The Tim Appelo Files: What You Might Not Know About the Frye's Most Popular Show

There are plenty of reasons you have to see the Frye Art Museum’s The Old, Weird America, wherein dozens of artists riff on folk themes in ways to make your head spin faster than the headless square-dancing robots in the show.

The best work is the sublimely surreal, wall-engulfing painting/movie Winchester by the deranged late art star Jeremy Blake; it’s like stepping into a dream that won’t let you out.

Jeremy Blake, Winchester, 2002.

DVD: color, sound, 18 minutes (continuous loop), courtesy Kinz, Tillou + Feigen, New York.

But almost everything else is a must-see, too; and I want to point out what nobody has noticed so far: the apparition lurking behind the painting Divine Fury 1932, 2002 by the artists David McDermott and Peter McGough and its connection to the startling Norman Rockwell profile in the recent Vanity Fair.

McDermott and McGough are two New Yorkers who live retro lives like Edwardian gentlemen — without electricity — and make art pastiches of past eras. Their work is like a remake of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, only when these guys time-trip, they go native. There’s a movie about them you can buy on Amazon: The 28^th Instance of June 1914, 10:50 a.m. It's available used and, appropriately, only on VHS.

Divine Fury 1932, 2002 is McDermott and McGough’s 2002 portrait of seven 1932-era gay dandies, filmed against the backdrop of what appears to be the Arrow Shirt man. Vanity Fair explains that the Arrow Shirt man was the first sex symbol in American print advertising — which was subversive, since the character was inspired by “a Canadian hunk named Charles Beach,” the live-in lover of the artist, J. C. Leyendecker. Leyendecker was the main cover illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, the titanic, infinitely straight-arrow mass-market magazine.

Norman Rockwell apparently behaved like Anne Baxter in All About Eve (about which you must read in All About All About Eve: The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made). He cozied up to clueless, innocent Leyendecker, copped his style, cultivated his contacts, stole his job and reduced Leyendecker from fame to obscurity so total that only three people attended his funeral besides Rockwell and the deceased’s boyfriend, Beach.

Rockwell triumphed partly by replacing Leyendecker’s “supplely muscled Ivy-league jock types” with an image we recognize today as more folksy all-American: skinny, hetero teens flustered by cheerleaders sewing letters onto their non-buff chests.

But you can see in McDermott and McGough’s slick, anachronistic, nostalgic painting the appeal of a vanished, vanquished gay subculture, and the inspiration of what VF calls “unabashed homoerotica slipped in [under] America’s nose.”

The Old, Weird America is on view at the Frye Art Museum through January 3, 2010.