In 1970s New York City, the abandoned piers of the Hudson River became a site for extraordinary works of art and a popular place for nude sunbathing and anonymous sex. Jonathan Weinberg’s provocative book—part art history, part memoir—weaves interviews, documentary photographs, literary texts, artworks, and film stills to show how avant-garde practices competed and mingled with queer identities along the Manhattan waterfront.
Artists as varied as Vito Acconci, Alvin Baltrop, Shelley Seccombe, and David Wojnarowicz made work in and about the fire-ravaged structures that only twenty years before had been at the center of the world’s busiest shipping port. At the same time, the fight for the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, spurred by the 1969 Stonewall riots, was dramatically transforming the cultural and social landscape of New York City. Gay men suddenly felt free to sunbathe on the piers naked, cruise, and have sex in public. While artists collaborated to transform the buildings of Pier 34 into makeshift art studios and exhibition spaces, gay men were converting Pier 46 into what Delmas Howe calls an “arena for sexual theater.”
Featuring one hundred exemplary works from the era and drawing from a rich variety of source material, interviews, and Weinberg’s personal experience, Pier Groups breaks new ground to look at the relationship of avant-garde art to resistant subcultures and radical sexuality.

Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront

Arts & Photography

Weinberg, Jonathan

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

Freud wrote that the artist “desires to win honor, power, wealth, fame, and the love of women.” In this engrossing book, Jonathan Weinberg investigates how an artist’s ambition interacts with his or her art, how wealth and celebrity play a role in the artistic process. He shows that anxiety about the relationship of an artwork to identity and the corrupting influence of fame plague modern artists of all genders and sexual orientations. Weinberg begins by discussing Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother in terms of maternal metaphors for painting. He then looks at the familial relationships forged by artists like Jackson Pollock and Sally Mann with their imagined tradition. He next focuses on the role of love in photographs by Alfred Stieglitz as well as Georgia O’Keeffe’s attempts to find autonomy from her partner Stieglitz. Weinberg also reveals that artistic fame is usually a matter of competition, and he examines the impulse of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol to work together. The book concludes with a rumination on the NAMES Project Quilt and the problem of what becomes of those who die in obscurity.

Ambition and Love in Modern American Art

Yale University Press

Tracing Robert Bechtle's career from his earliest paintings of the 1960s to the present day, this is the definitive book on one of the founders and foremost practitioners of American Photorealism. Created in close collaboration with the artist, Robert Bechtle will accompany the distinguished painter's first retrospective exhibition. Lavish plates feature reproductions of approximately ninety of Bechtle's most significant artworks, from large-scale oil paintings to intimate watercolors and drawings. These magnificent illustrations portray the range of the San Francisco-based painter's iconic imagery of California—the rows of palm trees, stucco houses, and the ubiquitous automobiles that spurred suburban expansion—as well as his lesser-known but equally compelling family scenes and stark interiors. Bechtle's preference for wide, empty spaces; his flat, sun-bleached palette; and his detached mode of recording random details impart a singular sense of alienation to his subjects. His deadpan paintings capture the essence of the postwar American experience, in which California often serves as the testing ground for the realization of national dreams.

Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective

Ray, Charles

Bishop, Janet

Auping, Michæl

University of California Press

This book is a survey of how American artists, particularly male artists, have portrayed the male body for the past two centuries. Beginning with the academic-style painting of Thomas Eakins, through the abstraction of the American avant-garde (Marsden Hartley) during the onset of modernism, to the foucs on the muscular body in the mid-twentieth century (Hugo Gellert, Thomas Pollack Anshutz, Richmond Barthe) and into the homosexual civil rights movement of the late 1960s (Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Arthur Tress) and beyond (Keith Haring, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Bruce Weber), Weinberg's engaging text highlights particular artists while paying close attention to the artistic and cultural contexts in which they worked. Sexy, beautiful, edgy, and thought provoking, this important book is a must-have for every art-book collection as well as every gay person's coffee table.

Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art

Harry N. Abrams

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Books by Weinberg, Jonathan