Perfect Male Bodies: Racialised Hierarchies, Whiteness and Neoclassical Embodiment in Duncan Grant’s Erotic Drawings

During the 1940s and 1950s, the British modernist artist Duncan Grant created a private collection of over 422 erotic drawings, only made public in 2020 when these works were donated to Charleston Trust. This paper focuses on drawings within this collection which construct an idealised Gay male body through references to Ancient Greece. These references are established both through allusions to classical mythology and physical culture, and the depiction of the figures’ bodies themselves as statuesque, lean, muscular and white.

Grant’s use of neoclassical embodiment is part of an artistic tradition in which white Gay artists and intellectuals from the nineteenth century onwards constructed themselves and their work in relation to a nostalgic ideal of Ancient Greek homosexuality. This Queer genealogy sits uncomfortably alongside a similar idealisation of neoclassical male bodies both within the British Empire and even the fascist aesthetics of the Nazis. Both imperial and fascist logics constructed a racialised, muscular body ideal which white Britons and Germans were intended to aspire towards through locating the origins of Western culture in a “white-washed” projection of Ancient Greece. Constructing themselves in relation to classical homosexuality was a means through which intellectuals such as John Addington Symonds articulated a Gay subjectivity that conformed to dominant masculine ideals in all but sexual object choice.

Grant’s work serves as a lens to interrogate how references to Ancient Greek embodiment in Gay art, writing and history have reified assumptions about the idealised male body as white, thin, muscular and able bodied. They reveal how, despite positioning themselves in opposition to white supremacy, patriarchy, empire and fascism, Queer politics and art can end up reinforcing their internal logics by reproducing contemporary ideals of neoclassical masculinity.

Image credit: © Estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2024