Sidney Hunt

Sidney Hunt (1896–1940) was a British draughtsman, painter, poet and editor who published the avant-garde journal Ray between 1926 and 1927.

In 1926 and 1927, Hunt edited the avant-garde magazine Ray, which has been described as the English equivalent of influential art journals from the 1920s such as Merz, Mecano and De Stijl.

[1] Ray featured work of leading figures of the European avant-garde such as Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, Naum Gabo and Hans Arp.

[2] Much of Hunt's work is homoerotic; he had homosexual patrons like Sir Edward Marsh; Alfred Flechtheim reproduced his Ganymede in Der Querschnitt (1921, VIII, p. 346); his drawings of boys appeared with those of Ralph Chubb in The Island in 1931; the bookplates he produced feature naked youths; and Oswell Blakeston published his experimental prose poem fantasies of 18-year-old hermaphrodites in the first, 1933 issue of Seed (p. 7).

He is one of the few modernist artists to use abstraction to express the essentials of male beauty in simplified forms like his painting of "Ganymede" or by contrasts of black and white as in "Drawing" (1922).