Hide/Seek

Club members will greatly enjoy the exhibition Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery (until February 13, 2011). It includes portraits of several of the authors we’ve read over the years as well as paintings and painters well known to gay men. The theme of the exhibition is how people occupying the “position of influential marginality in modern society” (apparently this includes such painters as John Singer Sargent) “crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits,” forming a “powerful artistic and cultural legacy that has been hidden in plain sight for more than a century.” This is from the Gallery’s brochure. Can’t say I got all that, or even any of it, from my first viewing, but I’m definitely going back for more and hope to learn. There was a review in the New York Times on Saturday, and Frank Rich took on the controversy the exhibition has spawned in today’s paper.