The job of an art critic presents more temptations to say stupid things than almost any other job. It’s the duty of every self-aware art critic to resist those temptations.
That was my thought after reading Blake Gopnik’s silly review in the New York Times of the current J.C. Leyendecker exhibition in New York.
People have long understood that Leyendecker was gay, and that his sentiments emerged in his paintings of dashing and muscular men. But in recent years, there has been an effort to abscond with Leyendecker’s legacy, injecting gay connotations into every brush stroke, and transforming the artist into a clandestine warrior for gay rights, while neglecting his broader array of artistic talents that produced 322 brilliant covers on a wide variety of subjects for The Saturday Evening Post.
As far as I can tell, this unfortunate trend began in 2008 in the poorly researched book, J.C. Leyendecker by Judy Goffman Cutler and Laurence Cutler. It was certainly appropriate for those authors to note that Charles Beach, Leyendecker’s model for the famed Arrow man, “was not only a homosexual but a kept man, the live-in lover of the famed artist who thrust himself into such an exalted status,” but 200 pages later the book’s fixation on “thrusting” continued unabated. We were still reading that “Charles Beach and Joe Leyendecker are held up as examples of monogamy among the gay community, so often criticized for promiscuity,” or that “Charles’ Dorian Gray image never [ages] in Joe’s eyes nor in ours either” or that “members of the gay community [remember Leyendecker] for icons of masculinity and sensitivity.” The authors inform us (without support) that Leyendecker was sending out “subliminal” homoerotic messages.
In 2010 Gopnik penned a puerile attack on Norman Rockwell’s art because Rockwell’s work “offended” Gopnik. He wrote, “I can’t stand the view of America that he presents, which I feel insults a huge number of us non-mainstream folks.” If Rockwell was insufficiently gay for Gopnik’s taste, Leyendecker passes the test because Gopnik fantasizes Leyendecker to be “a gay fifth column into American culture, undermining the majority’s straight erotics” with “a defiant message hidden beneath” and “reveling in [his art’s] secret subversion.” Gopnik even sees Leyendecker as “preparation for the uprising that came in 1969 outside the Stonewall Inn.”
Norman Rockwell, 20 years younger than Leyendecker and eventually his neighbor, writes quite brutally in his memoir about how Beach had “insinuated” himself into Leyendecker’s life and especially about the duo’s social withdrawal once he had.
If Gopnik had bothered to read Rockwell’s autobiography, he would’ve learned that Rockwell deeply admired Leyendecker and wrote about him with great affection and concern.
There’s one case where the subversion was barely hidden at all: In an ad for Ivory Soap, the shadow Leyendecker placed on his model’s crotch seems clearly to hint at an erection, according to an exhibition wall text. You can’t unsee it once it gets pointed out.