Biography
Although von Gloeden claimed to be a minor German aristocrat from Mecklenburg, the von Gloeden family and its heirs have always insisted that no such person existed in their family records and his claim to The Barony von Gloeden was without warrant; the barony became extinct in 1885 with the death of Baron Falko von Gloeden. Wilhelm von Gloeden was the son of head forester (forstmeister) Carl Hermann von Gloeden]] (1820–1862) and his wife Charlotte Maassen (1824–1901; from 1864 von Hammerstein).
After studying art history in Rostock (1876), he studied painting under Karl Gehrts at the Weimar Kunstakademie (1876–77) until he was forced by lung disease (apparently tuberculosis) to interrupt his schooling for a year, convalescing at a sanatorium in the Baltic Sea resort of Gröbersdorf. In a search for health, he travelled to Italy (1877–78), first staying in Naples before moving on to Taormina in Sicily. He lodged at the Hotel Vittoria before buying a house near San Domenico. Apart from the period 1915-18 during World War I, when he was forced to leave Sicily to avoid incarceration as an undesirable alien, he remained in Taormina until his death in 1931.
The mayor of Taormina in 1872-82 was the German landscape painter Otto Geleng (1843–1939), who had moved there in 1863. Through him, von Gloeden became acquainted with the local inhabitants. He set up his photographic studio in Taormina at first as a hobby and was exhibiting his work internationally by 1893 (London), including Cairo (1897), Berlin (1898–99, including a solo exhibition), Philadelphia (1902), Budapest & Marseilles (1903), Nice (1903 & 1905), Riga (1905), Dresden (1909) and Rome (World Fair 1911).
His well-known study of two young boys clinging to an Ionic column was published in The Studio (London) in June 1893 (above a nude study of Cecil Castle by Baron Corvo), which brought his work to the notice of a wider public.
In 1895, when the family fortune was lost through the "Hammerstein affair", he received as a gift from his friend and patron the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a large-format plate camera. Soon his work brought him visitors from Europe, including royalty, industrialists, writers (Oscar Wilde in December 1897) and artists. In 1930, von Gloeden ceased work as a photographer and sold his house on the Piazza S. Domenico in Taormina in return for an annuity & residence rights.
Von Gloeden scrupulously shared the proceeds of his sales with his models, providing a considerable economic boost in this comparatively poor region of Italy, which might explain why the homosexual aspects of his life and work were generally tolerated by the locals.
His cousin, Guglielmo Plüschow (1852–1930), also a photographer of nudes, helped von Gloeden get more familiar with the technical side of photography (until then von Gloeden had not been a hobby photographer). Other important teachers of von Gloeden were local photographer Giovanni Crupi (1859–1925) in the Via Teatro Greco and the pharmacist/photographer Giuseppe Bruno (1836–1904) in the Corso.
Read more about this topic: Wilhelm Von Gloeden
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