Self-Portrait, 1932
Duncan Grant

The Secret Erotic Drawings of Duncan Grant

For decades, the Bloomsbury-group artist quietly sketched his male lovers. These works, long kept hidden by the friends who inherited them, are finally going on display.

Anna Russell
October 10, 2022

Erotic art by Duncan Grant is on display at Charleston, in East Sussex.Art work by Duncan Grant / Courtesy The Charleston Trust © The Estate of Duncan Grant

What happens in an artist’s private life? In public, Duncan Grant was a charismatic and influential painter, a member of the Bloomsbury group of artists and intellectuals who flourished in London during and after the World Wars. In private, he was equally charismatic, and involved with a series of male lovers—erotic dalliances that he kept hidden to avoid criminal prosecution. Born in 1885, when Queen Victoria still ruled, Grant was a hearty octogenarian when private acts of homosexuality were largely decriminalized in England, in 1967. By then, he was a man of considerable experience, adept at picking up men at the National Gallery and Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner. For decades, Grant, a compulsive sketcher, kept hundreds of explicit drawings—scribbled on the backs of paper scraps and grocery lists—out of the public eye. Playful and inventive, they were fuelled by memories of his trysts and his freewheeling imagination. “I can’t speak for anyone else,” he said, in 1970, “but I had relations with anyone who would have me.”

 

Subversive sexuality amid the smell of cow dung – Duncan Grant: 1920 review

Charleston, East Sussex
This exhibition at the Bloomsbury group artist’s mural-filled former home joyously recreates his intensely sexual first solo show

Jonathan Jones
Wednesday 15 September 2021

The tale of Venus and Adonis has been used in various sexually ambiguous ways for centuries. Shakespeare adopts the voice of the goddess in his long poem Venus and Adonis: she pleads with her lover – or is it the Bard’s? – not to leave, not to go on the boar hunt in which he’s doomed to die. Its lyricism is echoed in Cy Twombly’s paintings, in which Adonis was his former lover Robert Rauschenberg. For the pioneering British modernist Duncan Grant, in a joyous exhibition at his mural-covered, biography-stained home in the East Sussex hills, the metamorphosing body of Venus allows a shift of identity. This is not a woman but a constructed abstract form with which the artist can merge, to express his own longing for Adonis.

‘The house sings with colour and with life’ / How the fashion world fell for Charleston, the Bloomsbury set’s country home

Kate Moss photographed at Charleston house for British Vogue, 2021.
Photograph: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Art Partner

‘The house sings with colour and with life’: how the fashion world fell for Charleston, the Bloomsbury set’s country home

From Virginia Woolf and her circle to Kate Moss’s Vogue shoot, the unconventional Sussex farmhouse has captured imaginations across the decades

How to get the Charleston look in your own home

Jess Cartner-Morley

Saturday 12 August 2023

The most fashionable house in England isn’t on an elegant London street or in a chocolate-box Cotswolds village, but at the end of a long, narrow, often muddy country lane riven deep in a fold of the Sussex Downs. Inside, there is not a single midcentury cocktail cabinet, rainforest shower or Italian designer sofa to be found. Instead, Charleston is a thickset farmhouse of doughty 17th-century stone, scrambled with roses, dormer windows nosing from a slope of weathered tile.