Art and soul.

With a stunning mid-career retrospective, artist Lari Pittman brings a bold gay sensibility into the picture

"I'm of the lineage of Cecil Beaton," says Lari Pittman. "When I come across the grand style of old queens, I'm amazed at how powerful and transgressive that position still is within culture. When it's done elegantly and with intelligence, I'm bowled over." For the past decade Pittman himself has been bowling over art lovers with his brashly decorative, sexually celebratory paintings. And in his major mid-career retrospective, which debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in June and began traveling across the country last fall, Pittman has proved to be one of the brightest stars in the contemporary art world.

"If there is a thread in my work, it's been just to throw it out there," the 45-year-old artist says of his extra-rich canvases, "even if I might be embarrassed by its effete aspects." It's precisely the "effete" aspects of Pittman's paintings that make them so fascinating. In his work Pittman invents a universe of ornate flourishes, Victorian silhouettes, erupting sex organs, and a recurrent image of the number 69, which relates as much to infinite union as to the popular sex act. "I never apologize for my work," he says. "I just insist that it's part of culture by making my subjects as beautiful and as elegant as I know how."

As much as he portrays himself as a flamboyant iconoclast, Pittman is also mannered and charming and a firm believer in the mainstream. "My work is about human issues - period," he states emphatically. "I've never been interested in the marginalized discussion. I'm interested in the centralization of my work within culture. Sometimes I get a little haughty in panel discussions when I'm introduced as 'Lari Pittman, gay artist.' I'll respond by saying, in my school-marmish voice, 'And I'm human too.'"

It's not difficult, however, to comprehend why Pittman's work is known as being unabashedly gay. Right off, his large, exceedingly colorful canvases exude the visual imprint of interior decoration, a field in which the artist enjoyed a formidable career. "I can understand critics' talking about my work as 'Lari's gay art,'" Pittman admits, "but I never think about it that way. It is my identity; it's not about my identity."

Pittman's identity gives him a lot to draw on. The son of a Colombian mother and an Anglo-German father, he has exhibited his paintings in international museums and galleries, and he is the first openly gay tenured professor in the art department at the University of California, Los Angeles. His achievements have garnered him artist-as-role-model status. "The reality is that a lot of young students have never seen a powerful gay person," he says. "So when they come in contact with me, it's like they're sighting a rare bird."

The power he sees in himself as a gay person is something Pittman incorporates into all of his work. The result? "An effete muscularity that drives straight men nuts," Pittman says. "What is a gay aesthetic? I haven't the faintest idea. But at this moment in American culture, mine is the type of work that would not be made by a straight man."

Pittman admits he can't answer why that is, but he does find pleasure in posing such rhetorical questions. "One of the things I always ask my straight students is how their hetero-sexuality influences their work," he says. "I do this in the same way that I'm always asked how my homosexuality informs my work. I'm very glad to try to answer that question, but I'm still not really sure how it informs my work. And you know something? My straight students are wonderful and bright, but they find that exercise amazingly difficult too."

The blurrier areas of sexuality, gender identity, and mortality all seem to merge in Pittman's paintings, which often include adorned images of entrails, orifices, and excrement. Some of this clearly relates to the fact that Pittman was shot and seriously wounded by a burglar in 1985. The harrowing experience, requiring three major surgeries in the years that followed, gave him a new perspective on life. And rather than making him cynical, the experience seems to have propelled Pittman into what some critics call his mature phase, one in which his paintings, though incredibly detailed and complex, are imbued with an obvious life-affirming spirit.

"Lari's work is both joyous and physically sumptuous," says Howard Fox, the curator who organized the Pittman retrospective. "It's full of messages about life, love, anguish, and anger. They are extremely optimistic pictures that uphold human dignity wherever it occurs."

The optimism illustrated in Pittman's work may also reflect the happiness he's experienced in his personal life. For more than two decades he's been in a long-term relationship with artist Roy Dowell, a man he met while they were both graduate students. "It was a case of our instantly liking each other," Pittman says. Still, he views the idea of gay marriage with some degree of ambivalence. "Puhl-e-e-eze," he scoffs. "I hate all the sentimentality and romance that surrounds it. Yet Roy and I have lived together for 24 years, and I find it a pain that we have to set up all these alternate ways of transferring our property to each other. [Gay marriage] has nothing to do with morality, religion, or romantic ideas about unions. For me, it's just about legal efficiency."

It's that kind of bluntness that earns him admirers - and sometimes detractors. Says Pittman: "Once I was teaching a class, and this horrible kid, a rough boy, gets up and says, 'I'm sick and tired of you, Lari, and your gay this and gay that. The way you talk, the whole world is gay!' Well, I just put on my high, fussy power hat and said, 'Yes, the whole world is gay, and there are these few isolated moments that I perceive as heterosexual, and you're one of them.'" This particular experience seems to underscore Pittman's approach to both his life and his work. "The queer person in society has everything to gain and nothing to lose," he says. "So I might as well put that part of myself out there."

RELATED ARTICLE: 1996 a year in art

No hot new talent sprung from the galleries over the past year, but a slew of career retrospectives improved the art world's landscape.

David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles February-April

Of all contemporary gay artists, David Hockney is perhaps the most revered and ebullient. After all, who can resist his sensual, rippling 1960s paintings of nude swimmers or his more recent cubist-inspired Polaroid collages?

But Hockney's formidable works on paper are equally as appealing, as this exhibition, organized in his native England, demonstrated. Arranged chronologically, the show reveals Hockney's ability to maintain a masterful command of his medium whatever his interests. Whether applying his hand to male nudes in Beverly Hills showers, colorful homages to Henri Matisse, opera sets, or portraits of his aging mum, the artist captures the essence of his subjects with just the right line.

Francis Bacon Georges Pompidou Center, Paris June-October

Born in 1909 and expelled from his family for being gay 16 years later, Francis Bacon earned himself a reputation as one of the century's greatest artists.

This retrospective, which travels to Munich in 1997, features nearly 80 works, including his North African landscapes and paintings inspired by religious masterpieces as well as his signature images of oozing, swollen-fleshed figures. Most of the works are from the '60s through '80s, because the artist - who died in 1992 - destroyed much of his early efforts.

Jasper Johns: A Retrospective Museum of Modern Art, New York City October 1996-January 1997

Unquestionably one of America's greatest painters, Jasper Johns hasn't struck much of a chord within the gay community. But since his last retrospective in 1977, his sexual identity has increasingly been the subject of art history research and biographical profiles.

Johns's current MOMA retrospective, which features more than Faces 225 of his highly personal - and frequently ambiguous - paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, can now be seen in a different light. The cryptic work of this sometimes reclusive artist exudes evocative gay visual clues. His abstractions can obscure identity within masterful uses of color, while his inclusion of language explores ideas of representing - and hiding - the self.

Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City October 1996-January 1997

For more than two decades, this New York-based photographer - who identifies herself as bisexual - has captured the lives, loves, and deaths of her closest friends, creating a heartfelt vision of contemporary life on the edge. As collected in this retrospective, Nan Goldin's work plays out as a diary of a generation. It traces a group of people who experienced drug-addled ambisexual 1970s revelry; the draining, mortal effects of substance abuse and AIDS; the recovery movement of the '80s; and the ambivalent nature of survival in the '90s - all things the artist has seen and experienced from the inside.