Peter Flinsch: The Body in Question

At the age of eighty-seven, Peter Flinsch is one of the art world’s unsung heroes; for the past sixty years, he has produced hundreds of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that depict the eroticized male body. In 2006, he won the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York, and now, for the first time, his work has been collected in a beautiful, full-color edition that celebrates his life and art.

His biography, included in this book, is as remarkable as his work. Born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1920, he was obliged to become a member of the Hitler Youth Movement and subsequently a soldier in Nazi Germany. During the war in 1942, he was accused of homosexuality after getting caught kissing a fellow soldier; he was court-martialed and sentenced to prison, a decision that may have saved his life, as his old unit was sent to the Russian Front and few survived.

After the war in East Germany, he was assigned to produce portraits of Communist heroes before he moved to Paris and finally to Canada in 1952. Free from the threat of persecution, in an age when the gay community was starting to emerge from the shadows, Flinsch began to produce a huge volume of art that over the decades has been acclaimed for its sinewy, modernist interpretations of the male body. His work and this book are a fascinating chronicle of his life as a courageous, openly gay man.

Ross Higgins teaches in the sociology and anthropology departments of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Involved in the city?s gay movement since 1975, he co-founded the Archives gaies du Quebec. He has also curated art exhibitions and written for television.