Essay by Tyler Rosebush
Over the course of his career, John Burton Harter created more than 60 self-portraits that attest not only to his skill in rendering the male physique but also his keen ability to channel nuanced and layered expressions of his own likeness. His self-portraits often incorporate countervailing symbolic undertones that complicate the presentation of his masculinity and sexual identity.
By portraying himself through these layers of coded symbolism, Harter’s self-portraits share many features with queer artists who came before him. In the early 20th century, artists with same-sex proclivities had to strike a delicate balance between self-expression and the oppressive censorship regarding any references to homosexuality. This was especially true for self-portraits as these works often reveal intimate details about the artist’s life.
In response to this predicament, artists like Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) and Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) made paintings that cloaked forbidden expressions of gender and sexuality inside coded visual language more acceptable to society. For example, both Brooks and Cadmus relied heavily on symbolic garments (e.g., a red tie) that had coded significance among queer audiences. Against all odds, this generation of painters pioneered a multi-layered style of painting rife with nuanced symbolism, veiled allusions, and subtextual narratives that allowed them to avoid moral outrage and legal prosecution.
As the century progressed, many artists with taboo sexualities bravely became more outspoken about their identities as gay liberation movements worked to reverse societal prejudice and remove discriminatory laws. Artists like Robert Mapplethorpe produced photographic self-portraits that were more overt than their predecessors but still maintained rich layers of subversive symbolic language.
Harter, similar to many queer artists who came before him, walked a fine line in how he portrayed his own gender and sexuality. He was not fully out of the closet until the death of his mother in the mid-1990s. His self-portraits naturally reflect the dichotomy of being open about his sexuality in certain circumstances and remaining closeted in others.
Even early in his career, the duality that defined Harter’s personal life imbued his self-portraits with complex meaning rather than limiting his artistic output. Harter finished his Masters of Arts in painting at Louisiana State University at the age of 30, and around that time, he made self-portraits that started to explore youth and the idealized classical proportions of the male form.
As far back as ancient Greece, the idealized male form in Western art has typically been portrayed as engaged in activities associated with masculinity such as sport, political oration, or philosophical thought. Harter’s Torso from 1968 is a skillful rendering of unblemished musculature but cleverly upends expectations by depicting himself caressing his own hair. This simple and subtle change shifts the reading of this self-portrait away from normative assumptions about masculinity to making himself an object of desire traditionally associated with femininity.
Harter continued to play with notions of gender regarding his own likeness throughout his career. Going a step further in 1970, his Male Torso contrasts the beauty and slight femininity of his youthful figure with an intent stare full of psychological depth, weaving multiple possibilities for interpretation into one painting.
Around the mid-1970s, Harter’s approach to self-portraiture began to shift towards depicting exaggerated archetypes of masculinity.
In “Hallowed be the Fruit of Labor”[1], he depicts himself shirtless, wearing a hard hat encircled by the text of the title, which contains an obvious play on words: “fruit” meaning both the payoff for hard work, as well as a pejorative term for a gay man. The title is based on a biblical quote about the virtue of farm work that Harter connects to all kinds of labor by wearing a hard hat in the self-portrait. Considering the various symbolic layers of this painting, Harter could also be alluding to a myriad of labors from gay liberation to performative masculinity to sex.
Throughout the rest of the 1970s, Harter went on to portray himself as a hippie, a hustler, and again wearing a hard hat, a symbol that would appear often in his other figurative work. In each of these self-portraits, Harter transforms himself into a lusty cliche of masculinity in a feat of painterly drag. These self-portraits draw attention to the many individual personas that construct one’s identity, and they walk a fine line in their subversion of the cultural tropes they attempt to reproduce.
As Harter became established as an artist, he began to grapple with the loss of his own youth and the passage of time.
Midlife Statement from 1976 shows a middle-aged Harter clutching a dandelion as sand passes through an hourglass. Perhaps the dispersion of the dandelion spores represents his waning virility; perhaps he’s trying to cope with the overall change in his physical appearance. Either way, the painting’s subtext hints at a resistance to, or, at best, a grudging acceptance of, the changes that occur as one ages.
In many self-portraits from this period, he paints from photos of himself at a younger age while capturing his aged appearance in others. In Paradox, Harter paints himself inside a picture frame on a wall admiring a younger nude version of himself posing in his studio in a brilliant role reversal of model and artist.
Harter achieved a career highlight in 1997 with En Garde. Harter again paints himself holding a dandelion, but this time he delicately holds the flower. Instead of the spores floating away, he depicts the flower in full bloom as he shows off his entire nude backside as if to suggest a full embrace of his maturing appearance.
Harter’s self-portraits, like those of his predecessors, demonstrate a deep sensitivity to the many nuances of rendering oneself in a painting. Due to the constant risk of public scrutiny, artists with socially unacceptable sexual identities like Harter were well aware of the symbolic weight behind a subtle gesture or particular article of clothing. This struggle has imbued queer artists with a talent for symbolic communication and has always been a defining feature of their self-portraiture.
Though “queer” is a term often applied retroactively, the self-portraits of Harter stand tall in a lineage of other such 20th-century artists who had to contend with the same struggle.
[1] The quotation marks Harter includes in this title could be acknowledging the biblical quotation or pointing to the multiple meanings present.
Tyler Rosebush is a multidisciplinary, New Orleans-based artist whose work explores moments of intimacy within queer spaces of the Gulf South. He has been a long-standing resident of the French Quarter, a historic enclave for queer people, where he has worked for a decade archiving stories and visual culture. Rosebush has produced interviews and photographs for Ambush Magazine, LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, and The Neighborhood Story Project. He also co-founded The Iron Lattice. As a fabricator, photographer, and painter, Rosebush has exhibited work at 912 Julia (since closed) and Good Children Gallery. He is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of New Orleans where he teaches courses in photography and video.
