In 1975, artist Joe Brainard created Monty Clift’s Shorts, a deceptively simple work that would come to embody the contradictions of one of queer cinema’s most complex figures. The piece, now in MoMA’s collection, draws from photographs of Montgomery Clift taken years earlier on Fire Island, where the closeted actor appeared happy, sexy, and alive in a way his public persona rarely revealed. As Henry Giardina reported for Queerty, Brainard’s work manages to capture something essential about Clift that transcends the usual tragic-gay-icon narrative.
Clift’s story is familiar to many: a Broadway prodigy who became a Hollywood leading man, then a shadow of himself after a devastating 1956 car accident during filming of Raintree Country. The crash and subsequent facial reconstruction surgery marked a turning point. Yet Brainard’s image resists simple interpretation. It shows not despair, but a kind of tender complexity—the slouching, sad, yet somehow joyful portrait of an artist who fundamentally changed what masculinity could look like on screen. Before Clift, Brando, and James Dean, there was no template for the brooding, sensitive leading man. Clift’s vulnerability and interiority formed a bridge between old Hollywood and the new.
Brainard himself would die of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1994, leaving behind influential visual works and the unconventional autobiography I Remember. His tribute to Clift speaks across decades to other queer artists grappling with visibility, desire, and the gap between public constraint and private freedom. In those shorts, Brainard found a way to honor not Clift’s tragedy, but his aliveness.
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