One-Man Show: The Life and Art of Bernard Perlin
by Michael Schreiber
Bruno Gmünder. 256 pages, $59.99
ANY LIST of important gay male artists of the mid-to-late-20th century would probably include names like Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, and David Hockney, to name just a few. But while the list could be quite long, it’s doubtful that artist Bernard Perlin (1918–2014) would make the cut. Known and admired by all of the men listed above, and many others, Perlin never earned the kind of fame that most of his contemporaries enjoyed. He did, however, enjoy financial and critical success. When he was in his thirties, the Tate acquired one of his paintings, and his work was consistently popular and well-received throughout his career.
Michael Schreiber’s One-Man Show is an exhaustive chronicle of Perlin’s life and work, a kind of hybrid monograph–biography, sumptuously illustrated with reproductions of the artist’s drawings and paintings, as well as many photographs of Perlin and his circle, including the work of his friend George Platt Lynes. It’s fair to say that Schreiber, a Chicago-based teacher and writer, was the Boswell to Perlin’s Johnson (a pun the sexually vigorous artist would no doubt have enjoyed). Schreiber met Perlin late in the artist’s life and convinced him to sit through several interviews, which he has transcribed. These form the bulk of the book’s biographical material. Perlin was an accomplished raconteur, so the interviews make for engaging biography. They also offer an intriguing behind-the-scenes perspective on gay life in the New York arts scene from the mid-20th century onward.
The book opens with a section of essays and reminiscences by some of Perlin’s friends and fellow travelers. These provide helpful background on the artist and his milieu. One key point that emerges here is that Perlin abhorred the art world and was indifferent to fame—sentiments that he confirmed and expanded upon in his talks with Schreiber. Another factor that probably contributed to his relative obscurity was his commitment to figurative painting long after it fell out of fashion, eclipsed by Abstract Expressionism and other Modernist movements. His early work fits easily within the Social Realist school, made famous by Ben Shahn (with whom he once worked). Indeed, one could be forgiven for mistaking his early work for Shahn’s. Perlin has a place in the history of Jewish art and also of queer art, but, as Aaron Rosen points out in his essay, he’s more of a footnote in the broader history of American art.
And yet, from the 1940s onward, Perlin seemed to be everywhere. His canvasses sold well, attracting the attention of nearly everyone who was anyone in the art world. He received commissions from the wealthy and the famous, a list that included the actor Vincent Price, Glenway Wescott, Leonard Bernstein, and many others. He did portraits of such writers as W. Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Truman Capote, and Katherine Ann Porter.
During World War II, Perlin was an artist-correspondent for Life magazine, and his work appeared on its cover, as well as on the cover of Fortune and other publications. He produced a series of wartime propaganda posters and made numerous drawings and paintings capturing the reality and horror of war, such as The Leg (1946), which depicts a soldier’s gangrenous severed leg. Perlin lived in Rome from the late 1940s to the early ’50s, and returned to the U.S. for good in 1953, eventually settling in Connecticut with his life partner, Ed Newell.
In one of his late interviews, Perlin joked that he was much more prolific sexually than artistically and recounted how a friend once calculated that Perlin, from age seventeen until his sixties, had sucked enough cock to consume “two miles of men.” There were many famous names along those two miles, but many more were simply men that he encountered during his decades of active cruising in the U.S. and Europe. Schreiber coaxes the somewhat reluctant Perlin to discuss how these adventures often led to trouble with the law, such as his arrests for homosexual acts in Virginia, Florida, and France.
Perlin once described men as “packages of pleasure.” Although he painted landscapes, still lives, and war-themed art, he was most devoted to capturing the beauty of the male body. He was an unapologetic champion of gay sensuality. “I’m painting these pictures that I want to paint,” he once told Schreiber. “I’m going to leave this large collection of basically homosexual, homoerotic paintings behind. So why not? I don’t have anybody to be protective of or ashamed for. And shame shouldn’t come into the act.” Schreiber’s book should help advance the reputation of this prolific and important gay artist.
Jim Nawrocki, a writer based in San Francisco, is a frequent contributor to these pages.
