Wilhelm von Gloeden
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Baron Wilhelm 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. Innovative use of photographic filters and special body makeup contribute to the artistic perfection of his works.
Famous in his own day, his work was subsequently eclipsed for close to a century, only to re-emerge in recent times as "the most important gay visual artist of the pre–World War I era" according to Thomas Waugh.
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Biography
Although von Gloeden claimed to be a minor German aristocrat from Mecklenburg, the von Gloeden family and its heirs have always insisted that no such person existed in their family records and his claim to The Barony von Gloeden was without warrant; the barony became extinct in 1885 with the death of Baron Falko von Gloeden. Wilhelm von Gloeden was the son of head forester (Forstmeister) Carl Hermann von Gloeden (1820–1862) and his wife Charlotte née Maassen (1824–1901; from 1864 von Hammerstein). After studying art history in Rostock (1876) he studied painting under Carl Gehrts at the Kunstakademie in Weimar (1876–77) until he was forced by lung disease (apparently tuberculosis) to interrupt his schooling for a year, convalescing at a sanatorium in the Baltic Sea resort of Gröbersdorf. In a search for health he travelled to Italy (1877–78), at first staying in Naples before moving on to Taormina in Sicily, lodging at the Hotel Vittoria before buying a house near San Domenico, where he remained until his death in 1931, apart from the period 1915-18 during World War I, when he was forced to leave Sicily to avoid incarceration as an undesirable alien. The mayor of Taormina 1872-82 was the German landscape painter Otto Geleng (1843–1939), who had moved there in 1863. Through him von Gloeden soon became acquainted with the local inhabitants. He set up his photographic studio in Taormina 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 of Cecil Castle by Baron Corvo), which brought his work to the notice of a wider public. In 1895, when the family fortune was lost through the "Hammerstein affair", he 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, writers (Oscar Wilde in December 1897) and artists.In 1930 von Gloeden ceased work as a photographer, selling his house on the Piazza S. Domenico in Taormina in return for an annuity & residence rights.
Von Gloeden was wealthy, and also scrupulously shared the proceeds of his sales with his models, providing a considerable economic boost in this comparatively poor region of Italy, which might explain why the homosexual aspects of his life and work were generally tolerated by the locals. 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 (or John) Crupi (1859–1925) in the Via Teatro Greco and the pharmacist/photographer Giuseppe Bruno (1836–1904) in the Corso.
Works
While today von Gloeden is mainly known for his nudes, in his time he was also famous for his landscape photography that helped popularize tourism to Italy. He also documented earthquake damage in Reggio Calabria & Messina in 1908. This may also explain why the locals mostly approved of his work.
The majority of von Gloeden's pictures were made before World War I in the period 1890-1910. During the war he had to leave Italy and after returning in 1918 he photographed very little but continued to make new prints from his voluminous archive. In total the Baron 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) for his North African looks. Il Moro had been von Gloeden's lover since the age of fourteen, when he had first joined the household of the Baron. In 1933 some 1000 glass negatives from von Gloeden's collection (inherited by Buciuni) and 2000 prints were confiscated by Benito Mussolini's Fascist police under the allegation that they constituted pornography and destroyed; another 1000 negatives were destroyed in 1936, although Buciuni was tried and cleared at a court in Messina (1939–41) 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 & 956 vintage prints formerly belonging to Buciuni to add to its collection of 106 prints already held) 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
Von 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 clothes like togas or Sicilian traditional costume and 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, or among the local ancient ruins, or on Monte Ziretto (c.600m.) located two kilometres to the north of Taormina and famous in antiquity for its quarries of red marble, where he had rented a country house. 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."
More explicit photos in which the boys aged between about ten and twenty 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 Baron, but "as far as is known, Gloeden's archive contained neither pornographic nor erotically lascivious motifs".
The popularity of his work especially in Germany, England, and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can possibly be attributed to three major reasons:
- The Classical and painterly themes in which his work wreathed itself served as a cultural "badge of protection" and the studies were often described in exhibition reviews as models for painters and were used by ethnologists to illustrate racial types.
- At that time male-male-love was unthinkable to many who saw his images.
- New printing technologies enabled the mass reproduction and sale of his work in postcard form from 1900 by reputable publishers.
Other similar photographers at the time
Von Gloeden's cousin, Guglielmo Plüschow, similarly photographed male nudes in Rome, Italy. From an artistic standpoint, Plüschow's work is somewhat inferior to von Gloeden's as the lighting in Plüschow's works is often too harsh and the poses of the models look quite stilted. Plüschow was already a firmly established photographer when von Gloeden started doing photographs of his own in the early 1890s. It is even speculated that von Gloeden was taught the (then difficult) art of photography by Plüschow himself. However, von Gloeden soon eclipsed Plüschow, and later works by Plüschow were frequently erroneously attributed to von Gloeden.
Up until 1907, his assistant Vincenzo Galdi secretly made work which he tried to pass off as von Plüschow's own. However, Galdi's pictures lack elegance, often also feature females and generally tend to border on the pornographic.
