Results by title

What does it mean to look like a lesbian? Though it remains impossible to conjure a definitive image that captures the breadth of this highly nuanced term, today at least we are able to consider an array of visual representations that have been put into circulation by lesbians themselves over the last six or seven decades. In the early twentieth century, though, no notion of lesbianism as a coherent social or cultural identity yet existed.

In Women Together/Women Apart, Tirza True Latimer explores the revolutionary period between World War I and World War II when lesbian artists working in Paris began to shape the first visual models that gave lesbians a collective sense of identity and allowed them to recognize each other. Flocking to Paris from around the world, artists and performers such as Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and Suzy Solidor used portraiture to theorize and visualize a "new breed" of feminine subject. The book focuses on problems of feminine and lesbian self-representation at a time and place where the rights of women to political, professional, economic, domestic, and sexual autonomy had yet to be acknowledged by the law. Under such circumstances, same-sex solidarity and relative independence from men held important political implications.

Combining gender theory with visual, cultural, and historical analysis, Latimer draws a vivid picture of the impact of sexual politics on the cultural life of Paris during this key period. The book also illuminates the far-reaching consequences of lesbian portraiture on contemporary constructions of lesbian identity.

In the 1960s, just beginning his career as a writer, Gene Logsdon read a magazine article about Andrew Wyeth in which the artist commented at length on his own creative impulse. What he said seemed so true and right and so directly applicable to writing as well as to painting that the young writer was transfixed. He was resolved to talk to Andrew Wyeth, even though warned that the artist could be as elusive as a wild rabbit. Not quite by accident, the writer and the painter met in a roadside diner, and what happened from then on is what Wyeth People is about—an effort to explain a famous artist, his work, and the people who love it, by an intrigued outsider. Wyeth People is the result of Gene Logsdon’s search to find the colorful people Wyeth painted and to interview them. Originally published in 1969, Wyeth People describes how the author solved the mystery of the creative impulse, at least to his own satisfaction. As Logsdon writes: “The story of my search for why I (and millions of other people) find Wyeth’s art among the greatest that human culture has produced, is ongoing. I may never fully end my quest. But this I know. I was lucky enough to have participated in some small way in the cultural process by which an artist and his work became a classic part of American tradition. "That I was able to talk to people like Karl Kuerner and Forrest Wall produced in me the same kind of knowledge and exhilaration that I would gain if I were viewing Michelangelo’s David and David came alive and spoke to me.”