Gay in Art: a brief art history guide
By 2019, when I first wrote this guide, Gay in Art suffers a lot of prejudice, repression and censorship. From a historical-blazé-pessimistic perspective, it is not big news. And, from a historical-optimistic-shiny perspective, all this oppression has never stopped — and will not stop — artists from finding ways to expressing themselves. Well, if you think about it, repression usually works in favor of creativity and further fuels it. After all, as Swift sings, "shade never made anybody less gay."
I will share here some examples of Art that are not shown in the mainstream Art History records as they should. I will also try to bring some context to the works, so we can understand why they rest in limbo. But first, Gay in Art 101. For a work of art to be considered queer, basically suffices that it:
Questions gender stereotypes/social norms.
Addresses homosexuality as a theme.
Disregard the bias of the observer of an artwork being always heterosexual and male.
Gender Representation
The work Young Spartans Exercising, by Edgar Degas, can be considered queer for a number of reasons, but mostly because it reviews some norms of gender representation through the ambiguity or illegibility of body shapes. You see, although Degas points to sexual differences such as breasts and genitals, all faces, hair, and legs are similar in both boys and girls. Allegedly, the artist used only one male model for all figures.
'Young Spartans Exercising' (c.1860) by Edgar Degas. National Gallery, London, UK. Source
The girl in the center is represented with an attitude usually attributed to the male gender. She is the one who's active, she does not stand passively. The groups are both kind of masculine and kind of homoerotic to a degree that challenged too many conventions at its time. Even among the self-proclaimed "modern" Parisian avant-garde .
If you are not part of the art nerds club, hardly you’ve heard of Edgar Degas’s Young Spartans Exercising. Most of people, movies, books or whatever, refer only to his lovely ballerinas.
Degas was not openly gay, but the work is anyway underestimated. Next we'll see some artworks by very out of the closet/openly queer artists, because representativeness absolutely matters.
The Male Nude
'Two Boys at the Beach' (c. 1938) by Paul Cadmus. John Wolf Art Advisory & Brokerage, Los Angeles, US. Source
Paul Cadmus became a target of international attention when his work was censored for focusing insistently on representations of the male body in various states of nudity. In interviews at the time of the censorship (1934) and even in testimonies from the 90s as an elderly man, the artist has always avoided an explicit connection to gay identity, “it was quite unconscious,” he used to insist. Today we know what Cadmus wanted was his work to be acknowledged for his technique and arduous figurative training. For his references of the Renaissance. For his skill. He was never able to be advertised simply as a super talented artist, because the focus of critics and interviewers layed always on his sexual orientation.
I do believe there has been a change of heart in Art History in the last decades and now writers finally understood that there is more to an artist than hers or his sexual orientation. Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Annie Leibovitz, to quote some, all have their work analysed and praised to exhaustion, and, in some cases, their queerness is not acknowledged. I think Cadmus was forcing people to see that artists tend to be very complex, nuanced human people, and their work even more. That was his point when avoiding identity labels. And now, maybe, just maybe, journalists, interviewers and art historians began to see "dating life monitoring" as the annoying, anti-art and anti-historical attitude that it is.
Moving on.
Lesbian Representations
When I thought of lesbian representations for this guide, Tamara de Lempicka immediately came to mind. So I find it meaningful that I could not find online the very first work I thought of showing: The Two Friends, or Perspective. So here is a picture of it from one of my books:
Back in the 20s and 30s, Lempicka challenged the chauvinist paradigm that turns lesbianism into a fantasy of male desire. The manner in which she represents the two women combined with her personal and historical context makes it clear that she represents the desire of lesbian women for lesbian women. And her audience was aware of that.
