Homintern ... Did gay culture inform the art of Maureen Mullarkey?

Cinalli

The Archbishop’s Mural & The Homintern

Homintern is used by Mullarkey in the same way other Vatican critics might use the term 'gay lobby'.  She more than likely believes the Church is controlled by homosexuals intent upon destroying traditional Catholic teaching and liturgical discipline.

Call it the Homintern. That word dates back to the 1930s and the belief that a clique of homosexuals had elite influence in the arts, theater—in all creative fields. It is a play on Comintern, short for the Communist International. It functioned in its day much like today’s term gay mafia but with one difference. It aligned homosexuals with Communists as wreckers of tradition and national boundaries, not only in the arts but in politics, institutions (including spydom), and manners as well. - Source

Mullarkey, whose art I have admired before I ever knew her name, has written a critique on the Paglia fresco.  Let me make it clear, I respect her opinion and welcome her point of view on the mural.  Perhaps especially more valid since her body of work for which she is noted, depicts drag queens and gay pride parade characters.  Her canvases are inhabited by gay harlequins, clowns, circus type characters.  Somewhat reminiscent - for me at least - in a kinda-sorta realistic Richard Lindner-esque way.  She has made her living documenting, exploring and exploiting aspects of what many once regarded as 'freak culture'.  Like I said - her work is good - yet in a strange way, she too had some degree of camaraderie with that so called "clique of homosexuals (who) had elite influence in the arts".

Researching some of her opinions, I came across a quote from her discussing her work on an old post about her stance on gay marriage, originally taken from her website:

Mullarkey says gay parades are a "marvelous spectacle" and "assertion of solidarity." 

"It is an erotic celebration loosed for a day to keep us all mindful that Dionysus is alive, powerful and under our own porch," said Mullarkey, a former art critic for the now-defunct New York Sun. - Source

Mullarkey

"An erotic celebration" - now that is interesting.  Her traditional Catholicism is interesting as well.  Her faith is admirable, though I would never support much of the extremely critical things she says about the Pope and the Church in our day.  She can be a bit of shrew there.  Having said that, her critique of the Cathedral fresco is much more intelligible than many of the commentators in the LifeSite com-box and a few other sites discussing the so-called homoerotic aspect of the composition.   Mullarkey clearly understand the erotic.  She also knows art and art history, which is demonstrated by how quickly she recognized Cinalli's central figure of Christ as derivative of the famous Piero della Francesca Resurrection image.  Mullarkey refers to the Cinalli work as "a leaden, unimaginative pastiche of its predecessors."

I saw only the pedestrian quality of Paglia’s mural—a leaden, unimaginative pastiche of its predecessors. It is a Fire Island resurrection scene that confuses several time-honored motifs and compositional conventions. Those many historic descents into limbo and falls of the damned render a clutch of naked sinners—some luminous, some drained by suffering—huddled together in dramatic coils, waiting out their purgatory or cascading into hell. Pre-modern pictorial narratives of salvation and damnation came from hands as lovely to contemporary secular eyes as to faithful ones. Even scenes of hell were endowed with a terrible, cautionary beauty. - Source

It's an interesting critique by someone more educated, refined, talented and skilled than myself.  To be sure, my amateur-outsider work is often derivative and reliant on pastiche - sometimes I think of it as 'painted collage' - but I'm just a painter, largely self-taught.  I'm just not sure I agree that the Cinalli work can be so easily dismissed. I continue to admire it very much.

I would still like to hear Archbishop Paglia's interpretation.

Signorelli