Untitled (Erotic Illustration for Mandate Magazine), ca. 1980s.

Ink and watercolor on paper vellum, mounted on bristol board.

Signed in red ink on the lower right, "RWR".

16 1/2 x 14 in. (42 x 35.5 cm.)

Notes:

Alongside his commercial work in mainstream fashion illustration, Robert W. Richards developed a substantial body of homoerotic art. His drawings appeared in many of the leading American gay-interest publications of the 1970s and 1980s including Mandate, The Advocate, Honcho, Playguy, Torso, Blueboy, and Stallion. Richards worked as correspondent for Manshots, an international review specializing in gay pornography, where he reporting on prominent performers and filmmakers. Many of his sketches from this time, some produced on the sets of adult films directed by figures such as Joe Gage, were the subject of the exhibition Gods of Erotica at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in 2003.

Richards' approach to the male figure departed from the heavily muscled beefcake ideal that dominated much early contemporary gay visual culture. In a 2014 interview, he described his preference for elongated, dancer-like physiques: “I like dancers’ bodies: long limbs, long muscles, as opposed to that scrunched-up look with short little muscley arms. It’s not my aesthetic.” [1]

Combined with his fashion background, Richard’s skill for rendering clothing, gesture, and anatomy, became a defining characteristic of his erotic body of work. Richards primarily worked in Prismacolor pencil, charcoal and watercolors, with a preference of drawing from live models rather than photographic references.

Richards began exhibiting professionally in 1983 alongside fellow fashion illustrator and erotic artist Richard Rosenfeld at the Basement Gallery, then directed by Charles Leslie. Richards curated a Peter Berlin retrospective in 2006 and Stroke: From Under the Mattress to the Museum at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in 2014, an exhibition showcasing the artistic significance of illustrations published in historic gay magazines. Stroke subsequently travelled to the GLBT Historical Society Museum in San Francisco in 2016.

[1] Cameron Keady, interview with Robert W. Richards, “Robert W. Richards: Dreamboys,” Gayletter, no. 1 (October 2014)
https://gayletter.com/robert-w-richards-dreamboys/

Nothing adverse to note.

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