The Image and the Closet

Chapter 0

Reading the room

In art history, "was this artist queer?" has three different answers: sometimes a documented self-identification, sometimes a scholarly consensus, and sometimes a contested interpretation. This exhibit never collapses the three.

We move from the Old Masters, where over-claiming is easiest and we are most careful, through the open lesbians of Paris and the queer figures of the Harlem Renaissance, to the gay men of mid-century painting, the artists who turned the AIDS crisis into some of the most powerful art of the century, the largest piece of community folk art ever made, and the global, living artists redrawing the field now.

Chapter I

The canon: Renaissance to early modern

The Old Masters are where over-claiming is easiest, so this is where we are most careful, and where the documentary record is often stranger and more specific than the legend.

Michelangelo (1475–1564) wrote roughly 300 poems, a large share addressed in passionate terms to the young Roman nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri. Here the documentary record is precise: his grandnephew, Michelangelo the Younger, changed the masculine pronouns to feminine when he first published the poems in 1623, and the original masculine address was restored by John Addington Symonds in his 1893 translation and biography. The censorship and its reversal are established fact; what they mean about his sexuality is debated, from a homoerotic reading to a Neoplatonic ideal of spiritual love. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was, at about 24 in 1476, anonymously accused with three others of sodomy with a male model, Jacopo Saltarelli; the charge was dismissed for lack of corroborating witnesses. His long association with his pupil "Salai" (Gian Giacomo Caprotti) is also part of the documentary record. The 1476 accusation is a legal document, not a self-statement, and we keep the distinction. Debated / historical interpretation

Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia (above) shows a nude, smiling adolescent Cupid trampling the symbols of human endeavor. A contemporary English visitor recorded the Cupid as modeled by Caravaggio's "own boy or servant that laid with him"; the art historian Gianni Papi proposed this was Cecco del Caravaggio (Francesco Boneri), an identification that is itself contested. The painting's eroticism is documented; the artist's identity is interpretive, and we hold that line. Work verified Identity debated

The firmest pre-modern case is Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), France's most celebrated woman painter of the nineteenth century. She lived more than forty years with Nathalie Micas until Micas's death in 1889, then with the American painter Anna Klumpke, and is buried with both at Père Lachaise. In the 1850s she obtained a police "permission de travestissement" to wear trousers, a legal permit required because an 1800 French ordinance barred women from wearing them, so she could study animals at livestock markets. Her masterpiece The Horse Fair (1852–55) hangs at the Metropolitan Museum. Verified Identity: scholarly consensus (no modern label used)

Sources: Michelangelo and Leonardo scholarship (Symonds, 1893; Florentine court records); Wikipedia and Smarthistory on Amor Vincit Omnia and Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (1998); JSTOR Daily ("Rosa Bonheur's Permission to Wear Pants"), the Met, and AWARE on Bonheur.

Chapter II

Early modernism (c. 1900–1945)

In Paris and Berlin between the wars, queer artists made some of modernism's defining images, and one of them painted a love letter to a dead soldier in code.

Romaine Brooks (1874–1970) was a leading figure of the Paris lesbian expatriate counterculture and the partner of writer Natalie Clifford Barney, whose salon was a hub of sapphic modernism, for some fifty years. Her 1923 Self-Portrait (oil on canvas, 117.5×68.3 cm), now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and released by it to the public domain, shows her in a man's greatcoat, top hat, and collared shirt, an icon of androgynous lesbian self-presentation. The Smithsonian describes her work as calling attention to the obstacles she faced as an open lesbian. Verified

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) painted Portrait of a German Officer (1914, 173.4×105.1 cm, the Met), an abstract elegy for Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, the Prussian officer Hartley loved, who was killed on October 7, 1914, early in the First World War. The canvas encodes his initials "K.v.F.," his regiment number 4, his age at death 24, and the Iron Cross. It is one of the most moving coded love portraits in American art. Verified

Hannah Höch (1889–1978), Dada's photomontage pioneer and co-inventor of political photomontage, lived about nine years (from 1926) with the Dutch writer Til Brugman; her landmark Cut with the Kitchen Knife… (1919–20) is in Berlin's Nationalgalerie. Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) is widely documented as bisexual; we keep that documented bisexuality distinct from the less-documented specifics of her reported affairs, including the one with singer Chavela Vargas, which rests largely on Vargas's later statements (Vargas said she burned Kahlo's letters) and includes a frequently quoted Kahlo letter of disputed authenticity, which we flag rather than quote as fact. Verified works Kahlo bisexuality: consensus Vargas specifics: oral, unverified

Sources: the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum on Brooks; the Met and Smarthistory on Hartley; Wikipedia and Weimar-subculture scholarship on Höch; Britannica ("Was Frida Kahlo LGBTQ?") and biography.com on Kahlo.

Chapter III

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance is recognized as a milieu with significant queer presence, and it is also a lesson in how the visual record can be thinner than the literary one, a gap we show rather than fill.

The 1920s flowering of Black art and letters around Harlem included queer writers and performers, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, the blues stars Gladys Bentley and Ma Rainey (see the Music exhibit). On the visual side, the clearest bridge is Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–1987), a writer and visual artist whose "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," published in the single 1926 issue of the magazine Fire!!, is regarded as the first openly homoerotic work by a Black American writer; he was also a draughtsman of homoerotic illustrations and was openly gay. The sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901–1989), whose sensuous male nudes such as Feral Benga (1935) are read as homoerotic, anchors the period's visual record. Scholarly consensus

Sources: standard Harlem Renaissance scholarship; biographies of Richard Bruce Nugent and Richmond Barthé; the documentary and archival record of Fire!! (1926).

Chapter IV

Mid-century (1930s–1970s)

As open homosexuality remained criminalized, a handful of painters lived and worked openly anyway, and one of them was censored by the U.S. Navy.

Paul Cadmus (1904–1999), a magic-realist who lived openly with his partner Jon Andersson, painted The Fleet's In! (1934), sailors carousing with women and an implied gay pickup. The Navy removed it from a public exhibition, making Cadmus a cause célèbre; the painting is held by the Navy Art Collection. Francis Bacon (1909–1992) was openly gay in an England where male homosexuality was illegal until 1967, and his relationship with George Dyer, whose 1971 death haunts the late triptychs, profoundly shaped his work. Self-identified / consensus

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was open about his sexuality in a way unusual for the 1950s, when the mainstream art world rejected his early "swish" gay drawings; his Factory was a hub of queer creativity, including the trans "superstars" Candy Darling and others among his circle. David Hockney (b. 1937) has been openly gay since the 1960s, when homosexuality was still criminalized in Britain, and painted gay domesticity matter-of-factly in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961) and Domestic Scene, Los Angeles (1963); the California pool paintings such as A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate) read within a gay sensibility. Verified Hockney living · public facts only

Sources: Navy Art Collection records and standard Cadmus biography; Tate and standard Bacon scholarship; the Andy Warhol Museum; Tate and Hockney's own published statements.

Chapter V

The AIDS era (c. 1985–1996)

The crisis produced an art of emergency: posters meant to save lives, collectives that turned advertising against the state, and a portrait that the visitor is invited to carry away.

Keith Haring (1958–1990), an AIDS activist diagnosed with HIV in 1988 who founded the Keith Haring Foundation in 1989 to fund AIDS organizations and children's programs, made the "Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death" poster for ACT UP. David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) made Untitled (One Day This Kid…) (1990–91), a childhood photograph of the artist ringed by text forecasting the persecution a gay child will face; first shown in May 1990, it is in the Whitney's collection. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related illness on July 22, 1992. Verified

The Silence=Death Project was a six-person New York collective, Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarras, formed in 1985, whose pink-triangle-on-black poster (1986, on the streets by early 1987) reclaimed the Nazi-camp badge and was then adopted by ACT UP, founded March 1987. The collective Gran Fury, spun out of ACT UP with members including Avram Finkelstein, Tom Kalin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, and Robert Vazquez-Pacheco, made "Kissing Doesn't Kill" (1989) and "The Government Has Blood on Its Hands"; the Canadian trio General Idea turned Robert Indiana's "LOVE" typography into a viral "AIDS" image (1987), and two of its three members died of AIDS in 1994. Félix González-Torres (1957–1996) made "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), an ideal 175-pound spill of wrapped candy, the healthy body weight of his partner Ross Laycock, that visitors take away and that is endlessly replenished; it is at the Art Institute of Chicago. Verified

Sources: the Keith Haring Foundation; the Whitney and the Wojnarowicz Foundation; Wikipedia and the Brooklyn Museum on the Silence=Death Project; Wikipedia and The Art Story on Gran Fury; the Art Institute of Chicago on González-Torres. Note: all of these works are in copyright; described here, not reproduced, until licensed.

Chapter VI

The Quilt

The largest piece of community folk art in the world is a memorial, and it began as one activist's idea on a San Francisco street.

Conceived by activist Cleve Jones in San Francisco in 1985 and built by the NAMES Project Foundation, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was first displayed on October 11, 1987, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. That first display held 1,920 panels, was already larger than a football field, and was seen by roughly half a million people over the weekend. Each panel is the size of a grave, hand-sewn by the friends, lovers, and families of the dead. Verified

The Quilt now holds some 50,000 panels bearing around 110,000 names, and its records are kept by the Library of Congress and the National AIDS Memorial. It is at once the period's most important work of vernacular art and one of its most complete archives of loss, which is why it sits at the center of this exhibit rather than in a footnote. Verified

Sources: History.com (Oct 11, 1987), Wikipedia, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, and the Library of Congress AIDS Memorial Quilt Records. Federal/NPS photographs of the 1987 Mall display are largely public domain and a cleared-image opportunity (verify per file); press-agency photographs are not.

Chapter VII

Contemporary & global (living artists)

The field today is photographic, global, and led by living artists who name themselves, which changes both what we can show and what we owe them.

Catherine Opie (b. 1961), an out lesbian photographer, carved a house and two women holding hands into the skin of her own back for Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), a longing for a lesbian family the law would not recognize, and followed it with Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994); both are in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Verified

Zanele Muholi (b. 1972), the South African visual activist, is non-binary and uses they/them, and we use they/them throughout. Their ongoing Faces and Phases (begun 2006) builds a portrait archive of Black LGBTQI lives, and Somnyama Ngonyama / Hail the Dark Lioness (begun 2014) turns the camera on themselves; a major retrospective filled Tate Modern. Verified

Internationally, Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003) was among the first major Indian artists to depict gay themes openly (You Can't Please All, 1981, Tate). Beyond a few anchors, the documentation of global queer art is uneven, and for living artists in places where being LGBTQ+ is dangerous we will not extrapolate identity from subject matter alone, a safety and consent rule, not merely a sourcing one. Living people · public facts only · consent & safety gate

Sources: the Guggenheim and Smarthistory on Opie; Britannica and Tate on Muholi (they/them); Tate on Khakhar. Opie's and Muholi's photographs are in copyright and require permission; described here, not reproduced.

Chapter VIII

How we know, and what we are still confirming

• Three kinds of claim, never blurred Method

  Every artist carries a tag: self-identified, scholarly consensus, or debated. Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Caravaggio are shown as debated, and the Kahlo–Vargas specifics as oral and unverified; that transparency is itself part of the exhibit.

• The copyright wall is real Rights

  The canon through early modernism can be illustrated with public-domain works (Caravaggio, Bonheur, Brooks, Hartley). Nearly everything from the AIDS era onward, Haring, Wojnarowicz, Gran Fury, General Idea, González-Torres, Opie, Muholi, is in copyright; we describe those works and budget for licensing rather than reproduce from the web. Installation shots of in-copyright works are not a loophole.

• Threads to add in a fuller build Finding

  Trans and gender-nonconforming artists as a named thread (Greer Lankton, Tourmaline), 1970s lesbian-feminist art (Harmony Hammond, "A Lesbian Show," 1978), the Mapplethorpe / NEA "culture wars" of 1989–90, and Latin American and African queer art beyond the single anchors.

Key sources: the Met; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Whitney; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim; Tate; the Keith Haring Foundation; the Library of Congress. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.