SOLOMON - How he painted saints out of gay boys
Pictures that were never painted - From now on, it's gay
Simeon Solomon - A Gay Artist Against His Time
There are painters who were ahead of their time. And there are painters who paid for their time. Simeon Solomon belongs to the second group. He paid with everything: his reputation, his friends, his life's work, his life. What he left behind are pictures of a beauty that hurts - because one knows what they cost him.
London, 1840. A Jewish artist family in the East End. Simeon is the eighth child, and he paints before he can properly write. At 18, his works are hanging in the Royal Academy. Critics are thrilled. He is young, talented, charming - and he knows exactly what he is. Gay. In an era when the word didn't exist yet, but the punishment already did.
He paints his way through this time. He paints saints with the faces of twinks. He paints angels touching each other as if it were the most natural thing in the world - because it is - if not in heaven, then so on earth. He paints Bacchus, rapt and sensual, a youth between dream and desire. He paints Sleep, two men holding hands in their sleep. Cardinal Manning, one of England's most powerful churchmen, hangs Solomon's saints in his rooms. He doesn't suspect - or doesn't want to suspect - that these saints bear the faces of the men Solomon loved.
Swinburne, the poet, is his closest confidant. Rossetti, Burne-Jones - the Pre-Raphaelites embrace him as one of their own. Solomon is at the heart of the most significant art movement of his time. He belongs there. He is one of them.
Until February 1873.
Paris. A public restroom. An arrest. "Indecent acts" - that's what the law calls what Solomon lived. The news reached London like a stone dropping into water. The ripples spread. Burne-Jones cut off contact - immediately, definitively, without a word of explanation. Swinburne, his closest confidant, publicly distanced himself. As if the shared years had never existed. As if Solomon had never been there.
In 1874, a second arrest followed in London. Now it was over.
What followed were thirty years of slow disappearance. Solomon continued to paint - he couldn't help it. But he sold his drawings on the street, for pennies. He drank. He lived in workhouses. The man whose works hung in a cardinal's rooms slept on wooden bunks among the homeless. On August 14, 1905, Simeon Solomon died in St. Giles Workhouse in London. Alone. Forgotten. 64 years old.
The art world that abandoned him rediscovered him decades later. Today, his works hang in the Tate Galleries, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in private collections worldwide. The men who betrayed him are footnotes in history. Solomon has endured.
What We Have Made of His Life
Solomon painted gay yearning in codes because he couldn't do it openly. We paint it openly - because we can and because we must. KUNSTWERK BILDER creates Gay Art in the style of the masters: not as a copy, but as a continuation. The images Solomon could never show - the embraces, the kisses, the tenderness between men without concealment and without apology - we make them visible. That is his homage. And our mission.
"Love is the beginning and the end of all things – it was before the world and will be after it." – Simeon Solomon, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1871)