GLR March-April 2023

ART

We Were Everywhere Then, Too

C HICAGO’S WRIGHTWOOD 659, a private institution focused on socially engaged art, mounted a landmark exhibition, The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930 , last fall. A team of in ternational scholars, led by art historian Jonathan D. Katz, assembled a ground breaking show with over 100 paintings, prints, photographs, and film clips that re

depending on the viewer. The third section, “Archetypes,” dis closed how the use of the term “Uranian”— suggesting a misalignment of soul and body—played out before the word “homo sexuality” was coined. Here it was revealed how the ideal of male beauty evolved from the 19th-century ephebe , who combined both male and female traits, to a resolutely masculine ideal of perfection, epitomized

I GNACIO D ARNAUDE

THE FIRST HOMOSEXUALS Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930 Oct. 1, 2022 - Jan. 28, 2023 Wrightwood 659, Chicago

by Thomas Eakins’ Salutat (1898). In this painting, a crowd not so much cheers a boxing victory as absorbs the exposed buttocks of a boxer glowing at the center of the canvas, the area histori cally reserved for eroticized female subjects. Sascha Schneider’s Growing Strength (1904), in which an ephebic youth is trained by a muscled older man, cements this new male ideal in a stun ning image. The fourth section, “Pose ,” showcased the deployment of various codes of representation and the crafting of a persona to meet a condemning world. Roberto Montenegro’s iconic por trait of the antiques dealer Chucho Reyes (1926) features the limp wrist, the tilted chin, and the wry smile that signified a certain type of man. The artist included in the foreground a sil ver ball reflecting his own face, bringing himself into the pic ture, a proud declaration of his own connection to the main subject. The fifth section, “Between Genders,” reminded us that the

veal how, as Katz notes, “while language narrowed into a sim plistic binary of homosexual / heterosexual, art gave form to a nuanced range of sexualities and genders that can best be de scribed as queer.” This trailblazing exhibition offered a tantalizing survey of the artists whose self-consciously queer art first fell under the category of “homosexual,” a term that was coined in Europe in 1869, catapulting same-sex desire into a new category of per sonal identity. One of the show’s most exciting aspects was that it chal lenged conventional art history by lifting the cover from works that have not been widely understood as homoerotic. In doing so, it revealed how art became one of the primary vehicles through which “the love that dared not speak its name” was able to manifest itself. The exhibition also introduced some artists who are little known in the U.S. but revered in their own coun tries, including Gerda Wegener (Denmark), Eugène Jansson (Sweden), and Frances Hodgkins (New Zealand). The First Homosexuals was divided into nine sec tions that offered a clear-eyed understanding of how the “first homosexuals” saw themselves and how dominant culture understood them. The first section, titled “Before Homosexuality,” featured 19th-century works that demonstrate that same-sex eroticism was far from a new art subject be fore the debut of the word “homosexual.” In Europe, the representation of classical, mythological, and reli gious themes such as Saint Sebastian provided artists with ample opportunities to showcase homoerotic im ages and a remarkable array of sexual possibilities. The second section , “Couples,” shined light on how many artists were romantically involved with other artists and often created works that depicted their partners. Louise Abbéma’s portrait of Sarah Bernhardt and herself by a lake was a tribute to their union. A standard exhibition would have focused on Bernhardt as a celebrity, ignoring their relationship, but this one identifies this as a portrait of domestic in timacy, showing how art can have alternate meanings, Ignacio Darnaude is an art writer, lecturer, and film pro ducer. He is currently developing the docuseries Hiding in Plain Sight: Breaking the Queer Code in Art .

Roberto Montenegro. Portrait Antiquarian Chucho Reyes , 1926.

The G & LR

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