When did homosexuality change from a description of what people do to a definition of who they are? How was an act transformed into an identity? In this precarious moment, as White House pronouncements, court decisions and public polling indicate backsliding support for gay rights in this country, such questions, long chewed over by scholars of sociology, philosophy and gender studies, are addressed in two impressive art exhibitions in Chicago.
Six years in the making, “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago, through Aug. 2, is an eye-opening global survey of same-sex-oriented art. With roughly 300 works on view, venturing beyond Europe and North America to include Latin America and Asia, it is a huge show. Yet the curator Jonathan D. Katz, who was assisted by Johnny Willis, said that procuring loans from international museums for an exhibition with this title and focus was a struggle, and more often than not, the requests were refused. Indeed, at the last moment, two promised paintings from Slovakia, which is governed by a socially conservative populist party, were withdrawn; a large black-and-white reproduction of one is hanging on a wall.
Coincidentally, a superlative exhibition nearby, “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” at the Art Institute of Chicago until Oct. 5, explores how the Impressionist master concentrated on the portrayal of men, at a time when turning the male gaze on another man was almost unthinkable. Most of his depictions are not overtly homoerotic. However, in a large painting, scandalous in its day and startling even now, he viewed from behind a naked man drying himself. It’s the sort of boudoir picture that his friend Edgar Degas frequently made of female bathers. Caillebotte, who died at 45 in 1894, lived with a woman and never identified as gay. An important lesson drawn from both shows is that categories like gay and straight are markers of our time, not his.
As documented in the erudite and sumptuous “First Homosexuals” catalog, the term “homosexual” (and “heterosexual”) came into being in the 1860s, along with “urning,” a newly coined word that has not lasted so well. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, divided humanity into those who are innately attracted to the opposite sex, and the “urnings” who are enamored of their own. A few years later, the writer Karl Maria Kertbeny came up with “homosexual.” Unlike Ulrichs, he viewed sexual choice as a changeable taste, not a binary division, akin to deciding what dish to cook for dinner. Yet in the years that followed, Ulrichs’s hard-and-fast split between gay and straight came to be popularized with Kertbeny’s terminology.
Katz argues that at about the turn of the 20th century, in light of behavioral and psychological research, same-sex attraction shifted. Instead of something that could turn like a weather vane, it came to be regarded as an immutable orientation, and the objects of erotic fascination for gay and lesbian artists changed, too. Earlier gay artists embraced indeterminacy and represented bodies that blurred the line between masculine and feminine. But once homosexuality was no longer viewed as a momentary preference, androgynous adolescents gave way to muscular men and buxom women.
Two paintings in the show by the academic French painter Gustave Courtois illustrate this transformation. In 1872, Courtois limned the nude body of a young model who posed as the self-adoring Narcissus. With his sex discreetly hidden by a ribbon, Narcissus elides the distinction between male and female. But over the next 35 years, Courtois rechanneled his energies. Painting a portrait of Maurice Dériaz, a professional bodybuilder, in 1907, Courtois clearly relished Dériaz’s dark mustache and bulging biceps as emblems of virility.
Courtois is believed to have been the life partner of another painter, Carl Ernst von Stetten. The exhibition includes a polished drawing of them walking arm in arm, which the art historian André Dombrowski asserts in an essay is the first known depiction of a modern gay male couple in European art. Women more frequently paired off as loving friends; the show features many depictions of lesbian domesticity, including the photos that Alice Austen made on Staten Island at the end of the 19th century, of herself and her friends, holding each other tenderly or frolicking in drag.
Many of the gay male encounters portrayed in Western art are fleeting or transactional. In early 20th-century America, George Bellows, who was not gay, made a print of a public bathhouse that centers on a naked effeminate youth flirting outrageously with a stout older chap; and Charles Demuth, who was gay, depicted himself in conversation with two sailors on a street outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Same-sex relations between men were thought to be driven by lust, not affection.
But in other cultures, same-sex relations and gender nonconformity were accepted. The exhibition includes fascinating depictions of cross-dressers in the early 19th century on the street in Lima, Peru; the erotic adventures of a young man engaged with male and female lovers in a Japanese scroll from the mid-19th century; and the tender intimacies in the early 20th century of Uzbek men with youths who worked traditionally as singers and dancers.
And even in the West, by the end of the 19th century, one can find affectionate scenes of domesticity, such as a painting from 1893 by the Danish artist Emilie Mundt of her female partner, their adopted daughter, and the partner’s elderly father at the piano; and a remarkable portrayal the next year by Andreas Andersen of his sculptor brother Hendrik lying under a duvet and stroking a pink-ribboned kitten, as the artist John Briggs Potter, naked at the foot of the bed, pulls on a sock.
For sheer eccentricity, it would be hard to outdo Elisàr von Kupffer, who called himself Elisarion. With his partner, Eduard von Mayer, also an artist, he lived in a mansion in southern Switzerland that he deemed a temple dedicated to a self-styled religion that denied gender differences. His endearingly campy 1915-16 oil painting of two youths in a chapel being joined in union by another young man, all of them nude, is said to be the first artistic depiction of a same-sex wedding.
Unlike these gay fantasies, in the art of Caillebotte there is no certain tip-off to sexual orientation. A wide-ranging talent who energetically pursued boating, boat design, philately and gardening, along with painting, the independently wealthy artist was for many years remembered primarily as a patron of his fellow Impressionists, bequeathing his collection of their work to France. When his own art was rediscovered, it was hailed for its radical use of perspective and cropped framing, which he derived from photography. The more recent curiosity about Caillebotte’s interest in masculine subjects raises questions that can’t be answered, and the curators are careful to avoid making any claims about his sexuality.
But naysayers who argue that finding traces of homoeroticism in Caillebotte’s work is an unsupported anachronism are mistaken. His first major painting, “Floor Scrapers,” depicted bare-chested muscular men stripping the wood parquet in the apartment of his parents. Its rejection by the establishment Salon of 1875 led Caillebotte to ally himself with the Impressionists and exhibit with them the following year. When he took up boating at his country estate outside Paris, his paintings of the sporting activity, unlike those of his colleagues Manet, Monet and Renoir, depicted only lithe men at the oars, rather than fashionable male-female couples. Most of the men he portrayed were not engaged in war, hunting or business, but within domestic settings thought to constitute the feminine domain.
These musings are not merely the product of our own day. The almost life-size “Man at His Bath,” with its subject prosaically naked rather than heroically or classically nude, provoked embarrassment and hostility when Caillebotte tried to exhibit it in 1884. It would have held pride of place at Wrightwood 659; none of the artists in that show, gifted and intriguing as many of them are, approaches Caillebotte in achievement. He painted the towel with white and gray slashes of pigment, but stippled the skin lovingly in flesh tones, with rosy highlights on the buttocks. Eventually, the canvas was accepted for an exhibition by the progressive Brussels artists society, Les XX, in 1888, but the organizers hid it in a back room to avoid attention. The following year, the leading Impressionist dealer in Paris, Paul Durand-Ruel, declined to show it, and Caillebotte, who didn’t need to sell his paintings, withdrew from exhibiting for the remainder of his life.
Caillebotte’s reputation hardly rests on his predilection for male subjects. His vertiginous depictions of the street as viewed from his balcony, which are included in the exhibition, are justifiably acclaimed. His most famous painting, “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” a treasure of the Art Institute, with its exaggerated perspective, bold cropping and a choreography that softens the bustle of urban life into a gentle ballet, doesn’t gain anything from scrutinizing in what direction the male protagonist is looking.
Indeed, the hunt for telltale signs of his sexual orientation turns ludicrous at times. The notion that the working-class fellow looking out over the Pont de l’Europe, in Caillebotte’s painting of that name, could be a sex worker eyed by the well-dressed bourgeois who is the artist’s double — as suggested in an essay by a feminist art historian, Norma Broude, that is cited in the catalog — strikes me as absurd. Yet refusing to acknowledge the homosocial, and in some instances homoerotic, elements in Caillebotte’s work is also a distortion of the record.
At this politically charged moment, American arts institutions seem anxious to avoid controversy. Wrightwood 659 offered to send its monumental exhibition to a major museum, without a fee and even covering the costs. It received no acceptances (although an abbreviated version, one-fifth the size, will be shown at the Kunstmuseum Basel next year). And the Art Institute chose a banal and anodyne title for its Caillebotte exhibition, “Painting His World,” forgoing the title of the Musée d’Orsay and the J. Paul Getty Museum shows: “Painting Men.” Asked why, the Chicago curator Gloria Groom said the new title was more “inclusive”: the show displays the artist’s sole female nude and a few other nonconforming works. But in practice, the rebranding obscures the originality of this take on Caillebotte’s oeuvre. Maybe the art world has not come so far as we might think from the days when “Man at His Bath” was hidden in a virtual closet.
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