Grouping of Three (3) Works by Sam Steward.

Ink on paper vellum (i & ii); Graphite transferred on paper (iii). 

Grouping of two (2) preparatory drawings and one (1) transfer from a Sam Steward portfolio. Includes the following drawings:

i. Untitled (Orgy I). 10 1/4 x 12 1/2 in (26.1 x 31.6 cm).

ii. Untitled (Orgy II). 10 1/4 x 12 1/2 in (26.1 x 31.6 cm).

iii. Untitled (Impression of an Orgy Scene). 11 x 8 3/4 in (27.8 x 21.2 cm).

Notes:

Samuel Steward (1909 - 1993) was an American university professor, novelist, poet, tattoo artist, illustrator, and pornographer who is best remembered as a chronicler of 20th-century gay culture through his collaborations with the Kinsey Institute. Throughout his life, he produced a substantial body of erotic art and literature documenting queer sexuality and BDSM subcultures in the United States.

Steward’s visual art is often overshadowed by his reputation as a sexual renegade and chronicler of 20th-century gay life. Working primarily with homoerotic themes, he was a prolific illustrator who often signed his artwork as Philip (von Chicago) in homage to his pen name as a novelist. Through a commercial arrangement with Thor Enterprises, his homoerotic drawings were marketed to a national audience through advertisements in Physique Pictorial.

After taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago under the mentorship of Polish-American artist Salcia Bahnc, Steward developed what his biographer Justin Spring described as “a natural flair for line illustration” indebted to the example of Jean Cocteau. In Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, Spring further elaborates: 

“He simultaneously took up painting, clay modelling, and various other media, in each case working almost exclusively with the male nude as his subject. Over the next five years he would create murals, oil paintings, watercolors, scratchboard illustrations, incised metalwork, glass etchings, small clay sculptures, painted screens, and painted lampshades, all of them featuring homoerotic themes… He also experimented with “small tempera portrait drawings with semen as a binder instead of egg white, the fluid being furnished by the subject of the drawings,” thereby creating macabre souvenirs of specific dalliances with men he found particularly attractive.” [1]

As a skid row tattooist and gay man in Chicago, his chosen subjects reflect his taste for illustrating soldiers, sailors, leatherfolk, rough trade, and other embodiments of rugged masculinity. Published in 2010 in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, An Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward collects a substantial body of Steward’s homoerotic artwork contributing to a broader reassessment of his significance as a visual artist.

[1] Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 101. 

Fraying and tears along edges of (i) & (ii); Horizontal fold across center and along paper edges of (iii).

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