate of 1970s America, positioning a nude, gay, black man as the site of desire would have been a confrontational act: an effect enhanced by the fact that the painting was made by another black man, though this time straight. What is interesting to consider here is how the eroticism at play in this painting can allow for a deeper exploration of the intersection of race, masculinity and sexuality in the 1970s.

– Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Excerpted from "Performing the Self in Family Jules"
Tate.org
2017

Related Off-site Links:
• Barkley L. Hendricks at the Jack Shainman Gallery
• Barkley L. Hendricks at the Tate Gallery