The Art of Looking: The Life and Treasures of Collector Charles Leslie

Lovely interesting book. I enjoyed it very much. I am a great fan of the museum and nice to see where and how it all came about.

Great coffee table book - text is a wonderful read of Charles Leslie's journey as a gay man in the fifties to the turn of the 21st century.

Fascinating. Very interesting information about a life I should have known about but didn't.

Great publication of amazing art.

Bruno Gmünder has published a very elegant homage to the life and work of Charles Leslie, one of the key figures in the current serious interest in gay art that is finding acceptance not only with the populace but also with art museums, art magazines, books, and films. As is one of the fathers of modern New York's SoHo neighborhood, he has for many years collected art by gay artists and art with gay themes and the selection in this book is astonishingly large and representative. Charles and his partner Fritz Lohman are the founders of the first museum for gay and lesbian art in the world.To pull this biography and catalogue together Bruno Gmünder turned to the German-Irish publicist Dr. Kevin Clarke whose background includes degrees in musicology and literature from Freie Universitat Berlin and the University of Milan following which he served as a journalist for the newspaper `Der Tagesspiegel' and the magazines `Bunte' and `Playboy,' as well writing for the opera magazine "Orpheus" and "De Groene Amsterdammer" from the Netherlands. His PhD thesis was on Emmerich Kalman and the Transatlantic Operetta 1928-1932. Clarke founded the Operetta Research Center Amsterdam of which he is the director. He teaches at the Conservatory of Tilburg and was curator of the 2010 exhibition Erik Charell and the Homosexuality of Operetta at the Schwule Museum Berlin. From 2011-2013 he was editor-in-chief of the German magazine `Manner.' His books include GLITTER AND BE GAY, THE WHITE HORSE INN, BEARDS: AN UNSHAVEN HISTORY and PORN: FROM ANDY WARHOL TO X-TUBE and have won awards and popularity among art aficionados. THE ART OF LOOKING is precisely that, as one current television series `LOOKING' demonstrates - a survey both in real time and in memories and in collections of memorabilia and sculpture, painting, drawing, cartoons, and photography that mimics the roving eye of the man on the street.The design of the book is impressive, the collection of works inclusive, and the history the book traces make it one of the more important volumes of gender studies available today. Including interviews with Charles Leslie adds enormously to the pleasure of the survey the book takes on, and when coupled with the informed art history and social history offered by Dr. Clarke the result is an exceptionally interesting tome. Grady Harp, May 15

Stunning book. I'm so excited my picture of Charles is in it.

Published in conjunction with the Leslie+Lohmann Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, this sumptuous coffee-table book is a celebration of the life and work of one of the museum's two American founders, Charles Leslie. Perhaps to set a tone of unabashed frankness, one which the museum is criticised for by the Puritans and praised for by the rest of us, the book opens with a 1963 close-up photograph of a blue penis: you know what you're in for from the start. The text opens with an essay by Elisabeth Raether pointing out that while female nudity is the standard, the male nude has struggled to establish itself in the art world, despite the inspiration of Classical times, and she has some interesting ideas about why. Straight male viewers of the male nude, she says, are discomforted by it, fearing that if they find it attractive their masculinity is challenged: fear of the male nude takes over. This helps to explain why the work of Leslie and his partner Fritz was so pioneering, why their museum - and earlier their galleries - are so rare in the art world and so needed (though less so now that the male nude has come out of the shadows and is ubiquitous in books, commercials, films, pornography, as well as in art). The Preface also includes short appreciative essays by well-known critics and fans of Leslie, James Saslow, Peter Weiermair and Jonathan D. Katz. The rest of the text takes us through the biography of Charles Leslie, from 1933 to the present day, through the by now familiar phases of gay history in the USA - pre- and post Stonewall, the military, the emergence of gay liberation, sexual promiscuity on an industrial scale before the onset of AIDS, and into the present era. During this time Leslie collected homoerotic art wherever he could find it, on a shoe-string budget, having to keep it hidden for fear of arrest; and this collecting habit grew with the help of Fritz Lohmann into a lifelong career. He and Fritz were the first to set up an art gallery dedicated to the male nude, to gay sex and to gay art, in defiance of all the established art galleries and museums who were afraid to feature the male nude (and still are to this day). It flourished, if with a limited clientele, until AIDS closed it down, only to be re-opened with ever greater success and a wider appeal later. Today, the museum's extensive collection of male art can be viewed on-line. Leslie's life as a gay man reads like the history of gay liberation in miniature, and in this respect too his life is worth the retelling. On every glossy page of this handsome book there are artworks, many very graphic and raunchy as one would expect in such a survey, and photographs, some of a historical nature, some of the partners' extraordinary apartment which is stuffed full of homoerotic delights. It's a gorgeous book that satisfies on many levels. What I would like to see now is a companion volume featuring a selection of the works in the museum - seeing them on-line is always second best for book lovers like me.

thank you, it's a great book.