Some exhibitions grab you with both hands. Very Private? is one of them, which is fitting, given all the grappling, clutching and caressing taking place on the walls. There are fistfuls of flesh, as well as other, harder things, plus a set of fingers curling around a whip, while another set clutches the back of a chair. These drawings are imaginative, playful and intensely sexual. They are, in the words of their maker, Duncan Grant, “very private”. Or at least they were until now.
Made in the late 1940s and 50s, when sex between men was still a criminal offence in Britain, Grant’s erotic drawings express thoughts and desires that society forced him to keep hidden. In 1959, he gave a folder of more than 400 sketches to his friend Edward Le Bas. Since then, it has been passed secretly between lovers and friends. In 2009, the theatre designer Norman Coates inherited it, and in 2020 he donated it to Charleston, the former East Sussex home and studio of Grant and Vanessa Bell. As well as making 40 of the drawings public, the trust has invited six contemporary artists to respond to them.
