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Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
SAMUEL STEWARD (1909-1993)
Untitled (Erotic Fantasy). Ink on paper. 420x293 mm; 16 1/2x11 3/4 inches. Unsigned. Circa 1959. Unexamined out of archival frame.
This wild work is a homoerotic take on Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights with human and fantastical creatures engaged in myriad ithyphallic activities.
Steward was an early and wildly prolific pioneer of the erotic arts and somewhat of a Renaissance man. He was a young friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Thomas Mann, André Gide, and Thornton Wilder, who influenced his early endeavors as a poet, novelist, and professor of English Literature. Leaving academia to become a tattoo artist under the tutelage of Admund Dietzel, he eventually became the official inker of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. In the 1960s he published a series of extremely popular erotica, often on the themes of sadomasochism and interracial relations, under the name of Phil Andros. Throughout these periods, he was also a spiritualist, (unofficial) sex researcher for Alfred Kinsey (with whom he shared his detailed sex journals and photographs), a pulp pornographer, and homoerotic artist/illustrator, sometimes under his own name or pseudonymously. Among biographies of pioneering gay figures, Steward's is certainly one the most fascinating and entertaining.
