Jim French
Photographer of the male nude who influenced Mapplethorpe
JIM FRENCH, who has died aged 84, was an American illustrator and photographer whose Polaroid studies of the male physique influenced such figures as Robert Mapplethorpe and Nick Knight at a time when nude images of men were considered risqué, even unacceptable.
French’s work reached a wider audience in the mid-1970s when the manager of the Sex Pistols, Malcolm Mclaren, appropriated a French drawing for a provocative T-shirt sold in Sex, the King’s Road boutique he ran with Vivienne Westwood. French’s 1969 illustration, “Longhorns-dance”, showed two cowboys facing each other, naked from the waist down bar their boots. Mclaren embellished the design by adding dialogue.
The first customer to buy the shirt was arrested in Piccadilly in the summer of 1975 and charged with displaying an obscene print in a public place under the 1824 Vagrancy Act. Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop was subjected to police raids, and the affair made the front page of the newspapers, provoking a debate about freedom of speech. In the subsequent indecency trial there was some discussion between barristers and the judge as to the exact distance between the cowboys’ genitalia.
The “Cowboys shirt”, as it became known, was later worn by performers such as Sid Vicious and became a staple item in the punk wardrobe, reproduced many thousands of times and regularly revived by Vivienne Westwood for sale via her global fashion empire.
French, however, was not pleased, issuing a statement in which he said that Mcclaren and Westwood had made “a whole bunch of money – and still do apparently – by stealing” his design.
James French was born at Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, on July 14 1932 and graduated from the Philadelphia Museum School of Art in 1955. After two years’ service in the US Army he pursued a career in New York in fashion illustration, producing textile designs for the handkerchief and scarf company Tammis Keefe.
He also rendered pen and ink portraits of such leading performers as Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand for LP releases by the Columbia Records Club.
From his time in the army French had made homoerotic drawings, signing off as “Arion”, and, in 1966 he formed a mail order company with a fellow ex-serviceman to circulate reproductions of this male erotica around America’s burgeoning gay underground network.
In the years before homosexuality was legalised by many states, French’s company ran the gauntlet, relying on small independent print presses whose activities were monitored by the authorities.
In 1967 French founded the Los Angeles imprint Colt Studio with his new partner, Lou Thomas, producing drawings and photography for books, magazines and calendars using a new adopted name, “Rip Colt”. The introduction of the Polaroid camera enabled French to capture studies of models for his illustrations, and the resulting photographs established a new market for him.
French became sole owner of the business in 1974. Among the books he published were Man, Another Man and The Art Of The Male Nude. One of his studies was used by the singer Morrissey on the sleeve of The Smiths’ 1983 single Hand In Glove.
He retired from Colt Studio in 2003 to live in Palm Springs. In 2013 a retrospective exhibition of his Polaroids was held in New York, and the same year he participated in Nick Knight’s London exhibition “The Photography Of Punk”. The publication in 2015 of a hefty coffee-table tome entitled The Jim French Diaries confirmed him as a pioneer of gay culture.
Jim French is survived by his husband Jeffery Turner.
Jim French, born July 14 1932, died June 16 2017