Hiding the Queer Identity in Painting: The case of the Greek painter Diamantis Diamantopoulos
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13131/unipi/ktbj-vg20Keywords:
social, installation, class, transformationAbstract
Artists are often stereotyped as eccentric individuals with unique personalities and attitudes. Therefore, while in traditionalist Greek society the LGBT community has long experienced oppression or marginalization, homosexual male artists were comparatively more allowed to deviate from social norms. This led Greek homosexual artists to hide their sexual orientation in their social life while expressing it covertly or, in a few cases, explicitly, in their art.
This paper studies the expression of sexual identity in the artworks of the Greek painter, Diamantis Diamantopoulos (1914-1995). In many of his pictures – mostly anthropocentric in subjects, focusing on the male human body – he hinted at his homosexuality more or less covertly. I aim to examine these works in correlation with issues of subjectivity and otherness, in the context of the artist’s lived experiences and social status. My research is based on Erving Goffman’s theory about social roles, and Didier Eribon’s books on sexual and class identity.
References
Cole, Brendan, 2010, ‘Jean Delville and the Belgian Avant-Garde: Anti-Materialist Polemics for ‘un art annonciateur des spiritualités futures’, in Rosina Neginsky (ed.), Symbolism. Its Origins and Its Consequences, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle.
Cole, Brendan, 2015, Jean Delville, Art between Nature and the Absolute, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle.
Dekeukeleire, Thijs, 2020, ‘The Perception of Men’s Intimacy in the Fin de Siècle: A Consideration via Delville’s The School of Plato’, in Art History, Volume 43, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages 154–175, Association for Art History, Oxford University Press.
Diamantopoulou E., 2018, Outside the family: Communicating with the Art of the Stranger, Epicentro, Athens.
Eribon D., 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, Duke University Press, Durham U.S.A, Eng. tr. M. Lucey 2004.
Eribon D., 2019, Returning to Reims, Eng. tr. M. Lucey, Penguin, London; or. ed. 2009, Retour à Reims, Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris.
Exhibition Catalogue: Masculin / Masculin. L’homme nu dans l’art de 1800 à nos jours, 2013, Flammarion, Paris.
Foucault M. 1966, Les mots et les choses, Gallimard, Paris.
Foucault, Michel, 1984, “Des espaces autres”, Conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967, in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n. 5.
Goffman E., 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre.
Goffman E., 1963, Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Simon & Schuster, New York.
Halperlin M. D., 1989, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, Routledge, New York.
Hartnoll, P. 1968, The theater - A Concise History of the Theatre, Harry N. Abrams New York.
Kottides, A., 1993, Modernism and Tradition in Greek Art of the Interwar Period, University Studio Press Thessaloniki.
Kounenaki P., 2005, Diamantopoulos, Adam, Athens.
Louis E., 2020, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, Points, Paris.
Ouranis K., 1953, Poems, Estia, Athens.
Panofsky, 1939, Studies in Iconology, Oxford University Press.
Ripa C., 1613, Iconologia, ouero, Descrittione di diuerse imagini cauate dall’antichità, & di propria inuentione https://archive.org/details/iconologiaouerod00ripa/page/350/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater accessed on 3-9-2023.
Sarantakos N. 16-6-2014, ‘’A Manos Xatzidakis’ text and his campaign against avrianism’’ in The words have their own history https://sarantakos.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/hatzidakis/ accessed on 3-9-2023.
Stefanidis M., 2021, The body drama – Diamantis Diamantopoulos, Aesthetics and Ideology of an epoch, University Studio Press, Athens.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Evaguelia Diamantopoulou
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Whatever is an open access journal, which means that all articles are available on the Internet to all users immediately upon publication. Our articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Licence 4.0 by-nc, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial.
Authors hold copyright without restrictions. Also, authors retain publishing rights on their articles; however, it is recommended to keep track of the CC-BY-NC license and to quote original publication.
