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porticoHere's a thing that happens to me all the time: I'll be down a research hole and I'll stumble across a person or factoid that catches my eye (usually the fact that someone was queer) but I don't want to lose my place, so I open up a new tab about it to come back to. Sometimes I will open up many tabs. It's one of the best part of research, in my opinion. Sarah Burns, the author of The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends, plainly operates in the same way--down to noting if someone is queer. The different between us, however, is that she decided to include all of her tertiary discoveries in what is nominally a biography of one man, resulting in a book that is rambling and gossipy and full of information you would never imagine coming across in the biography of a mostly forgotten 20th century artist. Some of this was fun, and genuinely related to Harnly and the people closest to him. A lot of it was only barely what you might considered relevant, however, and in a book whose author never used one word when three would do, it made for a LOT of book.
I stumbled across this book in City Lights in San Francisco, and I don't think there's another place in the world I would have found it on the shelf. I work as a reference librarian in an art library, so a lot of my job is dealing with people who want to know more about the artist of a work they have. Some of them are convinced they have a masterpiece that will be worth millions (they don't--it won't be), but most of them are genuinely curious. I would say about 75% of the time there is simply nothing to be found about the artist--even if they have a name, or provenance. There have been so many artists who have lived and died in the world, and we collectively remember a tiny fraction of them. A book that set out to bring into the light one of those artists was fascinating to me, and I do applaud Burns for her attempt.
She starts out the book discussing what her research materials were--they now reside in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art--and I think this was the part of the book I enjoyed the most. She worked very hard to track down the people who held most of Harnly's papers, and they proceeded to give her most of what they had. I absolutely cannot fault her thoroughness. She had a lot of correspondence from the early part of Harnly's life, and a lot from the very end (much of which consisted of him telling stories from his life, so there was material there), but at some point she decided to fill in the gaps by leaning on Harnly's "Bohemian Friends" and it doesn't quite work.
I completely understand the impulse, though. Harnly was a fascinating person. Born in 1901 in Nebraska, he developed the interests which would define his life early on--he was queer, he loved the trappings of death (which he referred to as "necrophilia" in a personal definition of that word), and he adored Sarah Bernhardt. He would continue being joyfully queer, necrophiliac, and obsessed with queens and "queens" for the rest of his life, which stretched all the way into the 1980s.
My primary area of interest is queer life in the interwar period, and Harnly lived that in a big, big way. In the early 1920s, he was in Hollywood, where he worked at a cafeteria and attended all of the major tragic funerals. He was at the opening of Alla Nazimova's Salomé. Later that decade, he was in New York, where he did drag and knew Rose O'Neill, creator of the Kewpie doll, who put him up in her country house for weeks and months at a time. He first painted there, which altered the course of his life.
His paintings tended toward cluttered portraits of sex workers or drag performers (or both). While he lived in Mexico, he delighted in turning his personal brand of the profane on the sacred images he saw everywhere. His first gallery show was in Mexico City, showing that collection of works. None of them seem to have survived, however. During the depression, he worked for the Index of American Design, for which he made watercolors of "Victorian" scenes as a way of preserving our recent decorative past. The National Gallery of Art holds that collection (as well as all other Index works, I believe), although he had a showing of them at the Met in the 1940s. If you search for Perkins Harly online, this is what you'll find. They seem very prim and pretty, but most if not all of them have subtle nods to Harnly's subversive sense of humor, such as the hole in the sole of the shoe in Boudoir, hinting that the owner of the room is perhaps not as upstanding a lady as she might seem.
Harnly went back to Los Angeles in the 1940s, and he stayed there, primarily working at a cafeteria, for the rest of his life. And as entertaining as the first part of the book was, with cameos from all sorts of people who Harnly knew well or sort of or not at all, it was the back half that I appreciated the most. There were people in Harnly's life who never stopped hustling for him, even when he quit painting. It was down to them that he had exhibitions of work in the 1960s, that he was able to travel widely in the 1970s. He even had a show of his Index pieces at the National Gallery in 1981.
In the 1980s, when Harnly was himself in his 80s, he met some young men in line to see a re-release of Alla Nazimova's Salomé. They asked him if he'd seen it before, he told them he'd been at the premiere, they ended up sitting together. This would be the family that supported Harnly for the remainder of his life. They took care of him when he was recovering from surgery, corresponded and socialized with him. They're the reason for most of the Harnly contents in the Archives of American Art. This was the place in the book where I cried. I wish that Burns had thought to draw some conclusions about the dearth of elder care in this country, that if it hadn't been for one lucky happenstance, the end of Harnly's life would have been much sadder, his mark more quickly forgotten. But she didn't, and she seemed to have been rushing at this point in the book, because it's more sloppily written and edited, which felt to me like a disservice.
This felt like a book that would appeal to me and to literally no one else. I did enjoy it, but I cannot recommend it (and I have a lot more complaints than even I've mentioned here--Burns' puzzling way of approaching period-typical and -atypical racism among them). I think the book would have been better if it had omitted several dozen of Harnly's bohemian friends, but I still quite enjoyed getting to know Perkins Harnly.
I stumbled across this book in City Lights in San Francisco, and I don't think there's another place in the world I would have found it on the shelf. I work as a reference librarian in an art library, so a lot of my job is dealing with people who want to know more about the artist of a work they have. Some of them are convinced they have a masterpiece that will be worth millions (they don't--it won't be), but most of them are genuinely curious. I would say about 75% of the time there is simply nothing to be found about the artist--even if they have a name, or provenance. There have been so many artists who have lived and died in the world, and we collectively remember a tiny fraction of them. A book that set out to bring into the light one of those artists was fascinating to me, and I do applaud Burns for her attempt.
She starts out the book discussing what her research materials were--they now reside in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art--and I think this was the part of the book I enjoyed the most. She worked very hard to track down the people who held most of Harnly's papers, and they proceeded to give her most of what they had. I absolutely cannot fault her thoroughness. She had a lot of correspondence from the early part of Harnly's life, and a lot from the very end (much of which consisted of him telling stories from his life, so there was material there), but at some point she decided to fill in the gaps by leaning on Harnly's "Bohemian Friends" and it doesn't quite work.
I completely understand the impulse, though. Harnly was a fascinating person. Born in 1901 in Nebraska, he developed the interests which would define his life early on--he was queer, he loved the trappings of death (which he referred to as "necrophilia" in a personal definition of that word), and he adored Sarah Bernhardt. He would continue being joyfully queer, necrophiliac, and obsessed with queens and "queens" for the rest of his life, which stretched all the way into the 1980s.
My primary area of interest is queer life in the interwar period, and Harnly lived that in a big, big way. In the early 1920s, he was in Hollywood, where he worked at a cafeteria and attended all of the major tragic funerals. He was at the opening of Alla Nazimova's Salomé. Later that decade, he was in New York, where he did drag and knew Rose O'Neill, creator of the Kewpie doll, who put him up in her country house for weeks and months at a time. He first painted there, which altered the course of his life.
His paintings tended toward cluttered portraits of sex workers or drag performers (or both). While he lived in Mexico, he delighted in turning his personal brand of the profane on the sacred images he saw everywhere. His first gallery show was in Mexico City, showing that collection of works. None of them seem to have survived, however. During the depression, he worked for the Index of American Design, for which he made watercolors of "Victorian" scenes as a way of preserving our recent decorative past. The National Gallery of Art holds that collection (as well as all other Index works, I believe), although he had a showing of them at the Met in the 1940s. If you search for Perkins Harly online, this is what you'll find. They seem very prim and pretty, but most if not all of them have subtle nods to Harnly's subversive sense of humor, such as the hole in the sole of the shoe in Boudoir, hinting that the owner of the room is perhaps not as upstanding a lady as she might seem.
Harnly went back to Los Angeles in the 1940s, and he stayed there, primarily working at a cafeteria, for the rest of his life. And as entertaining as the first part of the book was, with cameos from all sorts of people who Harnly knew well or sort of or not at all, it was the back half that I appreciated the most. There were people in Harnly's life who never stopped hustling for him, even when he quit painting. It was down to them that he had exhibitions of work in the 1960s, that he was able to travel widely in the 1970s. He even had a show of his Index pieces at the National Gallery in 1981.
In the 1980s, when Harnly was himself in his 80s, he met some young men in line to see a re-release of Alla Nazimova's Salomé. They asked him if he'd seen it before, he told them he'd been at the premiere, they ended up sitting together. This would be the family that supported Harnly for the remainder of his life. They took care of him when he was recovering from surgery, corresponded and socialized with him. They're the reason for most of the Harnly contents in the Archives of American Art. This was the place in the book where I cried. I wish that Burns had thought to draw some conclusions about the dearth of elder care in this country, that if it hadn't been for one lucky happenstance, the end of Harnly's life would have been much sadder, his mark more quickly forgotten. But she didn't, and she seemed to have been rushing at this point in the book, because it's more sloppily written and edited, which felt to me like a disservice.
This felt like a book that would appeal to me and to literally no one else. I did enjoy it, but I cannot recommend it (and I have a lot more complaints than even I've mentioned here--Burns' puzzling way of approaching period-typical and -atypical racism among them). I think the book would have been better if it had omitted several dozen of Harnly's bohemian friends, but I still quite enjoyed getting to know Perkins Harnly.