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2 Sailors Urinating (?) by Charles Demuth circa 1930, watercolor
Xmas on the High Seas- Postcard early 20th century
“Like pears closely packed, the crowded crew mutually decay through close contact…Still more, from this same close confinement- so far as it affects the common sailors- arise other evils, so direful that they will hardly bear even so much as an allusion. What too many seamen are when ashore is very well known; but what some them become when completely cut off from shore indulgences can hardly be imagined by landsmen. The sins for which the cities of the plain were overthrown still linger in some of these wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep.”-White Jacket, Herman Melville, 1850
Dancing Sailors by Charles Demuth circa 1918 watercolor
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Distinguished Air by Charles Demuth 1930 watercolor
An intersection of avant-garde art and rough trade.
Two attractive, handsome young men pose for the camera either before or after a casual game of baseball. It is the 1920’s or 1930’s. I’m not sure. The setting is perhaps a small town, a park in a residential area. Private homes and trees are in the background of the photograph.
The two men stand close together with their arms around one another in a gesture of intimacy. There is an ease to their embrace. The man on the left wears a hat and has a baseball glove on his left hand. The man on the right holds a baseball in his right hand. They wear the clothes of their time and place. They stare out from the past at me the viewer…
Read the rest of the blog post here: http://www.thegreatwithin.org/2009/07/notes-on-photograph.html
Don’t drop the soap…
Ivory soap ad circa 1910
Socrates and Alcibiades- illustration by Édouard-Henri Avril in De Figuris Veneris by Frederich Carl Forberg, first published in 1824. This illustration is from the 1906 French edition.
Perhaps the spewing fountain in the background is a displacement of the ejaculation which is to come…
Three Sailors by Charles Demuth 1917
Platonic Lament by Aubrey Beardsley 1894. Another drawing for Wilde’s Salome.
