Musée imaginaire (3)

 

Roma, Accademia di S. Luca. Putto (Raffaele)

 

Roma, Angelo del Monumento degli Stuardi, San Pietro

Edit. Brunner & C Como e Zurich, Stab. eliografico

Musée imaginaire (2)

Second post of this Musée imaginaire series (Imaginary Museum)

As explained before, I bought a private collection of postcards related to young male beauty, as displayed in European Museums, in European painting as well as in antique sculpture.

This collection mirrors a gaze and a taste, artistic, sensual, uranian at the same time...

I hope you will enjoy these pics...

They tell the same stories, although through different means, as von Gloeden's photographs...

 

Roma, Pinacoteca Capitolina, Martirio di S. Sebastiano (Guido Reni)

Musée du Louvre - Amour bandant (l'arc, bien sûr)

Musée imaginaire (1)

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to buy a lot of vintage postcards from a dealer on Ebay. These postcards shared a common feature: the depiction of young male beauty, in sculpture and painting, mostly in Western tradition, with a strong emphasis on Classical Antiquity.

It was an exquisitely chosen collection, with a great artistic taste, with an obvious sensitivity to the beauty of the young male body...

Who was this collector ? I don't know...

But this collection mirrors his personality, his tastes, his dreams, and perhaps his desires too...

In order to provide "Rêves Siciliens" with a new start, and just to say "thank you" to the small international follow up of my blog, I am planning to scan and to post this collection...

Perhaps to the set of original vintage postcards I bought, a few modern pics will be added...

They will mirror my own personality, tastes, dreams, and perhaps my desires too... Who knows...

But the core of this collection is the gaze an unknown man (or a woman ? why not) had on young male beauty...

I love the vintage patina of the postcards I will share with you...

These postcards were bought for personal collection, not for correspondance... No stamps, no adresses, no handwritten texts on the reverse side...

I am happy to share them with you... If you repost them, please, link to my blog...

 

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson

(1767-1824)

Le sommeil d'Endymion

Paris Musée du Louvre

(Editions des Musées nationaux, Paris, 1974)

Psiche riceve d'Amore il primo bacio - Gérard, Louvre, Parigi

Eliocromia Zacchetti e C. - Piazza Risorgimento 4 - Milano IV (no date)

A new start for Rêves Siciliens ?

80 followers... 

And some nice comments...

And always visitors from all around the world...

Perhaps I should resume my postings ?

Still so many dreams, pictures and stories to share about Taormina and the enchanted world of Wilhelm von Gloeden...

The Male Nude (Exhibition at the Art Gallery "Au Bonheur du Jour, Paris)

Nus Masculins (Exposition à la Galerie "Au Bonheur du Jour" à Paris)

My dear Wilhelm...

"My dear Wilhelm,

Sorry for this so long pause in my posts, in my blog Rêves Siciliens... I spent the last two months in Taormina, I visited the Protestant cemetery and I put a few roses on your grave...

I have seen the end of the Sicilian spring, the beginning of the Sicilian summer, I have smelt the perfumes of so many flowers, I have seen the light and the colors, I felt the warmth and the cool evenings...

I spent hours dreaming at the scenic landscape where Mount Aetna caresses a blue sea..

And never I was tired looking at Taormina, at its walls and roofs, on the cliffs, against the mountain...

I feel I shared your gaze and your vision, I breathed the same air you did, a century ago, I had the same feeling to be in a land loved by the ancient gods of Greece and Rome, a land where beauty is everywhere, in the sky and in the sea, in the flowers and in the blossoming boys....

I spent to much time, dreaming about the landscape, dreaming about you, dreaming about your gorgeous models I love so much...

Dear Wilhelm, I am still on the terrace of my hotel, I am sipping tea... I hope you will join me... Please, tell Pasqualino, Il Moro, Luigi, Pietro, Domenico, the Faun and so many others of your models to join me...

They will be most welcome... It is impossible to stay in Taormina without inviting all the beautiful and young forever ghosts haunting this place...

Please join me...

Yours as always...

Butterfly"

Vintage prints

Blogs, books, .jpg files and modern reprints are fine....

But nothing replaces a vintage photographic print of von Gloeden, of von Plüschow, of Vincenzo Galdi, the sensual inventor of gay pornographic photographic art

There is this unique sepia color, and also the stamp of the photographer on the back, and sometimes the handwritten number of the photograph...

There is also the fact that a vintage photographic print is a unique artifact, whose tones and contrast are different from any other print...

And each vintage photograph has its own secrete story to tell you: who was its first buyer, through which private collections was it transmitted ?

There is a place in Paris, where a unique Art Gallery traces out and collects the most beautiful, the most sensual vintage prints of von Gloeden's photographs...

The Art Gallery "Au bonheur du jour", and Nicole Canet, its main creative force, are devoted to saving these vintage photographs as well as many other curiosa, paintings, drawings and erotica, mirroring the many ways to love and to be loved, in our human condition....

There is currently a unique exhibition of almost 60 vintage photographic prints of the masters of Italian nude male photography... All these vintage prints are for sale...

You should definitely visit Nicole Canet's Gallery

11 rue Chabanais, 75002 Paris

and you could visit too here...

website

Jardin secret

In my von Gloeden's photographs collection, I think this one is among the rarest, the most precious... I have never seen it in any modern Gloeden's books...

I love the purity of its structure... A wall, a tree, a jar, light and shade, and a teen boy...

I love the infinite grace of this young male body, its visible beauty as well as the way a part of it is hidden under a clothe... I love the curves, the inflections, the smoothness, the curly and tousled hairs... I love the profile of his face, the way his body is at the same time so relaxed and tensed, to keep the posture...

I love the set up of this photograph... It is in Taormina, in the late 90's of the XIXth century... It could be a scene from Greek antiquity, and this boy could be the listener of a Socrates' lesson of philosophy...

I love what is intemporal in this photograph... What it displays could speak and sing for viewers in Antiquity, in Renaissance, in XIXth century and today as well...

I love the way desire, longing, appeal, sensitiveness are staged within a border when one can look at, admire, dream about, but not touch...

I don't know the name of this ragazzo of Taormina, in the late XIXth century... But thanks to von Gloeden's photograph, he became immortal... and he is young for ever, even if he is now just dust in the soil of Taormina's cemetery...

If you repost this photograph of my collection, please link to my blog...

Butterfly

Taormina 1926

1926, Gloeden, Taormina. Five years before his death, Wilhelm von Gloeden signed this photograph. The buyer probably asked for this signature. He (or she ?) considered this photograph as a work of art, as a unique picture, as precious as a painting by a famous artist. And von Gloeden was willing to sign the prints of his photographs, in order to provide them with their uniqueness, with the special quality of a unique artifact.

Photography is a mechanical and an industrial art, allowing the reproduction of many copies of a single image, according to Walter Benjamin's famous statement. But a photograph is also a unique artifact, through the way it was printed, through its patina, through the chemical processes that fix light and shades in an unpredictable way.

This photograph is 86 years old. This blossoming boy is most likely ashes and dust in the Taormina's cemetery.

Through this photograph, however, this Taormina boy is young forever, he is a blossoming boy, as the flowers and leaves surrounding him.

I find in this photograph a Von Gloeden's trademark... a unique way to displaying the beauty of a young man and to concealing the focus of his mind, of his gaze, of his soul...

This photograph was conceived to inspire love and desire. In 2012, this photograph still inspires them. Love and desire.

But I don't know what I love and desire the most... The sensual display of an ephebe's body... Or the mystical focus of a gaze and a soul...