Arch and Obelisk: The Eiffel Tower as Androgyne

Arch and Obelisk: The Eiffel Tower as Androgyne

When one looks at the Eiffel Tower, two major architectural forms are present: the arch and the obelisk.

Throughout history, these two forms have carried opposite meanings. The arch, open and enclosing, has been read as feminine. The obelisk, upright and rising to a point, has been read as masculine. Each form has served as a symbol of one sex, echoing its genitalia.

In the Eiffel Tower, the two forms do not stand apart. They merge. The great arch at the base rises and narrows into the obelisk above it, in one continuous structure. The symbols of female and male are joined in a single figure.

That joining is the mark of the androgyne: a figure that unites the masculine and the feminine in one identity. The Eiffel Tower is an androgyne in iron. It is also a portrait of a new kind of person, one that Paris was beginning to imagine at the end of the nineteenth century.

Two Monuments, 1836

The arch and the obelisk are among the oldest forms in architecture. Egyptian obelisks date to about 2500 BC. Arches appear in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the same era, and Rome later made the arch monumental. For more than four thousand years, the two forms carried their meanings through Egyptian, Greek, Roman and European culture.

In 1836, Paris completed its two most famous examples. In July, the Arc de Triomphe was inaugurated at the top of the Champs-Élysées. In October, the Luxor Obelisk, carved around 1250 BC for the pharaoh Ramesses II, was raised in the Place de la Concorde at the other end of the same avenue.

Both monuments celebrated the old order. The Arc honored Napoleon's armies. The Obelisk was a gift from Egypt, displayed as a sign of French prestige. They stood about two kilometres apart, the feminine form and the masculine form, separate.

In 1836, the androgyne was a subject for a few Romantic novelists. Honoré de Balzac's Séraphîta (1834) and Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) explored figures who were both male and female. Over the next fifty years, that literary curiosity moved to the center of French culture.

The New Person, 1880s and 1890s

By the 1880s, Paris was asking what a person could be.

The first organized feminist movements had appeared, along with the figure of the "New Woman": educated, independent and unwilling to accept the roles assigned to her. The boundary between male and female was under public question.

Writers took up the question. In 1884, Rachilde published Monsieur Vénus, a novel that reverses the roles of a woman and a man. The same year, Joris-Karl Huysmans published À rebours, the central novel of the Decadent movement, which set out to break down traditional categories, including male and female. Also in 1884, Joséphin Péladan began his novel cycle La Décadence latine, which in 1891 included L'Androgyne and La Gynandre.

From 1892 to 1897, Péladan organized the Salons de la Rose+Croix, six exhibitions of Symbolist art in Paris. For Péladan and his circle, the androgyne was the perfect human being: the complete person described in Plato's Symposium, before the division into male and female.

Artwork Spotlight: The Face of the Androgyne

Cover of Joséphin Péladan's L'Androgyne (Paris: E. Dentu, 1891). A single face floats above the sea, beneath the book's title. The cover advertises a "hundredth edition," a sign that the book was sold as a popular success. The androgyne was not a private subject. It was on the bookshop shelves of Paris.

In the decades before, Paris had already seen real androgynes. The novelist George Sand wore men's suits and top hats and smoked cigars in public. The painter Rosa Bonheur held a permit from the Paris police, a permission de travestissement, allowing her to wear trousers so she could work in livestock markets. Both were among the most famous artists in France. They were early examples of the new person.

Science arrived at the same subject. In the 1860s, the German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs described men who loved men as a "third sex," with a female soul in a male body. The word "homosexual" was coined in 1869. In 1872, the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a French intersex person raised as a girl and later reclassified as a man, were published in Paris, raising public questions about how sex itself was defined. In 1886, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, the most widely read work on sexuality of its time.

Novelists, painters, critics and doctors were describing the same figure: a person in whom masculine and feminine are combined, and who did not fit the old categories. It was not an idea at the edge of Paris culture. It was at the center.

Architects worked in the same city, read the same books and visited the same exhibitions. If the new person appeared in literature, painting and science, it is reasonable to look for it in architecture. The Eiffel Tower is where it appears.

The Tower, 1889

In June 1884, the same year as Monsieur Vénus and À rebours, Maurice Koechlin, an engineer in Gustave Eiffel's company, sketched a plain iron pylon 300 metres high: four legs rising to a point. To show its height, he drew famous monuments beside it at the same scale. One of them was the Luxor Obelisk. From its first drawing, the tower stood beside an obelisk.

The company's architect, Stephen Sauvestre, then gave the sketch its artistic form. He added the great arches between the legs at the base. Those arches carry almost no load. The structure did not need them. The engineers explained the curve of the legs as a calculation of wind resistance, but no calculation required the arches. The feminine form at the base was an artist's choice.

The design history follows the visual reading. First came the shaft, drawn beside an actual obelisk. Then came the arch, added by the architect. The finished tower joins the two.

The tower was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the world's fair marking the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, the revolution that declared the rights of the individual. It was built of iron, the material of the modern age, and at 300 metres it was the tallest structure in the world.

The tower itself celebrated no army or conquest, as the Arc and the Obelisk did. It celebrated engineering and the modern age.

It stands across the Seine from the Arc de Triomphe and the Luxor Obelisk, almost directly south of the Arc. The three monuments form a triangle. In 1836, Paris set the arch and the obelisk apart, at opposite ends of an avenue. In 1889, it added a third point that joined them.

Artwork Spotlight: The Face of the Androgyne

Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes, 1890. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Redon painted this work in Paris one year after the Eiffel Tower opened. A single face rises above the sea with its eyes closed. Its sex cannot be determined. It is one figure that holds both.

Reading the Form

Stand at a distance from the tower and look at its outline. The lower part is the arch, wide and open, spanning the ground between the legs. The upper part is the obelisk. Above the first platform, the four legs draw together and rise as one tapering shaft toward a point.

The legs that form the arch are the same legs that form the obelisk. There is no seam. One form becomes the other.

This is a reading of symbols, not of anatomy. A hermaphrodite, in the language of the nineteenth century, is a body that is biologically both male and female, a condition now called intersex. The androgyne is different. The word comes from the Greek andro, man, and gyne, woman, and it describes a person who combines masculine and feminine qualities in appearance, behavior and identity. In current terms, the androgyne is gender fluid.

The tower joins the symbol of the feminine and the symbol of the masculine into one identity. It is the new person of 1880s Paris, given architectural form.

(On the builders' intentions, see the author's note at the end of this essay.)

Artwork Spotlight: The Face of the Androgyne

Jean Delville, The School of Plato, 1898. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Plato teaches in a garden, surrounded by nude disciples with long hair and feminine features. Delville paints Plato in the manner of Christ, with twelve disciples, giving the androgyne the status of a sacred ideal. Delville exhibited at Péladan's salons.

A Structure Ahead of Its Time

The tower was not welcomed. In 1887, as construction began, a group of leading artists and writers published a protest calling it useless and monstrous. It was granted a permit for only twenty years and was expected to come down.

The new person met the same resistance. Sand and Bonheur were mocked, and Bonheur needed police permission to dress as she did. The writers of the androgyne were attacked by critics. Each challenged a settled idea of what was proper, and each was ahead of its time.

The tower was not taken down. Over the following century, it became the most recognized structure in the world.

From the Canvas to Daily Life

The conversations of nineteenth-century Paris did not end with the century. The novelists, painters and doctors who wrote about the androgyne and about intersex bodies raised questions that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries continued to ask: what makes a person male or female, and whether a person must be only one.

Those questions moved from the canvas and the page into daily life. In the twentieth century, women entered professions once closed to them, men and women wore each other's clothing, and the law began to recognize same-sex relationships and changes of gender. In the twenty-first century, many people live outside the fixed roles of man and woman, and the terms gender fluid, nonbinary and intersex are part of ordinary language. Others still hold to the rigid roles of the past, and the debate continues.

Spotlight: The Androgyne Today

Rad Hourani, unisex collection. Hourani designs clothing for no particular sex. Men and women wear the same garments, cut to the same line. In 2013, he became the first designer to present a unisex haute couture collection in Paris, more than a century after the city's writers and painters first pictured the androgyne.

Image via The Rosenrot, "Defining Androgyny and Elimination of Gender Codes in Fashion" (2019).

In this sense, the Eiffel Tower looked forward. Built in a city absorbed by the union of masculine and feminine, it joined the arch and the obelisk into one figure at the start of a new age of sexual independence, gender expression and individual freedom.

That is why it remains an important architectural moment in Western civilization. The Eiffel Tower still looks modern because the person it represents is still the person of the present: free to combine the masculine and the feminine as they choose, and free to define themselves outside imposed cultural norms.

It still stands for that today.

Postscript: A Note on Method from the Author

There is no record that Gustave Eiffel, Maurice Koechlin or Stephen Sauvestre spoke of the tower in terms of androgyny or gender. Their documented explanations concern engineering, height and appearance.

This essay is a reading of form, made by an artist looking at a structure. Since the late 1960s, beginning with Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author," critics have held that the meaning of a work is not limited to its maker's intentions. Meaning is also produced by the viewer. Art history adopted this view in the 1980s, opening the field to readings its makers did not state, including feminist and queer readings.

The tower's builders did not need to intend androgyny for the tower to express it. They worked in a city preoccupied with the union of masculine and feminine, and the form they built joins the two.

Sources: Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, toureiffel.paris; Swiss National Museum blog, "The Swiss Magician of Iron" (2025); The Architecture Professor, "Early Designs for the 300-m Tower"; Plato, Symposium; Honoré de Balzac, Séraphîta (1834); Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835); Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus (1884); Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (1884); Joséphin Péladan, L'Androgyne (Paris: E. Dentu, 1891); Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886); Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1967); Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes (1890), Musée d'Orsay; Jean Delville, The School of Plato (1898), Musée d'Orsay; The Rosenrot, "Defining Androgyny and Elimination of Gender Codes in Fashion" (2019).

Behind the Process

These two collages start with images from 1899. Two men in straw boater hats stand on a racecourse lawn, with a woman between them. A grandstand full of spectators sits behind them. It follows the usual format: boy, girl; boy, girl.

Then the woman steps out while the two men stay to meet up with some new friends. In the space between them, men from 2026 appear. One pulls his shirt over his head to wear even less. Another takes a phone call, or is it a mirror selfie? The Blue moon and Jupiter 3 witness it all.

The new seating arrangement: boy, boy; boy, boy.

The result is the same image, queered. Like squared, but queered.

The clothing shows 127 years of change. In 1899, the men are fashionably dressed in high collars, waistcoats, jackets, ties and straw hats. In 2026, the men leisurely don tank tops, shorts and briefs, or nothing above the waist at all. In 1899 they carry canes and pipes. In 2026 they carry phones.

The original images had room for one story. Now they have room for another.

— Behan

Homage to Hartley and His German Lover

In 1914, the American painter Marsden Hartley was living in Berlin. There he loved Karl von Freyburg, a young Prussian lieutenant. In October of that year, in the first months of the First World War, von Freyburg was killed in battle. He was 24.

Hartley responded with Portrait of a German Officer. The painting contains no face and no body. It is built from flags, epaulets, military insignia, letters and numbers. For decades it was described as an abstraction about war.

The painting is a portrait, written in code. "KvF" is von Freyburg's initials. "24" is his age. "4" is his regiment. The Iron Cross is the medal he was awarded after his death. Hartley put the man he loved into the painting in the only form the time allowed: as coded information.

This collage brings the code out. Hartley's composition remains, and in front of it stands Dirk Yager, a German gay adult film star. His head is framed by the painting's central yellow triangle. He wears a black leather harness, shorts and gloves, and the straps over his shoulders follow the lines of a uniform. Beside him, the number 24 is still visible. The painting Hartley built to leave the body out now contains a living, breathing body.

Making this collage further revealed something in Hartley's painting. Beside Yager hangs a form from an officer's uniform: a tassel with a long shaft above a rounded base. The painting is composed as a torso, and this form sits where the groin would be. As a painter, I read it plainly as genitalia. This then is not only a portrait. It is a nude portrait, which makes sense, as Hartley was painting his lover.

I have not seen this formally discussed. That is not surprising. Art history has a long habit of looking away from queer sexual content. A coded language is also meant to be read by very few people: the artist, and those closest to him. Hartley coded his lover's name as initials and his age as a number. He also coded his body.

The two figures, von Freyburg and Yager, are two German men separated by more than a century. During his lifetime, von Freyburg could only be recorded as initials and numbers, while Yager is photographed openly as a gay man by his own choice. The collage places them in the same frame to honor both of their realities.

Layering onto an existing work is not new. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. I also work on a reproduction, in my case a digital one.

This is the method of all of my work: take the subtext, the code, and make it context, make it legible. Hartley named his lover in letters and numbers. This collage brings the idea of him into corporeal form, so that we can see him the way Hartley no doubt saw him when he looked back at this painting. Hartley did not see numbers and initials. He saw his beloved, Karl.

Sources: Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer (1914), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection; Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919).

Roommates AKA Straight-Washing in Art History

Straight-washing is the practice of presenting historical figures as heterosexual by default, and removing or renaming evidence that complicates that picture. Close bonds between men become "friendship." Shared homes become "studios." Love letters become "admiration."

The practice is documented. When Michelangelo's poems were first published in 1623, his grandnephew changed the pronouns. Sonnets written to a young Roman nobleman, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, were printed as poems to a woman. The original texts were not restored until the nineteenth century, when scholars returned to the manuscripts.

In 1914, Marsden Hartley painted Portrait of a German Officer, a dense arrangement of flags, numbers and military insignia. For decades it was described as an abstraction about war. It is a memorial to Karl von Freyburg, a young officer Hartley loved, killed in the first months of the fighting. The initials and his age are in the painting.

In the autumn of 1888, Gauguin and Van Gogh moved in together to share a studio and a home in Arles. Van Gogh lovingly decorated Gauguin's room with sunflowers. Their arguments, he told Theo, were "terribly electric." In the joint letter of November 1888, Van Gogh writes that Gauguin interests him "greatly as a man — greatly." Two months later, when Gauguin prepared to leave, Van Gogh collapsed.

The standard account reduces this to rivalry and mental illness. The brothel visits are cited as proof that settles every question. For many men of the period, they settled nothing.

The table below sets the two readings side by side. The same four events appear in both columns: the relationship, the Yellow House, the arguments and the ear. Traditional art history describes a professional rivalry, a shared workspace, debates over theory and an unexplained illness. A queer reading describes an intense bond, a domestic life outside the family structures of the time, emotional friction and a breakdown that followed rejection. The facts in each row are the same. Only the interpretation changes.

The 1956 film Lust for Life fixed the standard account in popular memory. Kirk Douglas plays Van Gogh as a tormented genius. Anthony Quinn, who won an Academy Award for the role, plays Gauguin as a brawling, confident man. Both are presented as heterosexual by default, at the height of Hollywood's production code.

These collages reverse the arrangement. The actors are stripped to their bodies and repeated in rows. Douglas, the screen Van Gogh, stands in a Gauguin landscape. Quinn, the screen Gauguin, stands in Van Gogh's Les Alyscamps, the avenue the two painters worked on side by side in the autumn of 1888. Each man is placed in the other's world.

The bodies the film presented as rivals are presented here as subjects. What the official account omits is now in the picture.

Sources: Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, 1–2 November 1888, letter 716, Van Gogh Museum, vangoghletters.org; Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, December 1888; Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, ed., Rime (1623); Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer (1914), Metropolitan Museum of Art; Lust for Life, dir. Vincente Minnelli (MGM, 1956).

Just what is it that makes today's bunkers so similar, so unaffordable?

The Original Room

In 1956, Richard Hamilton makes a small collage for This Is Tomorrow, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. He titles it Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? It is printed in the catalogue and on the poster, and it becomes one of the founding images of Pop Art.

The room is a catalogue of postwar promise. A bodybuilder holds a giant Tootsie Pop. A woman poses on the sofa. A tape recorder sits on the floor. A vacuum cleaner climbs the stairs, with an ad arrow claiming that ordinary cleaners reach only this far. A canned ham rests on the table. A television, a comic-book cover, a Ford emblem, and a movie marquee fill the walls. Above it all, the ceiling is a photograph of the Earth.

The message is simple. The good life can be bought, and it is coming to every house.

Seventy Years Later

Today the most talked-about new homes are not in the suburbs. They are underground.

Survival condominiums are built inside decommissioned missile silos. Billionaires dig shelters beneath ranches in Hawaii and estates in New Zealand. These spaces come with pools, theaters, gyms, and air filtration systems. They are sold as protection from collapse, war, pandemic, or unrest.

They are also sold to very few people. The luxury bunker is the clearest statement yet from the top 1%. It assumes that a disaster is coming, and it plans for only one group to survive it in comfort.

The New Room

My collage keeps Hamilton's layout and moves the room below ground.

The ceiling is no longer a picture of the Earth. It is an opening to the surface: grass, a fence, the sky, and a man in a black coat looking down into the shelter. The danger is up there. The residents are down here.

The bodybuilder returns, multiplied and flexing, still holding an oversized lollipop. The woman on the stairs with her vacuum is replaced by a young man in briefs, phone in hand, with a cordless vacuum waiting at the bottom step. The woman on the sofa is replaced by a man in a college tank top. The television is now a wall-sized screen. The canned ham is still on hand, because every bunker needs a pantry. A flying saucer hovers near the stairs, the old fear of the 1950s still in the room.

Subtext Made Context

Hamilton's bodybuilder comes from a physique magazine. In the 1950s, those magazines are among the few places gay men can find images of other men, published under the cover of health and fitness. Hamilton places that figure in a conventional household beside a pin-up woman.

In my room, the household is all men. What sits in the margin of the original is the subject of this version.

Similar, Unaffordable

Hamilton asks what makes homes different and appealing. The honest answer for bunkers is that they are all the same: concrete, filtered air, stored food, and a door that locks from the inside. What separates them is price.

This collage imagines the opposite of the current model. If bunkers are needed, everyone gets one. The same canned ham, the same screen, the same safe room, for the same reason that public schools, public libraries, and public shelters exist. Safety in a crisis is not a luxury product.

If the people building these shelters believe the future requires them, the question is not how to buy one. The question is why only they are planning to live through it.

— Behan

Sources

• Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, 1956, collage, Kunsthalle Tübingen.

• This Is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1956, exhibition catalogue.

• Richard Hamilton, letter to Alison and Peter Smithson, January 16, 1957, in Collected Words 1953–1982 (Thames and Hudson, 1982).

• Guthrie Scrimgeour, "Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Top-Secret Hawaii Compound," Wired, December 2023.

On The Wall

Like Standing in the Rain

A shower recreates standing in the rain. Water falls from above and covers the whole body.

Many religions connect falling or running water with purification. Islamic ablution (wudu), Jewish ritual hand-washing and Hindu bathing in rivers all use poured or running water rather than still water.

The shower also has practical benefits:

• Sleep: A warm shower one to two hours before bed helps the body fall asleep faster.

• Muscle tension: Warm water increases blood flow and loosens tight muscles.

• Congestion: Steam loosens mucus and eases breathing.

• Cold showers: In a 2016 Dutch study of more than 3,000 adults, ending a warm shower with 30 to 90 seconds of cold water cut sick days from work by 29 percent.

• Mental reset: A routine, low-effort task lets the mind wander, which is why so many ideas arrive in the shower.

• Sound: The steady sound of falling water works as white noise and calms the listener.

Showers for Crowds

The shower becomes practical when many people need to get clean quickly.

In 1872, François Merry Delabost, chief physician at Bonne-Nouvelle prison in Rouen, France, installs communal showers for inmates. Compared with tubs, they use less water, less soap and less time.

Armies, schools, factories and YMCAs follow. Around 1900, American city reformers build public "rain baths" for tenement residents who have no place to bathe at home.

For many Americans, the first shower is not at home. It is at a school gym, a workplace or a military base.

The Shower Comes Home

Well into the 20th century, many Americans still take a Saturday night bath in a tin tub filled with water heated on the stove. In 1940, nearly half of American homes lack complete plumbing: hot and cold running water, a bathtub or shower, and a flush toilet.

In the 1920s and 1930s, middle-class bathrooms begin to add a showerhead above the built-in tub, with a curtain rod around it.

After World War II, new suburban houses come with full bathrooms and water heaters. The combined tub and shower becomes standard. Men returning from military service are already used to showering.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the daily shower replaces the weekly bath as the American routine. Stand-alone shower stalls become common in new homes.

Gay Men and the Shower

For gay men, the shower has its own history. For much of the 20th century, gym, YMCA and military showers were among the few places men saw each other undressed. They were places of risk and of quiet recognition.

Gay bathhouses later made the shower and steam room open social spaces. Many cities closed them in the mid-1980s during the AIDS crisis.

Today the shower is part of gay domestic life, and part of intimacy.

Clean and Ready

Cleanliness matters in sex between men. The shower is where preparation happens.

A shower before lovemaking, alone or together, removes uncertainty. Both partners can relax and be present. A shower afterward closes the experience and returns both men to the day.

Water and Intimacy

Showering together slows two people down. Warm water, steam and the steady sound of falling water heighten the senses.

The water brings the same sense of renewal found in standing in the rain. Two men under falling water, washing each other, share a moment that is physical and spiritual at once. Lovemaking becomes a ritual of cleansing as well as desire.

Morning Shower

Dan wakes to the sound of the shower. Dale's side of the bed is empty and still warm. Dan knows where he is.

He gets up without a sound and walks to the bathroom. Steam has already fogged the mirror. He slides the shower door open and steps in behind Dale.

Dale does not turn around at first. He leans back against Dan, and Dan wraps his arms around him. The water runs over both of them.

Then Dale turns. They hold each other, and Dan kisses him slowly. Neither of them is in a hurry.

Dan reaches for the soap. He works it into a lather between his hands and moves them across Dale's shoulders and down his back. Dale lowers his head and lets him.

Neither says a word. The water keeps falling. The day can wait a few more minutes.

Water From Above

The ancient Greeks have a form of shower more than 2,500 years ago.

Greek gymnasiums, where young men train, include washing rooms. Water travels by gravity from springs, cisterns or aqueducts through clay or lead pipes. It pours from openings in the wall onto the bather standing below.

These showers are communal and cold. The water runs continuously, and no one adjusts it or turns it off. The basic idea is already in place: stand up, let the water fall, and finish.

The Romans prefer large heated pools for soaking. After them, the shower nearly disappears from European life for more than a thousand years.

Athenian vase painters of the late 6th century BC often show fountain houses, public buildings where water runs from spouts set high in a wall.

On the Collages

These collages do not attempt a seamless image. The cuts stay visible. Edges are hard, figures sit at different scales, and each piece shows how it was made.

Some images keep the text they arrived with: a discount offer, a username, a like count, a comment icon. These marks show where the images come from. Social media is the source, and the collages leave that fact on the surface.

The settings move across a century. A pink mid-century bathroom from a 1950s advertisement and turquoise-tiled bathrooms sit beside brass showerheads and LED rain heads glowing pink and orange. A strongman photographed in the early 20th century stands next to a contemporary bodybuilder under the same spray.

The result places the shower in its full history: a domestic object, a site of advertising, and a private space men now share openly, all in the same frame.

Express Bathing Today

The shower is now the default way Americans get clean. The bath is optional, kept for rest and relaxation.

The shower fits a day organized around work, school and going out. It takes a few minutes and uses less hot water than filling a tub.

The equipment has changed from a wall spout in a Greek fountain house to a chrome showerhead in a suburban bathroom. The idea has not changed: stand under falling water, get clean, and get on with the day.

For gay men, the shower holds more. The shower that once meant risk in a locker room is now a place to share openly, at home, with a partner. The collages hold both histories in the same frame: the advertised bathroom of the 1950s and the men who now step into it together.

Monsters Out of the Closet

For most of its history, the zombie was a body that society marked as dangerous: feared, quarantined, and treated as a threat to everyone nearby. For many gay men, that description is not fiction. In the 21st century, however, the roles have reversed. From a queer perspective, the zombie is no longer the outcast. The zombie is the mob.

The link between gay men and the zombie began with AIDS. Infection films of the 1980s and 1990s were released while the epidemic was killing gay men and the public was calling for quarantine and testing. Critics have read the films' fear of contagion, and of people visibly marked by it, as a reflection of that panic. Harry Benshoff's Monsters in the Closet (1997) documents how horror monsters have long served as stand-ins for homosexuality.

Some filmmakers made the link explicit. Bruce LaBruce's Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010) present the zombie as a gay man who is alienated and treated as diseased. The BBC series In the Flesh (2013–2014) took the idea further. Its recovered zombies take daily medication, wear makeup to pass as living, and are rejected by their families and their town. Its gay lead, Kieren Walker, faces the same pressures as a closeted man.

That is the irony. The people who once treated gay men as a contagion now fit the zombie's description more closely than anyone. Much of the conservative straight community moves as a single body. It repeats the same slogans and turns on anyone who does not conform. It shows little capacity for independent thought.

Yeon Sang-ho's Colony (2026) makes this dynamic visible. Its infected share a single hive mind, and the crowd acts as one. In my collage, two men stand apart from that crowd. They are individuals set against a mob, and the mob is the danger.

Two icons from my recurring visual vocabulary frame the scene. The Blue Moon, in the upper left, stands for longing and witness. The Jupiter 3 spacecraft, at the right, stands for freedom, escape, and witness. Both icons share the role of witness. They record what happens to the two men, and they show that the men's longing and their way out exist outside the mob.

“The Dilemma of Gays and the Medical Industry: Are Doctors Good Husbands, and Why You Don't Want to Marry a Dentist” 2026 Digital Collage

The Collage

A surgeon sits in blue scrubs, cap, and mask, knees apart, one fist at his temple. He looks straight at the viewer.

Two men sit in the foreground. On the left, a shirtless man covers his mouth, one finger at his eye, with an amazed expression. On the right, a second man faces the doctor, his head at the level of the surgeon's lap. The surgeon's hand is raised above it in a gesture of control.

The setting is a hospital supply room, its color shifted toward lavender and green. The Jupiter 3 hovers at the surgeon's shoulder. It stands for escape, rescue, and witness. A Blue Moon sits in the upper left corner. It stands for longing and desire.

Both icons serve as unseen witnesses. The men in the collage do not see them, but the viewer does. The icons represent the viewer inside the collage. The act of witnessing begins with them and passes out to the person looking at the work.

Medicine as Adversary and Caretaker

Until 1973, American psychiatry classified homosexuality as a mental illness. Treatments to change gay men included aversion therapy, electric shock, and hormones. Hospitals turned men away from their partners' bedsides because they were not legal family.

In 1981, AIDS appeared. Gay men now depended on the system that had called them sick. Some doctors and nurses refused to treat them, and meal trays were left outside their doors. Other doctors became their strongest advocates.

This is the dilemma. Medicine harmed gay men, and gay men needed medicine to survive.

Are Doctors Good Husbands?

The data is better than the reputation. A 2015 study of U.S. Census data found that physicians divorce less often than non-healthcare workers and most other health professions, including nurses and health-care executives. They also divorce less often than lawyers.

As for the dentist: same training, same income, more divorces. Marry the doctor.

— Behan

Sources

• Ly, D.P., Seabury, S.A., and Jena, A.B. "Divorce among physicians and other healthcare professionals in the United States: analysis of census survey data." BMJ 2015;350:h706. https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h706

• ScienceDaily, "Physicians less likely to be divorced than other occupations," February 23, 2015. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150218141315.htm

• PBS NewsHour, Paul Volberding, "Reflections on 30 Years of AIDS," June 2011. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/health-jan-june11-volberding_06-06

Eight Collages, Five Elements

These eight collages share a set of formal decisions. Each one is built from different source material, but color, value, line, shape and space are handled in consistent ways across the group.

Color

Saturated blue dominates most of the series. It appears as sky, water, rain-streaked windows and night. Warm skin tones sit against that blue, and the contrast between the two is the main color relationship in the work. The champagne gold of the Jupiter 3 adds a third, metallic note. Three pieces shift the key: one to lavender, one to deep green-black, one to amber gold. Each still keeps the warm figure against a single dominant field.

Value

Digital processing pushes the darks toward black and the lights toward white. Faces receive the strongest light in each composition. The middle values are compressed, which flattens forms and gives the surfaces a poster-like quality. The nighttime pieces use a low-key range, with light reserved for skin and the moon.

Line

Line comes mostly from cut edges. Each figure has a hard silhouette, and in several pieces a thin halo outlines it. This keeps the collage process visible. Horizon lines run across the landscapes, and window mullions divide the interior scene. The horizontal rim of the saucer repeats the horizon wherever the two appear together.

Shape

The circle is the constant. A moon or globe occupies an upper corner in every collage, and the ellipse of the Jupiter 3 appears in all eight. These geometric shapes contrast with the organic shapes of the bodies and with the rectangles of windows, car interiors and a magazine cover.

Space

Space is layered rather than continuous. The upper register holds the sky, the moon and the craft. The lower register holds the figures. Scale changes abruptly: large heads crop at the frame edge in the foreground while small landscapes recede behind them. There is no single perspective. Many foreground faces look directly out at the viewer, which places the viewer inside the arrangement.

The Result

The repeated decisions make eight separate images read as one series. The moon and the Jupiter 3 hold the top of each composition, and the men below them carry the content.

Artist and Model

Most of my collage work looks outward: at other men, other places, other decades. In my recent work, I place myself in the picture with the model. This is an old practice in painting. Three works show how artists have handled it.

Courbet: The Artist at the Center

Courbet paints himself seated at his easel, working on a landscape. A nude model stands behind him and watches. A boy looks up at the canvas.

On either side of the studio are the people of Courbet's life. On one side are ordinary working people. On the other are his friends, critics and supporters, including the poet Baudelaire, who reads at the far right.

The full title calls the painting an allegory of seven years of his artistic and moral life. The Exposition Universelle of 1855 rejects it. Courbet shows it in his own pavilion instead.

The model in this painting looks at the artist, not at the viewer.

Velázquez: The Viewer Takes the Model's Place

Velázquez stands at a large canvas, brush and palette in hand. The young Infanta Margarita and her attendants fill the room. A mirror on the back wall shows the king and queen.

The king and queen stand where the viewer stands. They appear to be the models. The canvas faces away from us, so we never see what Velázquez paints.

The artist looks out of the picture at his models, and at us.

Hockney: The Artist Becomes the Picture

Hockney's model is Gregory Evans, his partner at the time. Evans sleeps in a blue robe in the foreground.

Behind him is a painting of Hockney at work, drawing at a table. The painting is unfinished. Parts of the table and chairs remain outlines.

Here the artist is the image within the image. The model is a man the artist loves, painted in an ordinary, private moment.

My Collage: The Brush Becomes an iPhone

My piece starts with a mirror selfie. I stand in an ornate gilt mirror, holding my iPhone. Behind me, a second mirror shows a young man with a towel. In the foreground, another man holds a plaid towel to his chest.

The Blue Moon as longing and love and the Jupiter 3 as freedom and autonomy inhabit the space as unseen witnesses except to the audience.

Where Velázquez and Courbet hold a brush, I hold a iPhone. The tool stays in the frame. It records the moment and the person making the image.

Why the Artist Appears

Collage is built from images of other people. The artist can easily stay out of view. A self-portrait puts the artist back into the record.

Courbet surrounds himself with his world. Velázquez places the viewer in the position of the model. Hockney shows himself next to the man he loves. I show where I am, what I am doing, and that I am the one choosing these images.

My work takes subtext and makes it context. The artist and model theme makes that visible. The person looking is part of the subject.

The history a Man Carries with Him

Five Centuries of Men

1440s — Donatello's Bronze David
The sculpture comes from the Medici circle in Florence. It is one of the first freestanding nude male bronzes since antiquity, and historians have discussed its homoerotic qualities for generations. It is the earliest historical reference in the collage.

1960s — The Physique Pair
Two bodybuilders, tinted chartreuse, represent mid-century physique photography by artists such as Bob Mizer. Physique magazines presented themselves as fitness publications. For gay men, they were one of the few available sources of images of other men.

1980s — The Rugby Shirt
Two young men in a striped rugby shirt and short shorts represent a period when gay men were appearing in public more openly. At the same time, straight men were beginning to adopt the fashions of an emerging queer culture. Styles that began in gay communities, such as fitted clothing, short shorts, and the pink Izod polo shirt, entered mainstream menswear, often without straight men recognizing where they came from.

2020s
Shirtless contemporary figures at the upper left, and a man in a yellow-patterned swim brief, come from social media. In Donatello's time, sculpture and painting set the standard for male beauty. Today, social media does the same work. Photographers, content creators, and the men who post their own images now shape how the male body is seen. The medium has moved from bronze to the phone screen, but artists, including women, define what we see when we look at men.

The Objects

The 1969 Pontiac Bonneville
My father drove this car. Its size, power, and audacious styling taught me early what a man is supposed to look like. It belongs here with the figures, because it is another image of masculinity. These lessons reached me through ordinary family life, not only through art.

The Jupiter 3
The two saucers are the Jupiter 2 spacecraft from the 1960s television series Lost in Space, styled in my iconography as the Jupiter 3. They represent witness, freedom, and escape.

The Blue Moon
The moon in the upper right represents witness, longing, and desire.

Witness

The journey of this artwork begins with a simple selfie. The collage gathers five centuries of men around my face, with the eye at the center, the Jupiter 3, and the Blue Moon all marking the same idea: I see this history, and I place it in plain view.

The selfie shows a man alone in a room. The collage becomes the history that man carries with him.

— Behan

Postscript: For the personal history behind my move from painting to digital collage, please read "From Darkroom to Digital: A Personal Timeline."

Ride the Gay Surf

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — HOLLYWOOD, 1964

Columbia Pictures Presents "Ride the Gay Surf," the Summer's Breakout Hit

Columbia Pictures heads to Hawaii this summer with "Ride the Gay Surf," a story of surfing, friendship, and romance on the North Shore of Oahu!

The Stars

Tab Hunter and Fabian lead the cast as two mainland surfers who travel to Waimea Bay to test themselves against the biggest waves in the world. They find more than waves. Shelley Fabares, Barbara Eden, Peter Brown, and James Mitchum round out the cast as the friends who cheer them on from the beach.

Filmed on Location

Every surfing scene is filmed in the wild waters of Waimea Bay, in full color.

The Look of the Summer

Hunter and Fabian model the newest Jantzen swimwear line throughout the picture. Audiences will want to leave the theater and head straight to the beach.

Opening This Summer

"Ride the Gay Surf" opens in theaters nationwide. Bring your friends. Bring your boyfriend.

Artist's Note

The Real Film

"Ride the Gay Surf" is based on "Ride the Wild Surf," a 1964 Columbia Pictures release starring Fabian, Tab Hunter, Shelley Fabares, and Barbara Eden, filmed at Waimea Bay. It was one of the many beach films that studios produced in the early 1960s for teenage audiences.

The Law in 1964

In 1964, homosexual acts were illegal in every state except Illinois, which had repealed its sodomy law in 1961. The Hollywood Production Code had banned any depiction of homosexuality until 1961, and after that it allowed the subject only if handled with "care, discretion and restraint." In practice, gay characters in films of the period were punished, killed, or presented as tragic.

Tab Hunter

Tab Hunter was gay. He was arrested at a gay party in 1950, and Confidential magazine reported the arrest in 1955. He did not speak publicly about his sexuality until his 2005 memoir, "Tab Hunter Confidential." In 1964, he played the heterosexual leading man because the studios and the law required it.

Follow the Money

Studios made beach films because beach films made money. If being gay had been legal and socially accepted in 1964, the studios would have made gay beach films for the same reason. These collages show that version: same stars, same location, same swimwear tie-in, and an open gay romance at the center of the story.

Subtext becomes context.

— Behan

Rory and Guy Having a Moment

Summer of Love, 1951

Imagine a 1951 where being gay is completely ordinary. In that year, Guy Madison and Rory Calhoun are Hollywood's newest and hottest couple.

The Couple

They are seen at every hotspot in town. They spend afternoons with friends at the Riviera, LA's swankiest pool and lounge. This summer they star together in MGM's major new picture, "Union Soldiers in Love."

The Real History

The pairing has a real-world basis. Madison and Calhoun were both clients of agent Henry Willson, who built the careers of a generation of handsome leading men, including Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter. Willson also created their names: Robert Moseley became "Guy Madison," and Francis Durgin went through several names before Willson settled on "Rory Calhoun."

The two actors did share the screen. They appeared together in the Monogram film "Massacre River" in 1949. Off screen, Robert Hofler's Willson biography includes a story of Calhoun and Madison found together in a Jaguar while Willson stood outside in the rain. The story is unconfirmed, and both men married women.

The Version That Never Happened

In the actual 1950s, studios and agents carefully managed the image of men like these. Willson did not allow his gay clients to live with other men and enforced the rule through surveillance. In 1955, when Confidential magazine threatened to expose Rock Hudson, Willson gave the magazine information about Calhoun's years in prison and Tab Hunter's 1950 arrest at a gay party instead.

These collages remove that management and show the version that was never allowed to happen.

The Symbols

Blue Moon, representing love, and Jupiter 2, representing freedom, appear in each piece.

Subtext becomes context.

— Behan

Sources: Robert Hofler, "The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson"; Bright Lights Film Journal, "Inside the Dreamboat Factory"; Wikipedia, "Rory Calhoun"; IMDb, Henry Willson biography.

Who’s Your Zaddy Daddy?

In gay communities, "daddy" has described a specific type of man for decades: older, masculine, confident, and often protective or a mentor to younger men. The type overlaps with bear and leather culture, which value a mature, bearded, masculine appearance, and in those settings "Who's your daddy?" works as a flirtatious line that draws directly on it.

When people on social media call an attractive older man "daddy" today, they are using a term gay men used first. It moved into general use through online culture in the 2010s and produced a variant, "zaddy." Where "daddy" centers on age and masculinity, "zaddy" emphasizes style and confidence: a well-dressed, self-assured man who is attractive regardless of age. The term spread through hip-hop and social media and is now common in mainstream slang.

Remembering Charles Demuth

Introduction

Charles Demuth (1883–1935) is one of the first American modernists. He is also a gay man working in a period when his life cannot be shown openly. His art reflects both facts.

This post presents three of his watercolors next to three of my digital collages. Each collage is an homage. Each one takes what Demuth places beneath the surface and puts it on the surface.

What Demuth Has to Do

Demuth builds a successful public career. He becomes known for delicately colored watercolors of flowers, fruit, and figures, and for Precisionist paintings of architecture and cityscapes. Over his career, he completes about 750 paintings and 350 drawings, receives favorable reviews, and sells numerous works.

He spends time in New York and Provincetown, but Lancaster, Pennsylvania remains his home throughout his life. In New York, he takes part in the bohemian life and gay subculture of Greenwich Village.

Two Kinds of Work

Alongside the public work, Demuth makes watercolors of the nightclubs, performers, and bathhouses he knows in Greenwich Village. He keeps the openly homoerotic watercolors private throughout his career and almost never shows them publicly. In his will, he leaves all of his watercolors to Robert Locher, and among them is a series of explicitly homoerotic paintings of gay life in New York.

Between the public and the private work, there is a third category: works that can be shown, but that carry a meaning for viewers who know how to read them. This is how Demuth survives professionally while remaining honest to himself. The three works below come from that practice.

One: The Acrobats

Demuth paints a series of vaudeville images between 1914 and 1919, and acrobats are among his favorite subjects. In these watercolors, the attention falls on the male body in performance. The tights cover the body completely while showing its full shape.

The Acrobats keeps the attention on the male body in performance, but the performance now takes place on social media. The figures float without a floor, as Demuth's acrobats do. The covering is gone, both literally and figuratively.

Two: The Discotheque

Demuth paints Dancing Sailors twice, in two almost identical compositions. Both show three couples on a dance floor. In the center, two sailors dance together, while the others dance with women. The women give the scene a respectable surface. The two sailors at the center carry its actual subject.

The Discotheque moves the dance hall to a nightclub. The same male couple appears three times across the horizontal expanse, embracing and kissing. The repetition answers Demuth's three couples. The longing in the watercolor is fulfilled in the collage.

Three: The Beach X 2 2026

Demuth spends many summers in Provincetown, beginning in 1914. In the early 1930s he returns to the figure with a series of openly homoerotic works, and his last pieces are figural watercolors made in Provincetown in 1934.

In this watercolor, two men in dark swim trunks share an empty beach. One, in a white sailor cap, sits bent toward the other. The second reclines on one elbow, his legs stretched across the sheet. Large areas of the paper are left bare or only drawn in pencil, and nothing else is on the beach.

The collage repeats the arrangement. One man is raised on his hands behind; the other reclines on one elbow across the foreground. Dark trunks become briefs.

The main change is the setting. Demuth's men are alone, on a beach with no one else present. In the collage, the beach is full of people and umbrellas. The two men are in public, and they are not hiding.

Working in Code

Demuth and artists like him are forced to work in code. They do so magnificently and with great heart. Their paintings record what they are not permitted to say directly, in a form that allows the work to be made, kept, and in some cases shown.

These three collages are made a little over one hundred years later. They do not need the code. The subtext of Demuth's watercolors becomes the context of the collages.

• Cleveland Museum of Art. Charles Demuth, Dancing Sailors, 1917. clevelandart.org

• Museum of Modern Art. Charles Demuth, Dancing Sailors, 1918. moma.org

• Demuth Foundation. "Stop 6: The Colonial Theater." demuth.org

• New Britain Museum of American Art. "Charles Henry Demuth." nbmaa.org

• The Art Story. "Charles Demuth." theartstory.org

• Westmoreland Museum of American Art. "Celebrating LGBTQIA+ Artists in the Collection: Charles Demuth." thewestmoreland.org

• Weinberg, Jonathan. Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Homage to DeMuth

An Homage to Charles Demuth's Dancing Sailors

The Discotheque (2026) is a digital collage made as an homage to Charles Demuth's watercolor Dancing Sailors (1918). The two works are made a little over one hundred years apart. Demuth's sailors express a longing that his era does not allow him to show directly. The Discotheque shows that longing fulfilled.

The Watercolor

Dancing Sailors is a small work in watercolor and pencil, measuring 8 by 10 inches, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Demuth paints the subject more than once; an earlier version from 1917 is in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The scene is a crowded dance hall. Three sailors dance with women. The sailors' uniforms dominate the composition, and the tight navy wool shows the shape of their backs, shoulders, and legs. The women are mostly hidden behind the men.

The Gaze Between the Sailors

The meaning of the watercolor is in where the sailors look. The sailor on the left turns his head toward the center of the picture. The blond sailor at the center turns his head back toward him. Their gazes meet over the shoulders of the women they hold.

In this period, sailors dancing with other men is not unusual. Demuth places his sailors with women instead, and the tension of the picture comes from that substitution. The women give the scene a respectable surface. The exchanged look between the two men carries the actual subject.

Working in Code

Demuth draws these scenes from his experience of New York's Greenwich Village nightlife, where he paints nightclubs, performers, and bathhouses. His most explicit watercolors of gay life stay private during his lifetime; in his will, he leaves them to Robert Locher.

Works such as Dancing Sailors are built so that a general viewer sees a dance hall, while a viewer who knows the code sees two men looking at each other. Artists like Demuth are forced to work this way, and they do so magnificently and with great heart.

The Discotheque

The Discotheque moves the dance hall to a nightclub. The background shows a crowded dance floor, red and pink club lights, and the dark space of the room at night.

Across the horizontal expanse of the image, the same couple appears three times: two men in an embrace, kissing. The repetition answers Demuth's three dancing couples. In the watercolor, each sailor holds a woman. In the collage, each man holds the man he is looking at.

The navy of Demuth's uniforms reappears in the dark tank top of one figure. The earth and the flying saucer, recurring elements in this series, place the scene outside ordinary time and location.

From Longing to Fulfillment

In Dancing Sailors, the two men can only look at each other, and only for the length of a turn on the dance floor. In The Discotheque, there is no woman between them and no need for a code. The embrace that the sailors cannot have is the central image of the collage, repeated three times.

The subtext of Demuth's watercolor becomes the context of The Discotheque.

— Behan

Sources

• Museum of Modern Art. Charles Demuth, Dancing Sailors, 1918. moma.org

• Cleveland Museum of Art. Charles Demuth, Dancing Sailors, 1917. clevelandart.org

• Queer Art History. "Charles Demuth (1883–1935)." 2017. queerarthistory.com

• Demuth Foundation. "Stop 6: The Colonial Theater." demuth.org

• Weinberg, Jonathan. Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

The Acrobats

An Homage to Charles Demuth

The Acrobats is a digital collage made as an homage to Charles Demuth (1883–1935) and his watercolors of vaudeville acrobats. Demuth's acrobats carry a meaning that only part of his audience can read. This collage states that meaning openly.

Two Kinds of Work

In the same years, Demuth makes openly homoerotic watercolors. They show sailors and scenes at the Lafayette Baths in New York, including a 1918 self-portrait set in a Turkish bathhouse.

These works stay private. In his will, Demuth leaves all of his watercolors, including the series showing gay life in New York, to his partner Robert Locher.

The acrobats are different. They are made to be exhibited, and their meaning depends on what a viewer knows how to see.

The Male Body in Performance

In the acrobat watercolors, the attention falls on the male body in performance. The Barnes Foundation notes that in In Vaudeville: Two Acrobat-Jugglers (1916), a cascade of flowers draws the eye to the central figure's muscular legs. The Barnes places the work alongside Demuth's watercolors of the gay nightclubs, cafés, and bathhouses he frequents in Greenwich Village.

Scholars describe the sexual ambiguity in these works as signaling the homosexuality of the subject and the artist, in a way that perhaps only Demuth's inner circle would detect. The central study of this coding is Jonathan Weinberg's Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (1993).

The Same Attention, Now from Social Media

The Acrobats keeps the attention on the male body in performance, but the performance now takes place on social media. Every figure in the collage comes from images that men post of themselves. These men are both the performers and the people presenting the performance. The man looking at his phone places the audience inside the image.

The poses repeat Demuth's. One figure lies with his arms raised behind his head, in the same position as an acrobat gripping a trapeze bar. Another stretches horizontally across the bottom of the composition, as Demuth's middle acrobat folds through the center of his.

None of the figures stands on a floor. The moon and the flying saucer place them in the air. The reds and oranges of Demuth's tights become the colors of the background textile.

The Covering Is Gone

The main change is the costume. Demuth's tights cover the body completely while showing its full shape, and that covering allows the work to be exhibited in 1916.

In The Acrobats, the covering is gone, both literally and figuratively. What Demuth's audience had to recognize or decipher, the viewer of this collage sees directly. The subtext of the watercolors, beautiful in their own way, becomes the context of the collage.

— Behan

Sources

• Barnes Foundation. In Vaudeville: Two Acrobat-Jugglers, 1916. collection.barnesfoundation.org

• Demuth Foundation. "Stop 6: The Colonial Theater." demuth.org

• LancasterOnline. "Demuth Foundation updates provide fuller portrait of artist's life, sexuality." lancasteronline.com

• Title Magazine. "Charles Demuth's Watercolors." 2012. title-magazine.com

• Weinberg, Jonathan. Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

L'Asie, Reversed

Timeline

• 1946 — Henri Matisse paints L'Asie in Venice, France.

• 1981 — ZZ Top releases the song “Pearl Necklace.”

• 1993 — The Kimbell Art Museum acquires L'Asie.

• 1994 — Apple releases the QuickTake 100, the first color digital camera sold to the public.

• 2026 — I create my digital collage homage to L'Asie.

Introductory Thoughts

One of my favorite moments at the Kimbell since 1993 is standing before this amazing painting by Henri Matisse. In my digital collage homage, I bring contemporary perspectives on five major elements of his work: the Media, the Odalisque, the Arabesque, the Tiger, and the Beaded Necklace.

The Media

Matisse paints L'Asie in oil on canvas in Vence between November 1945 and June 1946, just after the Second World War. A woman sits in a violet-and-blue coat over a striped gown, holding a string of beads against a flat red field. Oil on canvas is the medium of the European tradition he inherits.

My medium is born as the Kimbell acquires L'Asie. More than thirty years on, I use that new medium, digital collage photography, to make this homage and to examine the painting's major elements for a better understanding of what is happening in the work.

The Odalisque

The odalisque is one of the most durable figures in European painting: a woman, usually reclining, often in an imagined “Eastern” setting, placed there to be looked at. Ingres, Delacroix, and Matisse himself return to her again and again.

In my collage, the odalisque is a man. He reclines with one arm behind his head, a red robe open across his chest, and looks directly back at the viewer. The pose and the display are the same. The odalisque is defined by who is doing the looking. When a man takes her place, the question of who looks, and who is looked at, becomes visible.

The Arabesque

Matisse fills the red ground with loose black arabesque lines. A photograph of an earlier state shows a black section in the lower left. He repaints it red so the whole background reads as one decorative surface. The arabesque comes from Islamic ornament. European painters took it, along with tiles, textiles, and costume, to build a decorative “East.”

My ground is assembled from that borrowed vocabulary: red chinoiserie wallpaper, a blue geometric Islamic tile, and a pink paisley textile. Each piece keeps its own edges. Instead of blending into one surface, the sources stay separate, so the borrowing itself is visible.

Two recurring elements from my collage series appear in this field. With the Blue Moon and Jupiter 3 present, my collage indicates a universal view while Matisse's work points to the earth.

The Tiger

Matisse's costume is a Chinese coat lined with the white fur of a Siberian tiger. In the painting, the tiger has been skinned and made into a garment, and Matisse then turns that garment into violet and blue paint. The animal survives only as material.

In my collage, the tiger is alive. A white tiger lies in a tapestry landscape in the upper background, alert and looking at the viewer. Today the Siberian tiger is an endangered species, and fur carries a different meaning than it did in 1946. The tiger is no longer worn. It is present, and it watches.

The Beaded Necklace

In L'Asie, the model raises the blue beads with one hand and holds them away from her body. The gesture is open. She offers the necklace, and herself, to the viewer. Matisse ties the necklace directly to the model's gaze. He paints her eyes blue and green, the colors of the beads. The necklace is what she sees and what the viewer sees.

In my collage, finding the right necklace is central to the work. It has to function as a design element, floating above the figure. It also has to be scaled large enough to hold its place among the other elements. The blue pearls cross the bare chest of a reclining man, and his pale blue eyesrepeat their color, as the model's eyes do in Matisse.

In contemporary language, a “pearl necklace” refers to a man ejaculating onto a partner's neck and chest. ZZ Top's song brings the term into popular culture in 1981, thirty-five years after Matisse paints L'Asie. Popular understanding assumes the partner is a woman. Placed on a man, the necklace removes that assumption.

The two necklaces are coded differently, but they carry the same meaning: an invitation to lie down and to engage. Matisse's reference is nuanced. Mine is explicit. I take subtext and make it context.

Concluding Thoughts

Eighty years apart, the two works come from similar moments. Matisse paints L'Asie in the months after the defeat of fascism in Europe, the first use of the atomic bomb, and years of wartime deprivation in France. I make my homage in a time of rising authoritarianism, renewed fear of world war and nuclear annihilation, and economic hardship. Facing those realities, Matisse creates an image that reflects the hope of a new and better world. He hides his effort, and the painting appears effortless.

My work looks back at that hope and reflects how that world has remained very much the same, if not worse. It shows every seam, every layer, every effort. The invitation of the necklace remains, made explicit, in a world that still has not become what Matisse hoped.

— Behan

Sources

Kimbell Art Museum, “L'Asie (Asia),” Henri Matisse, 1946, accession no. APg 1993.01, kimbellart.org.

ZZ Top, “Pearl Necklace,” El Loco, Warner Bros. Records, 1981.

Urban Dictionary, “pearl necklace,” urbandictionary.com.

The Odalisque Wears Gym Shorts

ride Alaskan motion, liberated they’re free to love who they wantThe Reclining Figure

In 1814, Ingres paints a woman turned away, looking back over one shoulder. She is arranged to be seen, and the viewer is assumed to be a man.

Today the reclining figure is a young man on a phone screen. He identifies as straight. He has priced his body by the month.

What Masculinity Allows

A generation ago, a straight man who offers himself as an object of desire risks his standing. Display belongs to women. Looking belongs to men.

That line has weakened. Gym culture builds the male body for viewing, and social media rewards the result. The shame falls away. The body remains, shown openly.

Who Is Looking

The men who pay are most often gay. The straight performer knows this, adjusts to their requests, and accepts their money.

For centuries, the gay man looks at male bodies only through the cover of myth or athletics. Now he looks directly, and the man he looks at has agreed to be seen.

The Same Composition

The straight man takes the place of the odalisque. The gay man takes the seat of the patron. The composition is unchanged. Only the figures have traded places.

— Behan

References: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814, Musée du Louvre. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, 1975.

Saturday Color Drench

Rain falling all weekend. Beautiful.