Kunst + Design x Leben

From Plato’s ecstatic seizure to Kusama’s self-curated hallucinations, the link between madness and brilliance has never belonged to biology or metaphor alone. It belongs to society’s need to pathologize prophecy, sanctify breakdown, or canonize pain. 

In postwar Los Angeles, behind a hedge-lined bungalow on West 11th Street, Bob Mizer assembled a visual counterculture from scraps of chiffon, glycerin, and outlaw muscle. His mother sewed the briefs. He choreographed the rest.

Séguy’s illustrations, governed by taxonomic fidelity and the formal grace of Art Nouveau, are decorative declarations. Reminding us that even the humble fly contains a symmetry as deliberate as any architectural frieze, and just as enduring.

Lionel Wendt conjured a Ceylon ungoverned by imperial cartography. Where colonial rule had criminalized queer intimacy and privatized the commons, Wendt’s gelatin silver prints offered a counter-archive: lush, erotic, and defiantly abundant.

There are afternoons that behave like secrets. Not whispered—just unsaid. Henry Scott Tuke knew this. He painted them. Salt-damp bodies along the Cornish coast, young men folded into each other’s shadow and gleam. Not staged. Not coy. Just... held.

Schneider painted like someone smuggling voltage. He wrapped classical allegory around homoerotic fire, camouflaging danger in toga folds and divine musculature. In a language only the outlawed understood: each canvas a sigil, each body a cipher.

Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden reimagined classical antiquity through the sun-drenched bodies of Sicilian youth. Exiled by tuberculosis to Taormina, he transformed the village into a queer Arcadia—where marble myths met Mediterranean flesh.