‘First Homosexuals’ Traces Influence of Nascent Identity on Art – ARTnews.com

Painter Paul Cadmus once remarked that in the 1930s, New York gays were simply called gay artists. How anomaly became synonymous with the arts is really a tale of modernism
itself – one full of private laws and intimate nepotism. Think Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde coterie in Paris, Natalie Barney’s contemporary Left Bank salon, or Cadmus’ private circle in
New York. From at least Oscar Wilde onward, the grotesque and the aesthetic have been linked in the public imagination.

The First Homosexuals: Global Portraits of a New Identity, 1869-1930, an exhibition at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, seeks to emphasize this fact on a large scale. The show was intended to be one massive survey until a pandemic forced the show’s curators—a team of 23 researchers led by Jonathan D. Katz and Johnny Willis – on splitting it in two. The first half brings together about 100 works in various media from multiple (mostly Western) countries; A larger second installment, which will add more artists from the Middle East, Latin America and Asia to the mix, will open at Wrightwood in 2025.

As its lofty title indicates, the show begins with the annoying word itself. Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kyrtebene is credited with coining the term gay in 1869 to refer to a distinct group of persons rather than behaviour. The word had legal and medical implications that were more useful to bureaucrats than to the common people. But by the late nineteenth century, when British physician Havelock Ellis and writer John Addington Symonds wrote sexual inversionIn their landmark study of homosexuality, the term was more widely popular. Conceptually, Early Gays aims to examine how the nascent word and its accompanying identity filtered into visual art and influenced it over the ensuing decades. Is such an intimate work or a self-aware conception that written language cannot?

The answers given here are mixed. In some ways, the exhibition’s incompleteness hinders its impact. The six plotted decades provide a temporal constraint without narrative coherence, a shortcoming that not even an explicit mural text can address. Instead of facilitating aesthetic interaction and organic dialogue between the selected works, the curators opt for an intriguing anthropological approach. This is reflected in the gallery’s design: each small room is painted in a distinctive color and connected to the others by archways that evoke Stein or Barney’s bohemian salons, displaying one of nine thematic categories: ‘Before Homosexuality’, ‘Archetypes’, ‘Desire’, ‘Past and Future’. , “public and private”, “colonialism”, “between races”, “status” and “couples”. The work is suspended asynchronously, so there is no sense of continuity or progression, just tireless eclecticism.

This does not mean that there are no gems on offer. British painter Duncan Grant Swimmers by the pool (1920-21), a scene of languid sunbathing men in patterned paint and earthy tones, inspires the imagination. American painter Charles Demuth eight o’clock (early morning), 1917, a delicate watercolor in which two men—one seated in pajamas and the other standing imploringly in underwear—share a moment of fuzzy domesticity while another (nude) man washes his face in a basin in the background. Bath House Study (n.d.), black chalk drawing by Swedish artist Eugen Jansson (1862-1915), depicting an almost geometric composition of naked men, each suspended in their own erotic stillness—a painting that would not be out of place in the late twentieth-century works of Americans Patrick Angus or John Burton Harter.

Other works here point to deeper cultural currents. A wall of archival photographs documents the Temple of Elisarion, a new religious temple built in Switzerland by poet and artist Elisàr von Kupffer with his partner, philosopher Eduard von Mayer. These images—some of which show men in makeshift crowns and robes striking in nature—evoke the utopian spirit that infused gay life across the Atlantic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as embodied, for example, by the American poet Walt Whitman and his British counterpart Edward Carpenter. increasing strength (1904), a majestic oil painting by German artist Sascha Schneider, depicting a seasoned bodybuilder erecting the biceps of a young assistant—a precursor to the fitness magazines and “body cult” that defined gay life in the mid-century and beyond.

To its credit, the show also looks beyond the masculine or English-speaking perception of homosexuality. Carte de visite photographs by Norwegian couple Marie Högg and Paulette Berg show women dressed as men or dressed as androgynous. Likewise, portraits of Alice Austen, one of the first American women to shoot outside the studio, captured playful, if discreet, moments of lesbian socializing. Paintings and manuscripts by Japanese and Chinese artists, many of them unknown, offer the most overtly erotic period of exhibition, as in one print illustrating a meandering mixed orgy. Elsewhere, an unknown photographer films two black actors, one in drag, dancing at a picnic in turn-of-the-century Paris. Louis Lumiere’s silent film clip Le Cake-Walk at Nouveau Circus (1903), the earliest known recording of a drag performance, played on a nearby screen. Even more than a century later, footage of the artists enacting a dance that originated among slaves radiates a haunting, carefree joy tinged with the bigotry of the day.

A handful of pieces feel lost. American painter Romaine Brooks’s 1912 painting of the Italian nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, the sober analogy in Brooks’ signature gray palette, is a tantalizing choice. (D’Annunzio, a notorious womanizer, was not gay, looming in a playless chic style over the room.) Brooks’ self-portrait—or one of her many portraits of contemporaries—would have been a stronger choice. With three paintings on display, Canadian artist Florence Carlyle has dedicated more wall space than her elegant but boring portraits of women deserve. Also, the program’s “colonialism” section, which attempts to explore how Western attitudes toward homosexuality differ from those of Indigenous and Oriental populations, is also undercooked. Wilhelm von Gloeden, the German photographer who decamped to Italy to present pastoral fantasies with naked Sicilian boys, is included here, though his role as colonizer is debatable.

Ultimately, the show has the tone of a sociology textbook: earnest, pedantic, and often more pompous than heady. The premise itself appears to be wrong. It wasn’t as if 1869 was a eureka moment that propelled gay artists, collectively, into self-representational careers. Increasing secularism, urbanization, and the media have led to gender identification more than the invention of the word itself, yet these realities remain either unexplored or perverted here. Rather than tracing the back-channel story of modernity, the curators are taking a mixed look wunderkammer. For a show that takes so much effort to frame homosexuality as fluid, the thematic design comes off as rigid and limiting. Here we hope to ease the second installment.