Christopher T. Richards – Encounter: Man Mirror, Medieval Modern

In Jared French’s Prose, recently acquired by the Colby College Museum of Art, we witness an encounter between a man and a mirror. A nude, muscular, male figure stands before a large ovoid mirror, which faces outwards towards our space. The man stares into the mostly opaque surface: we cannot see his face, though perhaps he can see us. The painting is speculative. A surreal landscape and a deep blue sky surround the man while another nude figure lays on the sandy ground at the left and a youth stands atop a platform and gazes beyond the canvas upon distant sights unknown to us. The horizon line’s pale glow suggests dawn. The main figure holds a brush, painting something onto the glass, suggesting that French’s painting is itself a reflection of the world of the mind, turning both inward, like a dreamer, and outward, like a spectator. French’s imaginative art is a sensual and embodied practice (1).

The queer artist’s body cannot be forgotten. After all, this is a self-portrait of the handsome artist’s bottom—and of his bottom. French’s lover, the artist Paul Cadmus also exposes his muscular rear to the viewer, while Cadmus’s other sometimes lover and French’s close friend George Tooker, their artistic pupil, supplies the platform’s toned “twink.” This encounter with the mirror reflects a contemporary photograph taken in French’s studio at 5 St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village, where French and Cadmus appear within the same ovoid mirror, smiling at a knowing Tooker, who paints his queer teachers. Their eroticism and, indeed, their impassioned conflicts proved a productive creative engine (Silver 52–73). In both the photograph and Prose, queer artists draw an analogy between an encounter of masculine bodies and painterly practice. In a related painting by Cadmus (Gilding the Acrobats, 1935), a man literally paints a rippling male body a golden yellow. In Prose, a rippling male body instead paints reflections—and eerily distorted bodies—into existence, using a pointillist technique.

According to Mark Cole, French’s technique in this painting imitates those made famous by Georges Seurat, but “only superficially” (Cole 22–23). While Seurat set down colors in precise proportions according to the principles of color theory, French painted more imaginatively and intuitively with the result that each body and surface in Prose, composed of broad splotches of color, vibrates unnaturally. The paint insists upon itself, conjuring for us an image of the artist’s body beyond the canvas, a toned arm wielding a brush. The cloudy mirror’s opacity, rendered in the same pointillist technique that defines the rest of the painting’s imaginary world, suggests that what the figure sees in the mirror is not exactly an optical reflection but a carefully fashioned image, the reflection of a queer artistic self.

My interpretation reflects my personal encounter with this painting. I look at the speculative subject matter and figurative abstraction of Prose awry, rather than straight on. I am a medieval art historian. In a series of recent essays, I have considered medieval figurative abstraction as an “unnatural” or queer art, using images of Narcissus as a case study. Medieval painters turned to Narcissus and his deceptive mirror as an opportunity to reflect on artistic practice and create non-literal self-portraits. Such paintings rehabilitate Ovid’s doomed queer lover as an emblem of those bold enough to invent an imaginary world and love it. We can understand figurative abstraction as queer in that it dares to imagine the world and bodies beyond the rules that, in the Middle Ages, as in Greenwich Village of the 1940s, and as today, sought to restrict unruly subjects.

In other words, figural abstraction, medieval and modern, stretches and distorts natural bodies into unruly, queer forms that are clearly the work of a sensual embodied practitioner, in contrast to more mimetic art forms, such as illusionistic painting that seeks to obscure the processes of facture (2). In the image of Narcissus, the youth seems to look not upon a spring but a framed painted portrait. Set at a dramatic angle within a precarious composition, thickly applied paint and free-flowing contour lines insist upon themselves as artistic media in bold colors. I can almost imagine Narcissus painting and loving, rather than looking and loving, a logic fulfilled masterfully in the backward-looking work of Jared French. Ultimately, French offers us a modern version of the medieval Narcissus, an instance of queer reflexivity in a long tradition.

In what remains of this brief essay, I will dwell on two more encounters between men and mirrors that I have encountered in my capacity as an art history professor at Colby College. Through the contingencies of collecting, Prose joins a surprisingly strong number of artworks at Colby that reflect on the mirror as a distinctively queer artistic device (3). Being here at Colby has served as a powerful reminder that the medieval theorization of the mirror’s distortions as queer has enjoyed a long afterlife. Indeed, it was only a few decades before French painted Prose that Sigmund Freud found in Narcissus an ideal means of theorizing desires beyond the heterosexual and the Oedipal. A radical reading of Freud, as pursued by recent queer theorists, suggests that unruly desire is always Narcissistic and that mistaking another person as an image of the self always results in love (4). Love—always a disarming, transformative experience, regardless of its object’s gender—depends on the distorted images of the imagination’s dark mirror.

The difficult psychoanalytic ideas of the last paragraph are easier to understand when applied to artworks. Alex Katz’s Double Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg offers a fine example in Colby’s collection. According to Katz Curator Kiko Abei, the artist intended this picture to feature Rauschenberg only once, seated across from his partner and fellow artist Jasper Johns. The finished painting depicts Rauschenberg twice. Working among the hyper-masculine personalities of Abstract Expressionism, Johns apparently withdrew his participation from the portrait that would have rendered him so visibly queer. But Ecce no homo!—the resulting painting reveals what it tried to hide, rendering a gay man facing a mirror-image of himself, rather than his lover. It is as though the imaginative powers of Rauschenberg’s desires or the powers of Katz’s artistry have distorted Johns into a reflection of Rauschenberg. One power might be taken as a metaphor for the other, and the canvas itself becomes a kind of cloudy mirror, where paint once again insists upon itself as gestural, energetic painting in the long tradition of figural abstraction. Each unnaturalistic Rauschenberg reveals the distortions of the other. On the left, we find heavier contour lines, elevated shoes in two colors, a more neutral expression, and an exposed undershirt. At the right, we find unruly hair, broader trousers, and a far more relaxed posture. Rather than staging perfect duplicates, Katz’s mirror is a queer one, rendering the beloved as a distorted image of the self, in line with Freudian and medieval theories of queer desire as a mirror.

What is more, in the spirit of revealing what it might hide, the painting’s two Rauschenbergs sit in strange poses. Outer arms curl up then down in limp-wristed S-curves that terminate in long fingers gesturing downwards. Inner arms plunge between legs such that any fingers that might be present are obscured. Jeanne Silverthorne writes that Rauschenberg must be protecting his genitals, at least “metaphorically” (Silverthorne 134). If so, like the return of the repressed, like a queer lover repainted, genitals erupt outwards from these figures, disrupting any attempt at naturalistic depiction of the body. The oddly linear pocket on the right Rauschenberg might be taken as a misplaced bulge, at which the sitter points. A phallic ripple of fabric bizarrely extends outward from the back of the left leg of the left Rauschenberg’s trousers. Just above that, an oddly fleshy bit of negative space, which ought to be matte white like the window behind the sitter, stands erect beside the figure’s groin. One wonders just what these men are doing with their hands. I am not as sure as Silverthorne, but I know what Katz plays at. He denaturalizes and denatures these bodies with his paint, making them strange, making them visibly queer. Katz imagines these bodies otherwise, in creative if disruptive new forms. The painting offers the final lesson that an artist, in order to paint queerly, need not be queer in terms of identity.

Most mirrors visualize objects imperfectly, stretching and distorting them. Similarly, traditions depend upon both reference and transformation. Medieval depictions of Narcissus, of course, riff on an ancient story. I conclude this reflection on the tradition of the encounter between the man and the mirror with another painting at Colby, Untitled by Bob Thompson. Thompson’s work proves especially useful to this investigation because the artist produced, what he called, “variations,” riffs on the canon that transform their references in intriguing ways.

Thompson’s transformations have most often been considered from the perspective of Black Studies for the very good reason that Thompson, a Black American artist working abroad in Europe, necessarily encountered the Western canon’s construction of race and whiteness. According to Adrienne Childs, who identifies Untitled’s reference point as Francisco de Goya’s Hasta la muerte from Los Caprichos (1799), Thompson’s variations “destabilized” the canon’s “hierarchies and opened up new spaces for Black creativity” by demystifying this rarified tradition and its narratives (Childs 64).

I take a different but related tack and examine Untitled awry, through the notion of the queer mirror. Cultural critics, such as José Esteban Muñoz, have examined queer cultural productions through the notion of “disidentification,” a Lacanian elaboration of Freud’s theory of Narcissism considered earlier. Essentially, disidentification refers to acts of self-fashioning through riffing on a reference point, taking objects in the world as distorted mirrors, in other words (5). A drag queen does not “identify” with women or Woman, but instead scrambles and reconstructs the idea of Woman and femininity into new queer forms that say something true and empowering about himself (6). I believe Thompson does something similar in Untitled, which is not to say that Thompson, happily married to a woman, identified as queer. Instead, I hold that Thompson paints queerly, embracing figurative abstraction and the mirror, its emblem, in order to reveal the nebulousness of binaries that the canon deems natural, such as Black/white but also man/woman (7). Thompson imagines a world otherwise, opening up new possibilities that are creative and queer too.

Thompson turned to Goya on account of his own play with figurative abstraction. In Thompson’s words, Goya’s “distortion is terrific” (8). Hasta la muerte is a satirical comment on the vanity of a rich old woman, adjusting an elaborate and tattered headpiece before a mirror, while male onlookers sneer. Thompson disidentifies with Goya and distorts the terrific distorter, adding for good measure some terrific ghouls, also drawn from Los Caprichos. The 20th-century painter replaces the sepia palette of Goya’s print with highly saturated and mostly primary colors in bold pairings, from opposite ends of the color wheel: green on red, yellow on blue, white on black. Sweeping brushstrokes and heavy contour lines pair with matte areas that render the main figure as a silhouette or shadow. Thompson, like French and others, understands his canvas as a kind of dark mirror. The mirror in Untitled, rendered in the artwork’s thickest painterly brushwork, invites reflection on both the act of painting and its artist. In Goya’s print, a younger female figure had attended the old woman, but Thompson’s silhouette technique conjoins the two figures into one unnatural and undulating yellow form. The male onlookers transform into supernatural figures, duplicating and multiplying, under the power of the mirror. Looking again at the mirror itself, the face that appears there is apparently mustachioed, despite this face’s relation to curvaceous bodies that we might understand to be culturally and ideally female. While maintaining masculine attributes, Thompson’s figure is a queen in genderfuck drag, wearing a headpiece, more Nefertiti than Romantic, breaking the binary assumptions set up by the canonical Goya and opening exciting new queer frontiers.

Thompson, it seems to me, incorporates another, less obvious reference. Pressed against the surface of the picture plane and placed at a distinctive diagonal, his mirror riffs on that of the medieval Narcissus. If nothing else, Thompson certainly knew the story, painting it at least once in 1965 (9). We might, then, understand Untitled as a kind of self-portrait—not of Thompson’s literal appearance, but of his queer and creative vision and of his acts of disidentification. Like French’s Prose and Katz’s Double Portrait, this artwork stages an encounter between a man and a mirror in order to reveal painting as an imaginative medium where nature, bodies, and identities are distorted, layered, and made strange. In these works, figural abstraction functions as a queer aesthetic strategy, disrupting naturalistic representation and foregrounding the painter’s sensual, embodied process. Thompson’s mirror—murky, painterly, and performative—does not reflect a stable subject but instead visualizes the speculative labor of seeing and becoming otherwise, at a time when many Black artists and Black activists sought to reimagine the hierarchies and binaries that sought to hem them in.

As Alexander Nagel argues in his pioneering Medieval Modern, modern art’s medievalism operates not through direct or overt citation but instead “deeper structural analogies. The figural abstraction that so often attends encounters with the mirror proves a structuring principle by which many artists explore queer possibilities. French, Katz, and Thompson each offer painterly meditations on embodiment and vision that understand paint as an imaginative medium well suited to visualizing the queer currents of desire. Colby’s unusual collection allows us to see how figurative abstraction in the 20th century, as in the 14th, allowed artists the freedom to imagine the world and the body otherwise in bold, reflexive artworks.

 

Notes

1. In preliminary sketches, the central figure inscribed the mirror with words—hence the painting’s title, Prose. See Cole 265.
2. My work here builds off Getsy’s arguments.
3. See for instance Glenn Ligon’s Palindrome #1 (2007) and Richard Estes’s Columbus Circle at Night (2010), both recent focuses of Jillian Impastato and Kir Mullen’s “Art Queeries” workshop at Colby.
4. For a useful introduction on this topic, see Greven 40–68.
5. On this scholarly lineage, see Richards, “Painting Against Nature.”
6. See Muñoz 31.
7. See Lynne.
8. As quoted in Childs 62.
9. See Johnson 131.

 

References

Childs, Adrienne. “Variations and Old Master Narratives: Bob Thompson in the Wake of Art History.” In Bob Thompson: This House is Mine. Ed. Diane Tuite. Waterville: The Colby College Museum of Art, 2021). 59-77.

Cole, Mark. “Jared French (1905–1988),” PhD diss. Newark: University of Delaware, 1999.

Freud, Sigmund, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” The Standard Edition, vol. 14. Ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1981. 67–102.

Getsy, David. “How to Teach Manet’s Olympia after Transgender Studies.” Art History 45.2 (2022): 342–69.

Greven, David. The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012.

Johnson, Rashid. “Put Outside.” In Bob Thompson: This House is Mine. Ed. Diane Tuite. Waterville: The Colby College Museum of Art, 2021). 127–35.

Lynne, Jessica. “The Southern Painter.” Frieze (21 September 2021).

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Nagel, Alexander. Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time. London: Thames & Hudson, 2012.

“Overview: Paul Cadmus & Jared French: Residence & Studio.” NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project (2018).

Richards, Christopher T. “The Queer Imagination, Then and Now.” The Brooklyn Rail (July–August 2024).

—–. “Painting Against Nature: A Medieval Queer Theory of Art and the Artist.” Art History 48.2 (in press).

—–. “Couverture: Transing the Medieval Manuscript: Part 1.” The So What (March 2025.

Silver, Kenneth. “Homo Erectus and his Discontents.” In The Young and the Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955, New York: David Zwirner Books, 2020. 52–73.

Silverthorne, Jeanne. “Review: Alex Katz, Whitney Museum of American Art,” Art Forum 25.1 (1986): 135.

 

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my students and colleagues at Colby College without whom this essay would not be possible. I especially thank Kiko Abei, Jessamine Battario, Howie Gao, Jillian Impastato, Xiaoman Jiang, Kir Mullen, Eva Northway, and Véronique Plesch.