SOLOMON - Wie er aus schwulen Jungs Heilige malte

There are painters who were ahead of their time. And there are painters who paid for their time. Simeon Solomon belongs to the second group. He paid with everything: with his reputation, his friends, his life's work, his life. What he left behind are pictures of a beauty that hurts – because one knows what they cost him.

London, 1840. A Jewish artist family in the East End. Simeon is the eighth child, and he paints before he can properly write. At 18, his works hang in the Royal Academy. Critics are thrilled. He is young, talented, charming – and he knows exactly what he is. Gay. In a time when the word doesn't exist yet, but the punishment does.

He paints his way through this time. He paints saints with the faces of twinks. He paints angels touching each other as if it were the most natural thing in the world – because it is - if not in heaven, then so on earth. He paints Bacchus, rapt and sensual, a youth between dream and desire. He paints Sleep, two men holding hands in their sleep. Cardinal Manning, one of England's most powerful churchmen, hangs Solomon's saints in his rooms. He doesn't suspect – or doesn't want to suspect – that these saints bear the faces of the men Solomon loved.

Swinburne, the poet, is his closest confidant. Rossetti, Burne-Jones – the Pre-Raphaelites embrace him as one of their own. Solomon is right in the middle of the most significant art movement of his time. He belongs. He is one of them.

Until February 1873.

Paris. A public toilet. An arrest. "Indecent acts" – that's what the law calls what Solomon lived. The news reaches London like a stone in the water. The ripples spread. Burne-Jones breaks off contact – immediately, definitively, without a word of explanation. Swinburne, his closest confidant, publicly distances himself. As if the years they shared had never existed. As if Solomon had never been there.

In 1874, a second arrest follows in London. Now it's over.

What follows are thirty years of slow disappearance. Solomon continues to paint – he can't help it. But he sells his drawings on the street, for pennies. He drinks. He lives in workhouses. The man whose works hung in a cardinal's rooms sleeps on wooden bunks among the homeless. On August 14, 1905, Simeon Solomon dies in St. Giles Workhouse in London. Alone. Forgotten. 64 years old.

The art world that abandoned him rediscovers him decades later. Today, his works hang in the Tate Galleries, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in private collections around the world. The men who betrayed him are footnotes in history. Solomon has remained.

What we have made of his life

Solomon painted gay longing in codes, because he wasn't allowed to do it openly. We paint it openly – because we can and because we must. KUNSTWERK BILDER creates Gay Art in the style of the masters: not as a copy, but as a continuation. The pictures Solomon could never show – the embraces, the kisses, the tenderness between men without disguise and without apology – we make them visible. This is his homage. And our mission.

“Love is the beginning and the end of all things – it was before the world and will be after it.” – Simeon Solomon, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1871)

Gay Art. Gay art for your home. KUNSTWERK BILDER.