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Wilhelm Iwan Friederich August Freiherr[2] von Gloeden (September 16, 1856 – February 16, 1931) was a German photographer who worked mainly in Italy. He is mostly known for his pastoral nude studies of Sicilian boys, which usually featured props such as wreaths or amphoras, suggesting a setting in the Greece or Italy of antiquity. From a modern standpoint, his work is commendable due to his controlled use of lighting as well as the often elegant poses of his models. His innovations include the use of photographic filters and special body makeup (a mixture of milk, olive oil, and glycerin) to disguise skin blemishes. His work, both landscapes and nudes, drew wealthy tourists to Sicily, particularly gay men uncomfortable in northern Europe, and changed the history of Taormina.

Freiherr

Wilhelm von Gloeden
Wilhelm von Gloeden in 1891
Born(1856-09-16)September 16, 1856[1]
Wismar, Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin
DiedFebruary 16, 1931(1931-02-16) (aged 74)
Taormina, Sicily, Kingdom of Italy
NationalityGerman
Known forPhotography
Notable workCaino
Hypnos
Patron(s)Oscar Wilde
Friedrich Alfred Krupp
Richard Strauss
Wilhelm II

Early life


Wilhelm von Gloeden's background is something of a mystery. Although Gloeden alleged he was a minor German aristocrat from Mecklenburg, the heirs of the baronial branch of the Gloeden family have always insisted that no such person existed in their family records and that his claim to a barony was without warrant and the barony became extinct in 1885 with the death of Baron Falko von Gloeden.[citation needed] Both claims currently do not have any documents to verify.

He was the son of head forester Carl Hermann von Gloeden (1820–1862) and his wife Charlotte Maassen (1824–1901; from 1864 Charlotte von Hammerstein). [citation needed]. His grandfather, Iwan von Glöden († 1825), was an officer who had served in Hamburg during the wars of liberation against Napoleon. His mother, Charlotte, née Maaßen, had previously been married to Johann Magnus Wilhelm Raabe († 1848). The law professor Friedrich Maassen and the Parchim mayor August Dreschler [de] were his uncles on his mother's side; the lawyer and conservative publicist Iwan von Gloeden was a uncle on his father's side. On October 10, 1856, Wilhelm von Gloeden was baptized in the church of Blankenhagen as a Protestant.[3]

After the death of his father, his mother married for a third time, to Wilhelm Joachim von Hammerstein in 1864. Hammerstein (1838-1904) had been mentored by Carl Hermann von Gloeden, and his forestry career led to him becoming politician of the German Conservative Party and editor-in-chief of the Kreuzzeitung. Von Gloeden described the relationship with his stepfather as not good. The most important family member from his point of view was his half-sister Sophie Raabe from his mother's first marriage, who accompanied him for years in Sicily.

After studying art history in Rostock (1876), Gloeden studied painting under Karl Gehrts [de] at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School (1876–77) until he was forced by lung disease (apparently tuberculosis) to interrupt his studies for a year, convalescing at a sanatorium in the mountain resort of Görbersdorf, now known as Sokołowsko in Poland.


Taormina


See also: History of Taormina

In a search for health, he travelled to Italy (1877–78), first staying in Naples and visiting Capri before moving on to Taormina in Sicily.[4] He lodged at the Hotel Vittoria before buying a house near San Domenico Convent (Chiesa di Sant'Agata (Taormina) [it]).[5] Apart from the period 1915–18, during the First World War, when he was forced to leave Italy to avoid internment as an enemy alien, he remained in Taormina until his death in 1931. Gregory Woods, scholar of LGBT studies, credited von Gloeden with transformative powers: "Largely as a consequence of his photographs' popularity, the town became a tourist resort with good hotels."[6] Edward Chaney, an expert on the evolution of the Grand Tour and of Anglo-Italian cultural relations, described the town as attracting "male refugees from more repressive climates".[7]

The mayor of the town in 1872–1882 was the German landscape painter Otto Geleng [de] (1843–1939), who had moved there in 1863. Through him, Gloeden became acquainted with the local inhabitants. He set up his photographic studio at first as a hobby and was exhibiting his work internationally by 1893 (London), including Cairo (1897), Berlin (1898–99, including a solo exhibition), Philadelphia (1902), Budapest & Marseilles (1903), Nice (1903 & 1905), Riga (1905), Dresden (1909) and Rome (World Fair 1911). His well-known study of two young boys clinging to an Ionic column was published in The Studio (London) in June 1893 (above a nude study by Baron Corvo of Cecil Castle, cousin of Charles Kains Jackson), which brought his work to the notice of a wider public.[8][9]

In 1895, when his family's fortune was lost through the "Hammerstein affair", Gloeden received as a gift from his friend and patron the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a large-format plate camera. Soon his work brought him visitors from Europe, including royalty, industrialists, artists, and writers (Oscar Wilde visited in December 1897). In 1930, Gloeden ceased work as a photographer and sold his house on the Piazza San Domenico in return for an annuity and residence rights.[citation needed]

Gloeden's signature on a print
Gloeden's signature on a print

Gloeden scrupulously shared the proceeds of his sales with his models. The names of some of them are known: Pasquale Stracuzzi (known as "Pasqualino"); Vincenzo Lupicino (known as "Virgilio" & seen in the "Boy with Flying Fish" photographs); Peppino Caifasso or Carafasso (who posed as "Ahmed"); Pietro Caspano or Capanu; Nicola Scilio, also spelt Sciglio; Giuseppe De Cristoforo; and Maria Intelisano (niece of the parish priest of nearby Castelmola).[10]

His cousin Guglielmo Plüschow (1852–1930), also a photographer of nudes, helped von Gloeden get more familiar with the technical side of photography (until then von Gloeden had not been a hobby photographer). Other important teachers of von Gloeden were local photographer Giovanni Crupi (1859–1925) in the Via Teatro Greco and the pharmacist/photographer Giuseppe Bruno (1836–1904) in the Corso.


Works


Boy disguised as an odalisque in Gloeden's garden in Taormina. The reverse bears the stamp of Gloeden's heir, Pancrazio Buciunì, and the date: May 16, 1914
Boy disguised as an odalisque in Gloeden's garden in Taormina. The reverse bears the stamp of Gloeden's heir, Pancrazio Buciunì, and the date: May 16, 1914
Burial Place of von Gloeden in Taormina
Burial Place of von Gloeden in Taormina

While today Gloeden is mainly known for his nudes, and is considered "one of the founders of modern homosexual iconography",[11] in his lifetime he was also famous for his landscape photography that helped popularize tourism to Italy. In addition, he documented damage from the 1908 Messina earthquake, which may explain why the locals mostly approved of his work.[citation needed]

The majority of Gloeden's pictures were made before the First World War, in the years from 1890 to 1910. During the war, he had to leave Italy. After returning in 1918, he photographed very little but continued to make new prints from his voluminous archives. In total, he took over 3000 images (and possibly up to 7000), which after his death were left to one of his models, Pancrazio Buciunì (also spelled Bucini; his dates sometimes given as c. 1864 – c. 1951 but probably should be 1879–1963), known as Il Moro (or U Moru)[12] for his North African looks. Il Moro had been Gloeden's lover since the age of 14 when he had first joined his household. In 1933, some 1,000 glass negatives from Gloeden's collection (inherited by Buciuni) and 2,000 prints were confiscated by Benito Mussolini's Fascist police under the allegation that they constituted pornography, and were destroyed; another 1,000 negatives were destroyed in 1936, but Buciuni was tried and cleared at a court in Messina (1939–1941) of disseminating pornographic images. Most of the surviving pictures (negatives and prints) are now in the Fratelli Alinari photographic archive in Florence (which in 1999 bought 878 glass negatives and 956 vintage prints formerly belonging to Buciuni to add to its existing collection of 106 prints)[13] and further prints (which fetch hundreds of pounds at auction) are in private collections or held by public institutions such as the Civico Archivo Fotographico in Milan.


Attitudes towards his work during his lifetime and later


Gloeden generally made several different kinds of photographs. The ones that garnered the most widespread attention in Europe and overseas were usually relatively chaste studies of peasants, shepherds, fisherman, etc., featured in clothing like togas or Sicilian traditional costume, and which generally downplayed their homoerotic implications. He also photographed landscapes and some studies were of, or included, women. His models were usually posed either at his house, among the local ancient ruins, or on Monte Ziretto (c. 600 metres), located two kilometres to the north of Taormina and famous in antiquity for its quarries of red marble. He wrote in 1898: "The Greek forms appealed to me, as did the bronze-hued descendants of the ancient Hellenes, and I attempted to resurrect the old, classic life in pictures...The models usually remained merry and cheerful, lightly clad and at ease in the open air, striding forward to the accompaniment of flutes and animated chatter. More than a few greatly enjoyed the work and anxiously awaited the moment when I would show them the finished picture."[14]

More explicit photos in which boys aged between about 10 and 20, and occasionally older men, were nude (sometimes with prominent genitalia) and which, because of eye contact or physical contact were more sexually suggestive, were traded "under the counter" and among close friends of the photographer, but "as far as is known, Gloeden's archive contained neither pornographic nor erotically lascivious motifs".[15]


Other similar photographers at the time


Gloeden's cousin Guglielmo Plüschow also photographed male nudes, working in Rome. Plüschow was already a firmly established photographer when Gloeden started doing photographs of his own in the early 1890s. It is even speculated that Gloeden was taught the (then difficult) art of photography by Plüschow. However, Gloeden soon eclipsed Plüschow, and later works by Plüschow often were erroneously attributed to Gloeden. From an artistic standpoint, Plüschow's work is somewhat inferior to Gloeden's as his lighting is often too harsh and the poses of his models look quite stilted.

Up until 1907, Plüschow's assistant Vincenzo Galdi secretly made work which he tried to pass off as Plüschow's own. However, Galdi's pictures lack elegance, often feature females, and generally tend to border on the pornographic.[citation needed]




Major exhibitions



References


  1. Date in Schickedanz 1987, p. 140; Pohlmann 1987, pp. 9 & 156; Pohlmann 1998, p. 93; Natter & Weiermair 2001, p. 107; Zannier 2008, p. 168.
  2. Regarding personal names: Freiherr is a former title (translated as Baron). In Germany since 1919, it forms part of family names. The feminine forms are Freifrau and Freiin.
  3. Köhler, Joachim (January 2002). Zarathustra's Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. ISBN 0300092784.
  4. Peyrefitte, Roger (2008). Wilhelm Von Gloeden (in French). TEXTES GAIS. p. 27. ISBN 978-2914679305.
  5. Population of Taormina in 1881 Census 3218; in 1911 4832. Giuseppe Restifo: Tourism and the History of Taormina 1750–1950 (2001)
  6. Woods, Gregory (2016). Homintern : how gay culture liberated the modern world. New Haven. p. 225. ISBN 978-0300218039.
  7. Chaney, Edward (1998). The evolution of the grand tour : Anglo-Italian cultural relations since the Renaissance. London: Frank Cass. pp. 38–40. ISBN 9780714644745.
  8. Facsimile of page in Pohlmann 1987, p. 42.
  9. Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas Christopher Read (2011) OUP. ISBN 9780199830442
  10. Restifo 2001 p. 166 n. 59 citing Pietro Nicolosi I baroni di Taormina (Palermo, 1959, pp. 32–48) & D. Papale: Taormina segreta. La belle Epoque 1876–1914 (Messina, 1995, p.58); see also Guy Hocquenghem Race D'Ep (1979)
  11. Frankel, Nicholas (2017). Oscar Wilde : the unrepentant years. Cambridge, Massachusetts. p. 166. ISBN 978-0674737945.
  12. Restifo 2001, p. 126
  13. See The von Gloeden Archive in the Fratelli Alinari Museum Collections by Monica Maffioli in the 2008 exhibition catalog listed below.
  14. Quoted in Pohlmann 1998, p. 14 from Gloeden's article "Kunst in der Photographie" Photographische Mitteilungen, No. 36 (1898), p. 4.
  15. Pohlmann 1998, p. 16.
  16. Pohlmann 1987, p. 61 n. 79.
  17. The Times January 8, 1909.
  18. "Wilhelm von Gloeden: "... auch ich in Arkadien"" (in German). Stadt Memmingen. Retrieved April 2, 2010.

Further reading




Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wilhelm von Gloeden.

На других языках

[de] Wilhelm von Gloeden

Wilhelm Iwan Friederich August von Gloeden (* 18. September 1856 in Volkshagen; † 16. Februar 1931 in Taormina) war ein deutscher Fotograf, der hauptsächlich in Sizilien arbeitete. Er gilt als einer der Pioniere künstlerischer Aktfotografie. Berühmt wurde er durch seine Akte sizilianischer Knaben mit antikisierenden Requisiten und Kostümen, die eine arkadische Antike suggerieren. Et in Arcadia ego („Auch ich war in Arkadien“) war zu Lebzeiten von Gloeden ein geflügeltes Wort und gab im 21. Jahrhundert einer Ausstellung über sein Werk den Namen.
- [en] Wilhelm von Gloeden

[ru] Глёден, Вильгельм фон

Барон Вильгельм фон Глёден (нем. Wilhelm von Gloeden; 16 сентября 1856 (1856-09-16), замок Фольксхаген близ Висмара — 16 февраля 1931, Таормина) — немецкий фотограф, живший и работавший в Италии. Один из крупнейших мастеров изображения мужской наготы, родоначальник гомосексуальной фотографии[3], предшественник перформанса[4].


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