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.
The first you see is a series of large, monochrome photographs by Ajamu X, showing black male bodies pressed up against one another in a constellation of standing and seated positions. Initially, it’s hard to look beyond the profusion of bollocks and other bits, but stick with it and you’ll soon find your eyes gliding seamlessly over arched backs, rippling muscles and splayed legs. Limbs gleam in a theatre of light and dark that would make Caravaggio swoon. Apart from the odd piece of jewellery, the figures are naked, captured up close as they bend and curve. There’s something balletic about them, as if they’re moving to music or some internal rhythm.
It would have been nice to have started with Grant, though, whose drawings are less staged and more urgent. His pen and pencil marks are feverish, with sensual washes of watercolour. You can see the influence of ancient Greece and Rome in his lustful satyrs, with their pointed beards and hooves; and in a frieze-like procession of men joined not by their hands but by other appendages. Inspired by contemporary magazines, Grant’s figures are muscular and acrobatic. Some are bold and self-satisfied – parked on chairs, with hands on hips and legs spread, coolly meeting the viewer’s gaze. There’s more than a hint of kink in the ropes that are visible, and one man is pushing another’s face towards his crotch. Other drawings are quiet and tender, limbs lovingly interlaced. Two scenes could be described as ordinary, but for the fishnets.
Tim Walker, who photographed Charleston for Italian Vogue in 2016, gives us work that flickers between the erotic and the everyday. Printed on a stack of boxes in the middle of the second gallery space are images that show a muddle of pastel-coloured bodies and groceries – a carton of eggs, sliced white bread, a milk bottle, cornflakes. Charleston features as a backdrop in a couple of works, among them Kadie Salmon’s hand-painted photographs, shot in the house and the garden. Using multiple exposures on film, the dreamlike images show the Scottish artist in three poses, creating the impression of a romantic encounter between three women. Together with the plain white dresses and free-flowing hair, they call to mind classical depictions of the three graces.
It’s a shame Salmon’s photographs have been put in a corner. As if to make up for it, the third and final space dedicates two walls to women. Somaya Critchlow’s small-scale watercolours, mostly monochrome and showing just a single figure, allow you some room to breathe, though after the loud and proud efforts of other artists, they feel a tad underwhelming. Alison Wilding’s abstract works – acrylic ink and collage – successfully break away from the mass of bodies, while still recalling their rhythmic movements in their shapes and squiggles.
Initially invited to respond to Grant’s drawings along with the rest of the gang, Linder was soon given a Woolfian room and a title of her own. A Dream Between Sleeping and Waking opens in tandem with Very Private? and again offers a mixed bag, the best being a brilliant new photomontage series that shows naked men adorned with gladiatorial silverware.
The title of Linder’s display is something Grant once said about the surrealist creations of René Magritte. Linder feels the same way about the history and mythology of Charleston, and I’d argue that Very Private? also conjures that sensation of being between sleep and waking. Like morning light, the images are at times too bright, too graphic, making you want to squeeze your eyes shut. But give it a moment and they’ll adjust.
• Very Private? and Linder: A Dream Between Sleeping and Waking are at Charleston, East Sussex, from 17 September to 12 March.
