Pictures From An Exhibitionist

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But the prevailing climate of this collection is one of spare, sharp lines, big graphics and crisp edges. John loves Irving Penn, whose work looks clean and sober even when his subject was a New Guinea tribesman caked in ceremonial mud. He loves Robert Mapplethorpe, but without the whips and chains, which means the Mapplethorpe of laser-cut male torsos and tulips that loom before you like stage-lit pachyderms. These pictures were not collected by the inebriated stage floozy we used to know and love. They bear the mark of the studious Sir Elton John, a man buying things in the cold light of the morning after. Even the sex here is stately. Don't look for anything hairy or louche. It's mostly neatly muscled male torsos by Horst, Mapplethorpe or Herb Ritts. The models have abs more tightly organized than Elton's old record collection. Their nipples are neat as a pin.

What's unbuckled, in places, is the melancholy, which may be the emotional default mode of a man who has buried good friends--Gianni Versace, Princess Diana--and lost others to AIDS. The Elton John who wrote Daniel, with its baffled yearning, is the one who loves the blue-tinted male nudes of John Dugdale, with their Victorian grief. The somber undercurrent is plain even in Andres Serrano's vivid crimson circle in a rectangle of bright yellow, which on closer inspection turns out to be a pool of blood.

This show does have its one passage of starstruck pornography, meaning the small gallery designed to resemble a corner of John's living room, with furniture, knickknacks and all. (Ooh! Ah! Hmmm.) Someday John will write one of those obligatory star memoirs, the kind in which he won't be able to decide whether to remember his wild youth or forget it. ("Let's see, was I Pee-wee Herman or Mother Teresa?") Skip the book. The pictures he has bought may give us the best picture of him we are ever likely to get.