Lark Mason Associates is pleased to presents: Strictly Private: A Collection of Erotic Works by Duncan Grant which are available for bidding on www.iGavelAuctions.com from October 29th through November 19th, 2020.  Over 60 works of homoerotic drawings and paintings by Duncan Grant, from the private collection of Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, are now on sale for the first time. These intimate works provide an insight into the artist’s life and his famed Bloomsbury circle of artists, writers, philosophers and intellectuals including Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes, among others.

Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, author of Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group, as well a dance impresario, is 91 and lives in New York. He was introduced to Grant by Paul Roche, the critically acclaimed British poet and translator of the Greek classics who was the artist’s lover and confidante for 36 years.  He admired Grant’s work and through mutual friends was set to meet him in Charleston, England. On his first visit there he purchased several male erotic drawings and three oil paintings.

Grant’s homoerotic drawings were kept private between his lovers and close friends and Angelica Garnett–who was his daughter from a previous liaison with Vanessa Bell–was keen to keep it that way. After her father’s death, she sought to destroy the drawings, but Turnbaugh fought her in court, won the case, and secured ownership of the drawings and paintings.

Duncan’s appreciation for the male anatomy was inspired by Ancient Greek mythology and art. This sale includes a work based on the tumultuous battle between Hercules and Diomedes, memorialized by the statue by Vincenzo de‘Rossi in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Grant’s vertical composition of entwined figures bursts with emotion and physicality

Best known as a figurative painter, he never lost interest in abstraction, whether in art or design. This sale includes an important abstract composition of shapes and colors, in which Grant experimented with different textures of paint and areas of glitter in the pigments, as well as textile designs commissioned by Macy’s Department Store, Grant’s childhood drawings done in Burma, an oil painting of two nude dancers and a nude drawing of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

Says Charlene Wang, the fine arts expert in charge of the sale: “Lark Mason Associates is pleased to present this important oeuvre by the renowned British artist Duncan Grant, whose intimate portraits of human sexuality reveal his inner life and artistic expression which was heavily influenced by his association with the Bloomsbury Group."

Among the highlights are:     

Duncan Grant, Large Drawing of Nude Lying on Side, Graphite on Paper

(Estimate: $70,000- $100,000), reserve: $35,000

Duncan Grant, Steam Bathers, Oil on Board, 

(Estimate: $70,000-100,000), reserve: $35,000

Duncan Grant, Abstract (Last Work), Ink, Watercolor and Oil on Paper, 1978

(Estimate: $48,000-80,000), reserve: $24,000

Duncan Grant, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West, Ink on Paper

(Estimate: $3,000-5000), reserve: $1,500

Duncan Grant, Paul Roche Lying on His Back, Crayon and Pencil on Paper

(Estimate: $4,000-6,000), reserve: $2,000

Duncan Grant, Hercules and Diomede, Charcoal and Gouache on Paper

(Estimate: $4,000-6,000), reserve: $2,000