The Peter Gillis Collection: The Male Nudes of Laurence Herbert Scott (American, 1933 - 2005)

Vallot Auctioneers is pleased to offer for auction the private art collection of Peter Gillis, a Boston schoolteacher, innkeeper, activist, archivist, poet and collector.

LAURENCE HEBERT SCOTT (AMERICAN, 1933 - 2005)
'RECLINING NUDE MALE.'
BLUE CHALK STICK ON PAPER.
SIGNED AND DATED 29 MAY 68 UPPER LEFT.
13 1/2 X 16"; 20 1/2 X 22 7/8" (FRAMED).

In the mid-1960s, Gillis purchased his Roxbury town house. Gillis had many artist friends who stayed when visiting Boston and Gillis also operated his large home as an inn. Among Gillis' lodgers over the years were the New Orleans-based painter James Michalopoulos, the British figurative artist Stephen Mangan, the scholar-illustrator of Jewish history Nicholas Peter Stavroulakis, and the German stainless-steel sculptor known as Hex. Many offered pieces of their work in lieu of rent, from which Gillis in part amassed his art collection.

Included in the Gillis collection is an extensive collection of male nudes by Gillis’ close friend Laurence Herbert Scott (American, 1933–2005). Many of these works are sensual and erotic in nature and date from the 1950s - 60s , a time when such depictions could lead to professional and personal risk.  

Around 1966 or thereabouts, Gillis recalled, in an interview with Michael Dym, Vallot’s lead auctioneer, the first time that he took a step inside a gay bar, the Napoleon Club, in Boston’s Bay Village neighborhood, Gillis struck up a conversation with a young Harvard graduate.  He shared his then-current preoccupation with writing experimental poetry. The patron suggested that he seek out the advice of Laurence Herbert Scott, who was teaching at Harvard at the time. On their first meeting Gillis recounted, Scott greeted him with "a big wet kiss” and the promise that they would be friends for a long time. Gillis was 26 years old at the time, and Scott kept his promise of being Gillis' lifelong friend until the artist’s passing in 2005.

Laurence Herbert Scott

LAURENCE HERBERT SCOTT (AMERICAN, 1933 - 2005)
'NUDE MALE IN BED.'
COLORED PENCIL ON PAPER.
16 X 13 1/4"; 23 X 20" (FRAMED).

Laurence Herbert Scott was born in Detroit in 1933. He was raised in Ann Arbor and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1955. He earned a MA from Harvard University and continued to pursue doctoral work there in Slavic Studies. A consummate polyglot, Scott was fluent in eight languages, including Russian, Czech, and Polish. As an academic, Scott published the definitive English-language translation of Morphology of the Folktale by Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp, a seminal text in literary theory that remains in print to this day. During his time at Cambridge, Scott was active in literary circles such as the New Poet’s Theater, translating poems from Polish in its journal Fire Exit. He was employed as a teaching fellow in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard. Scott was a tutor at Lowell House, and he later lectured at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peter Gillis (left), Harry ‘Kitty’ Kevorkian (center) and Laurence Herbert Scott (right). Picketing at the American Psychiatric Association Conference in 1973.

Gillis fondly remembers his shared history of political activism with Scott as a “foot soldier in the revolution." Together, they attended anti-war “be-ins” on Cambridge Common, protesting the Vietnam War. In 1973, alongside gay and lesbian rights groups, the pair picketed the conference of the American Psychiatric Association, which classified homosexuality as a pathological affliction, an action which led to a resolution removing the classification, and the subsequent affirmation that homosexuality is not an illness.

As an out gay man, Scott was a fixture on the Boston queer scene. Through Scott, Gillis was introduced to many of its personalities, including Charley Shively and John Mizel who led the Fag Rag collective that printed one of the first national non-news focused newspapers for gay men.

Scott was an active figure in his hometown Ann Arbor chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. With Harry ‘Kitty’ Kevorkian and his life partner Gerald G. Naylor, Scott co-founded the first pro-feminist gay liberation group in the United States. Originally called the Male Liberation Collective, the organization changed its name to the Basic Education Project (BEP) to distance itself from the heterosexual men's movement that was gaining traction in the early 1970s. The main political activities of the BEP comprised the distribution of feminist literature and anti-sexist reading lists, the provision of consciousness-raising sessions, and personal counseling for closeted and politically disengaged gay men. The BEP was closely aligned with the first radical feminist organization established in the Boston area, Cell 16. Both organizations pioneered a self-defense program by running karate lessons for gay men and women who faced violence and discrimination in the streets. Scott was friends with some of the founding members of Cell 16, Abby Rockefeller, Jane West, and Betsy Warrior.

At Harvard, Scott established the Lowell-Adams House Printers, which specialized in producing limited-edition broadsides of poems and essays. Compared to the traditional typesetting of publishing houses, the student-run printing house could experiment in composition and page layout. Students could submit drawings and engravings to complement the written word, and each broadsheet was hand-signed by the poet and illustrator. Scott personally designed Marianne Moore's poem "W. S. Landor" and his close friend James Merrill's "1939: An American Woman Explores the Estate of Friends Who Have Fled France." The Lowell-Adams House enterprise published broadsheets of the work of Adrienne Rich, Cecil Day Lewis, Howard Nemerov, I. A. Richards, Jack Kerouac, John Updike, and Noël Coward.

In 1966, Scott founded the Ibex Press to publish and engrave exclusive collections of poetry by Allen Ginsburg, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, and W. H. Auden. Hors commerce copies were reserved as donations to libraries. Outside of his small press activities, Scott did illustrations for The New Yorker and The New Republic.

To say that Scott was well connected would be an understatement. In a letter to the literary scholar Hugh Kenner, his Harvard friend Guy Davenport, the celebrated writer and painter, claimed that Scott simply “knows everybody."

On a whim, a sixteen-year-old Scott sent the modernist poet Ezra Pound a copy of an illustration he designed for the cover of a local magazine. To Scott’s surprise, Pound responded. From high school through his university days, Scott received literary and philosophical recommendations from Pound by correspondence.

EZRA POUND "CANTO CX"
ILLUSTRATION BY LAURENCE HERBERT SCOTT

Guy Davenport and Scott teamed up to publish the first edition of Pound’s Canto CX in 1965 under the imprint ‘As Sextant Press’. Scott created and engraved Pound’s portrait frontispiece and printed 80 copies, which were presented to the poet on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

Scott maintained a close working relationship with the American poet Marianne Moore, whom he assisted with the translation of the Fables of La Fontaine. Along with the artist Peggy Bacon (American, 1895 - 1997), Scott created the animal engravings used to illustrate her festschrift, an album of essays and poems commemorating Moore. Through her, Scott became acquainted with literary giants such as T. S. Eliot.

Scott lived as an openly queer artist when such disclosure could involve considerable personal and professional risk. Through his extensive networking in literary circles and print work, Scott was a visual artist whose practice was structured around the principle of collaboration. His art was personal, cultivating both intellectual and intimate relationships and leaving a lasting impression as a mentor and friend on others along the way.

The Gillis collection of Laurence Herbert Scott includes a collection of Scott’s striking and most accomplished artwork - male nudes. These loosely drawn works tend to focus on and emphasize a single aspect of the model and move in quick and often wild lines to create just enough to give the viewer an impression of the subject, and then often emphasize one feature of the subject (e.g., feet, hands, torso, etc.). These sensual drawings were created at a time when such works and being identified as queer came with significant legal and personal risks.

Michael Dym, Vallot's principal, notes, "Male nudes from this period are much less common than female nudes, and then they tend to be academic in nature." Male nudes from this period that lean towards the sensual or erotic are scarce, and even scarcer still when coming from such a pivotal figure as Scott. 

Vallot would like to thank Barry Oliver, MA (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) for his adept art historical research and assistance in rediscovering the incredible life and artwork of Laurence Herbert Scott (American, 1933–2005).