[MUSIC] Hello I´m Ted Gott, senior curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia. Handsome, erudite, and well connected, Glenn Philpot made a considerable name for himself in Great Britain in the 1910s and 1920s as a fashionable society portrait painter. As an art student, Philpot was to become fascinated by vinician old master painting. For example, that of tishian and veranaze. From there we learned the subtleties of applying glazes over under painting to build up richness, and texture in his own paintings. I'm not one of those who think that we should begin by striking out methods of our own, he was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail around 1906. Almost every day I drop into the National Gallery in London for half an hour's pondering in front of some picture or other. Philpot's public reputation was cemented with his Manuelito Painted in 1909, a life-sized portrait of a young man dressed as a toreador that achieved a spectacular success at the February 1910 exhibition of the Modern Society of Portrait Painters. This helped open the door for Philpot to a wide spectrum of British society, clients, and he now entered into the world of London society with gusto. This was the age of elegant parties and elaborate and seriously undertaken fancy dress celebrations. In British society, this was the era as the Duchess of Westminster later famously declared when anyone seen on a bus after age 30 has been a failure in life. Throughout the 1920s, Philpot was to receive around a dozen major portrait commissions per year. He painted leading figures within British royalty and society such as Sir Banister Flight Fletcher, the distinguished architect. Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British union of fascists, and John Henry Whitley, speaker of the house of commons. These sublime portraits benefited from the painterly machismo Phil Potter drawn from his study of Italian renaissance masters, such as Mentenya and Tishan. As well as the portraits of Holbine t,he depth of construction and subtle palette gave Philpot's paintings a uniquely somber authority and his love of beautiful textures and nuanced surfaces led to his being dubbed a Beau Brummell of painting. Philpot found constant relaxation for the rigueur and forced politesse of is formal society portraits In another deeply personal category of portraiture. Devoted almost exclusively to male subjects, this embraced a range of masculinities, from the youthful optimism of callow young men, to the jaded charm of broken nosed boxers. Philpot was fascinated too, by male African and African American sitters. These portraits he painted and sculpted whenever the opportunity arose. Only Philpot´s sister Daisy, and his intimate acquaintances were privy to his most private artworks however. As well as two items he held in his personal library, such as John Addington Simmons, a Problem in Greek Ethics 1883. The first defense of homosexuality to be published in the English language. Alongside his public role as a portrait painter, Philpot maintained an extensive network of homosexual friends and acquaintances in his private life. These included the Canadian born journalist and art critic, Robert Ross. Who was an early lover of Oscar Wilde, and later his literary executor. It was Ross who in 1908 commissioned Jacob Epstein to create his controversial tomb for Oscar Wilde, which still stands today in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Ross' ashes are in this tomb along with Wilde's. Philpot was also good friends with the painters Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, one of the great gay couples of British art. Albeit in their day, a relatively discreet and closeted couple, and he was friends too with the homosexual politician, society figure, and art collector Sir Philip Sassoon, and his cousin, the poet Siegfried Sasoon, who was also homosexual. By the late 1920s, some of Philpot's friends became worried that he and his art were becoming too indiscreet for comfort. As one of them put it, they deplored that Glenn was getting out of hand, not hiding his homosexual taste. He was taking risks, being too obvious. By 1931, Phil Pope was forced to confront the many contradictions his life and art presented in a politically dangerous and sexually charged world that seemed to leave both Edwardian and Renaissance ideals far behind. Travel to Berlin affected him profoundly at this time, opening his eyes to decadent nightlife, and the grimly satiric art of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Secluding himself in Paris in an ultra-Modernist steel and glass studio apartment, he now sought to reinvent himself Experimenting with radical new paintings that engaged with Picasso, with surrealism, and that explored the erotically heightened milieus of the modern metropolis. Philpott's art was now also changing as much as his personal life. As his paintings shifted to a new palette of lilacs and blues And to send the abstracted compositions unified by elegant silhouettes. These dramatic changes in style and subject matter we're unveiled at his one man exhibition at the Lester Galleries in London, in June 1932. An exhibition that shocked the London art world. If ending his shift to dry chalky textures and a cool pastel palette, Philpot argued that this change is arisen from the convictions that new modes of expression are continually necessary if the artist is to add to the sum of beauty in the world, and not merely to echo or to express admiration for some beauty already crystallized in a recognized form. The Scotsman Newspaper put it more simply with a banner headline that yelled Glinfield Pott goes Picasso. The controversy surrounding his 1932 exhibition made the artist's clients nervous. Portrait commissions, once the mainstay of his practice, all but dried up in 1932 to 33, and despite staging four one-man exhibitions in quick succession, Philpot was increasingly beset by financial problems as his new paintings failed to fetch the prices his work had earlier enjoyed. What had gone wrong? An answer might be found, perhaps, by looking at the writing of the most widely read and popular American art critic of his day, the anti-Modernist and homophobic Thomas Craven. In his bestselling book, Modern Art, of 1934, Craven had railed against the perceived decorative weakness Of Modernist, and especially French Modern Art. The artist is losing his masculinity, Craven thundered. The tendency of the Parisian system is to disestablish sexual characteristics, to merge the two sexes in an androgynous third, containing all that is offensive to both. If you doubt the growing effeminacy of the artist you've only to examine the performances of the modern Ecole du Paris, or School of Paris. The school is fundamentally sexless from Picasso to [FOREIGN], and Dufie. In essence, it is an emasculated art, and art of fashions, styles, and ambiguous patterns. Craven thus equated Picasso with what he called, The most offensive element in modern art, the gigolo, and the homosexual playing on the vanities of bored women. In exhibiting such a strong body of new work, new in subject matter and radically new in style, at London's Leicester Galleries in 1932, Quinn Philpott transgressed in a number of ways. Phil Potts new depictions of decadent Berlin night life were full imitations of a sexual fluidity that all but flaunted the artist hitherto and spoken homosexuality. In a painting acquired from the exhibition by the National Gallery of Victoria, Oedipus, Philpot's strangely new violence scantily clad eight of his figure. For the noble features of his handsome young german friend, Cal Hans Muler. The primitive looking features, and massive petrified wings of the sphinx in this painting contains strong echos of the controversial guardian spirit had carved in 1908 to 1912. For Oscar Wilde's tomb in the Its powerful grip on the painting's Oedipus figure, surely a cipher for the artist's libido, encapsulates struggle at this time with both his sexuality and the modernist espree that he had moved to Paris in 1931 to confront and assimilate. Going Picasso then in 1932, if one held views similar to those expressed by Thomas Craven, was in conservative quarters arguably the artistic equivalent of coming out sexually today. Suddenly Philpott's art no longer looked masculine and reassuringly old master-ish but now seemed feminized even emasculated to use Craven's term. When reviewing this 1932 exhibition in the connoisseur, F Gordon Roe lamented that the artist had virtually abandoned that fine scholarly and richly competent performance which placed him in the front rank of contemporary British painters. Was this actually code for Philpot has become sexually degenerate, as conservative society still considered homosexuals to be at that time. What do you think? 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