Mark Beard's Elegantly Homoerotic Paintings Often Begin With Weekly Sessions Sketching Nude Men
The multiple-home-owning artist paints in varied styles under pseudonyms, but he's best known for his work as "Bruce Sargeant" which brought a vintage sexy vibe to Abercrombie stores worldwide.
Hi, Caftaners! Hope you had a good Memorial Day Weekend. I want to thank all the new paid subscribers from the following week and I want again to thank Greg Grove, better known as 2000s porn legend Matthew Rush, for the very intense interview that I ran last week that has racked up thousands and thousands of views. More evidence that you Caftaners want to keep hearing the stories of these gay lives spent doing sex work, so I’ll aim to keep them coming. And if you ever have a good, spicy interview lead for me, drop me a line and tell me about it at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com.
This week’s interview concerns work that’s spicy, but in a kind of classy way. Some 30 years ago, when I was the twentysomething editor of the weekly NYC gay club/culture free rag HX (here’s its cofounder, Matthew Bank, telling me about its rise and fall a few years ago), I did a roundup of mid-90s queer artists, including Lyle Ashton-Harris, Deborah Kass, Pat Cronin, Tony Feher, Hugh Speers (who had just died of AIDS) and Mark Beard, then about 40…
…who was already quite successful as an artist, painting antique-looking beautiful men under the “nom de pinceau” (paintbrush) of Bruce Sargeant, who supposedly was a great-uncle of his who painted in the early 20th century…and whose work was meant to be a hybrid of the extremely homoerotic photographs of Bruce Weber…
…and the turn-of-the-century paintings of the great, likely closeted John Singer Sargent (he of “Madame X” fame).
Now take a look at some of the work of “Bruce Sargeant.” Can you see the mashup?
I’ve really loved Mark’s work for years. I remember how excited I was to see the massive-scale installation of his work at the midtown Manhattan flagship Abercrombie & Fitch store somewhere in the 2000s or 2010s. I love not just the obviosus hotness of his male figures but something about his use of light and shadow, his colors, his “stroke”—sorry, I’m not very art-savvy. It obviously reminds me of the work of Paul Cadmus…
…even though their styles are clearly distinct. And it also reminds me of the early 20th century commercial illustrations of J.C. Leyendecker…
Now 70, Beard lives with his longtime husband, the molecular biologist Jim Manfredi, between their four homes in Manhattan, upstate New York, Fire Island and Paris.
They seem to live a posh life, which it appears Beard has always lived, having grown up in a very wealthy, artistic horse- and land-owning Mormon family in Utah and spending summers with yet more family in Europe. On May 12, Beard, enjoying wine, talked to me for two hours over Zoom from his art-filled apartment in Paris’ sixth arrondissement. I felt very posh just talking to him, even sitting in my rent-stabilized walkup in Ridgewood, Queens.
I hope you enjoy the chat and the art—not to mention Mark’s Instagram, an endless photo scroll of the hot naked men Mark sketches on a weekly basis.
Mark, thanks so much for talking today. So you’re in Paris right now.
Yes. My husband is upstairs on a Zoom telling his lab team which mice to kill.
I forget exactly how we get to this point in the conversations, but…
When I first got to New York, I made two best friends. One was [the composer] Virgil Thompson, who made a musical portrait of me, and I made his portrait. His lover, Maurice Grosser, who was a wonderful painter. And the other was Tennessee Williams, whose portrait I painted. But my first two lovers said to me, “Don’t pose naked for anyone until you’re 40.” And so I never did, except for Tennessee Williams, for whom I posed for naked. Look up John Dugdale/Mark Beard, it’s the first portrait I posed for nude when I was 40.
How do you divide your time? You have a place in Hell’s Kitchen, Fire Island, Paris and a church upstate in Catskill, NY.
The church upstate is grand and pretentious beyond belief. You won’t believe it. It’s packed with art in boxes and ten-foot-tall bronze statues I did for Abercrombie stores around the world.
Jim and I travel all over to meet with people he has to meet with for his work. So the church is sort of my folly. We have two floors in Manhattan, the 10th and 11th, and we just sold one floor because we’re getting too old. We still have our floor with a terrace that’s about 3,000 square feet with a library and grand piano.
Do you follow a calendar in terms of where you stay?
We come to Paris whenever we can. We have to do Thanksgiving dinner in NYC. I was very involved in Theater of the Ridiculous in NYC, doing sets for them, so all the people from the Ridiculous who haven’t died, like Black-Eyed Susan and Lola Pashalinski, all come to Thanksgiving dinner. It’s gotten up to 35 people, which is the end of our Limoges. But it’s gotten smaller in recent years because so many people have died.
So there’s no pattern to where you live when?
No. The beach is only during the warm weather. But we were out there in early April and it was cold…
I looked at your Instagram. Wow—you’ve had a lot of beautiful boys and men come through your spaces.
And you do that in Paris as well as Manhattan and Fire Island?
We drew here in Paris Sunday night because my friend who helps me organize the drawing group in New York was here for a week. We had a pretty Asian boy here Sunday night and we drew him.
How long have you had the place in Paris?
About 10 years. We have a few floors here.
What are your feelings about Paris?
I just love it, because I was raised with 19th century art and architecture. My mother was British, and my English granny would bring us here. I have such a history with it. I know it way better than I know New York, even though I’ve spent my life in New York.
What’s a perfect Paris day?
We’d go to see some wonderful show at the Musée Bourdelle and have lunch in the museum or the Jardin du Luxembourg. Then I’d do a little work and then meet friends for a drink or dinner. Or make them dinner here. I’m getting worse at that as I get older and more crippled. Jim is doing more and more of it.
I’m gonna get a splash more of wine.
Once he does, we continue…
So you were born in Salt Lake City?
My great-grandfather, who was British, went there to paint and became a Mormon there. I grew up in a fancy suburb of Salt Lake City called Bountiful. We kept horses. I also grew up a lot in Sheffield, England. We went there every summer.
Did you always know you wanted to be an artist?
My father inherited real estate so he didn’t really have to make money off his art. He’d paint spectacular landscapes of southern Utah. Once, when I was 10 and my father was drawing in his studio, I walked in and he was drawing a woman. I was like [makes bored sound]. The next week, he was drawing a man. I was like, “Dad, could I have some paper please?”
So you were drawing from an early age?
I think I was. I always drew horses because we had horses. And portraits of people. I was very interested in my late teens and early twenties in nineteenth century sculpture. I would go to the British Museum or the Louvre and sit with my sketchbook and draw them and my father would say, “No, no, the fingers should be like that.”
What was it about 19th century sculpture that was so compelling to you at such a young age? The male bodies?
I always tried to draw the women sculptures, too. I had a girlfriend at about 16, but then I had sex with a man. The first time I had anal sex, I was 16 or 17 and crossing the Ponte Vecchio bridge in Florence, and this cute guy cruised me.