Transgender Art

Artists whose work includes transgender, transvestite, or transsexual themes are rare. In other articles, discuss the work of Christopher Leach ("Christopher Leach") and Kimberly Wilder ("Kimberly Wilder: An Assessment"), whose respective styles, if not subject matter, are vastly different, although both are exquisite illustrators and painters. Another's whose work includes such themes is the outsider artist Henry Darger, whose watercolors include prepubescent girls who have penises and testicles rather than vaginas. I also suggest that a few of the great Rene Magritte's surrealistic paintings may have transgender themes ("Magritte: A Transgender Reading").

Other artists, fine and otherwise, whose work includes transgender, transvestite, or transsexual themes are Bill Ward, Edward Black Kim, George Grosz, Marquis de Panasewicz, Siegfried Zademack, Alford Lawrence, Harriet Zabusky-Zand, and Romaine Brooks.

Bill Ward drew comic book-style illustrations of the big-breasted, top-heavy female characters that were considered sexy in his day (the 1950s and 1960s). Especially adept at rendering leather and nylon stockings in pen and ink, he captivated fans by his illustrations of scantily dressed women with a penchant for appearing in lingerie. They were often engaged in humorous situations, for many of Ward's illustrations were used to set up punch lines which appeared as captions to his drawings. Toward the end of his career, his art began to include female dominatrixes and beautiful male transvestites. Much of his work was executed in black and white but has since been colorized.

In one of Kim's works, the belly of a male torso joins that of a female torso; the heads of each are not shown, but the hands of both clasp one another's upper arms. Another painting features a female torso, shown from the shoulders to the tops of the thighs. Her hands are down, along her sides, and a red apple appears just below the center of the figure's breasts. Despite her breasts and feminine figure, she has testicles, from which a phallic serpent winds its way up her abdomen, its tongue flicking at the apple, an obvious allusion to the Edenic serpent that tempted Eve.