5.0 out of 5 stars
This Study Is a Good Example (Though So Much More Is Needed) to Document the Visual Arts, Especially the Efforts of Gay Creators, July 31, 2011
This review is from: Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures (Hardcover)
It is marvellous that the visual arts and culture are studied from so many angles. In addition to "establishment", implicitly heterosexually leaning studies. However, there always are lapses in the whole of the documentation of the arts, which tends to feed off of existing journalistic and monographic attention to the arts (including dissertations and theses). There is a need, however, to avoid the prevailing emphasis on what is stylish and modish at any given moment, especially to do "pro-active" primary research of a direct sort, canvassing for what exists of ascertainable quality in the arts. This includes investigating and documenting what at times is offbeat and truly strange according to more currently fashionable artistic styles (also, of course, excluding the merely dilettantish, technically deficient, and/or aesthetically meritricious) as well as seeking out also art which does happen to be of more mainstream appeal but is created by artists who have slipped through the documentary matrix of published and academic documentation.
A wonderful moment of such sustained effort to document American art and music were the artistic documentary efforts of the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Much of the results of that particular effort even yet may not have been absorbed into published and academic documentation, but the primary W.P.A. documentation at least exists, waiting to be exploited further by researchers and writers. Another example of arts documentation by canvassing and direct contacts is the Boston Composers Project of several decades later, undertaken collectively (under the moniker of the Boston Area Libraries) by many New England music reference and cataloguing librarians. The project is well known from the published catalogue which it produced, a fine model for primary research and documentation in the arts.
I have good examples of the kind of lacunae that can result, i.e. the bizarre yet highly skilled artistic legacy (if it even still is extant) of gay Boston (Massachusetts) painter, Eric (or Erik) Schnickwald, an artist whose tormented psyche affected his ability to gain renown. Much the same applies to the case of Boston-based (and, in his case, heterosexual) composer, Peter Ganick (probably not also the poet of the same name), who in the late 1960s was a young man of stunning and radiantly sweet personal beauty, whose personality and lifestyle simply short-circuited his ability to gain attention (although, at least, two of Ganick's avant-garde compositions were published by a specialty music press). Schnickwald's visual art, in some ways, was far ahead of what was currently popular in his own time in the 1960s, having an emphasis on highly morbid subject matter that prefigures the "Goth" sensibility of some pop art and rock music in the last decade or two of the 20th century and of the beginning of this (21st) century. As "Outlooks" states, albeit in connexion with other artistic endeavours (on page 136), "Our regular audience has become accustomed to us as a sort of morbid, distressed, dissatisfied, and pathologically queer." Well, if any visual (or other) artist who was thus "distressed", "morbid", and "pathological", it was Eric (Erik) Schnickwald! And, yet, for all the truly odd and original quality of his highly intense, very skilled art, he simply has been forgotten. Despite how repugnant his demonic subject matter was, I feel privileged to have known Schnickwald and his peculiar art.
Here follows some words to convey some idea of who Eric (Erik) Schnickwald was and his fate as a forgotten gay visual artist.
I knew Eric (Erik) Schnickwald when I was an undergraduate student in music (at the University of Massachusetts at Boston). My landlord, Antonio Giarraputo (a very fine poet of verse in English, Italian, and French, and a teacher at the Boston Latin School), was a patron of Schnickwald, buying many of his canvasses. My fear is that when Giarraputo sold his home in Union Park, Boston, he may have abandoned the works. (I do not know that, but it is what I fear, Giarraputo, since deceased ayway, often having been quite careless with the precious things that he acquired over the years.) Schnickwald's work was of very high artistic calibre, but of quite disturbing subject matter. His paintings dealt with death, fire, and blood, often together! They were so redolent of "Satanism" that I usually had to pass them, where they were hung in the stairway and landings of Giarrauputo's magnificent staircase, averting my eyes from them. They would make me, to say the least of it, very uneasy. However, I often did stop to look at them more closely, admiring Schnickwald's painting technique. The man himself was strange and rather perverse (and decidedly gay, among other aspects of his weird persona), but handsome in a hauntingly eerie sort of way, or, rather, one could say that Schnickwald was a "Satanically pretty" young man.
The last that I knew of Eric (Erik) Schnickwald, he was working in kitchens of lower-class restaurants in Boston (in the South End, I assume), washing dishes or doing other menial work. He told me, when I encountered him by chance after I returned to Boston from my studies in Kent, Ohio (at Kent State University), that he had abandoned the practice of art. He was even more depressed than earlier, had gained weight, getting paunchy, and had lost the fey beauty of his years as an artist.
Although Schnickwald's paintings inspire terror, horror, and revulsion, they exhibited real artistic genius and fine technic. I have no doubt that his twisted gay vision, from the deep well of his morbid psyche, with surely some touch of the sado-masochistic and even suicidal, greatly affected what he painted so vividly. His art really ought to be (or to have been) preserved for posterity. He was a lone eccentric in American art, but one worthy of recognition, which he never received. (I cannot even find one single reference to him on the World Wide Web.)
As satisfying and encouraging as such arts studies as "Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures", even it is not, in the sense of inclusiveness, "definitive", as, indeed, nothing of its sort truly is (or, ultimately, can be). May more studies like this one, and a return to work with primary sources, from past and from present art information gathering, including direct canvassing of artists and musicians, result in even more all-inclusive documentation of the arts, including of the contributions of gays and lesbians.
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