Speaking for Vice -- Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde by Jonathan Weinberg

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Jonathan Weinberg. Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 260 pp.; 13 color ills., 78 b/w. $40.00

In 1987, during a visit to the Charles Demuth retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I happened upon a docent tour of the show. There is only one fact that I now remember about the tour, a fact that has erased whatever other content (or merit) it might have had. The docent concluded, rather abruptly, in the penultimate gallery of the show by noting that she would leave us to "discover" the last room on our own. The final gallery, devoted to erotic …