In the new exhibit at Wrightwood 659, curators Jonathan D. Katz and Johnny Willis have realized the full version of an ambitious goal. To create an art exhibition that recognizes and honors the significant contributions queer artists have made to art history. The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869 – 1939, revisits the past through art and exposes truths about people and societies that make us rethink our conceptions about sexuality. The exhibit opened this month after a painstaking six-year search encompassing the globe, with 22 scholars on their advisory board assisting the curators.
Intended as a visual learning exhibition as well as one filled with sensational aesthetic beauty, the messages being relayed in artwork gathered from around the world tell remarkable and fascinating stories. Through paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, films and photographs, our notions about how to regard sexuality across time and place become reset; altering how we view issues surrounding it today.
An earlier version of the show was unveiled in the fall 2022. Comprising over 300 works of art by more than 125 artists from 40 countries, the current exhibition is four times as large. The added depth and coverage make it infinitely more comprehensive and endlessly engrossing. The works are on loan from over 100 museums and private collections across the world.
Before 1869, the term “homosexual” did not exist. By segmenting the exhibition into eight parts, Katz and Willis look at the concept of queerness both before and after that date, revealing how the word’s creation has affected people’s views of themselves and one another.
The exhibition is organized as a journey of discovery with a specific start and end; it begins pre-1869 on the top floor of the gallery with Before the Binary. A time when distinctions concerning sexuality were much more nuanced and pliable than they’ve become after that date. A print of the Chevalier d’Éon highlights the acceptance of sexual ambiguity and fluidity in the 18th century French court. d’Éon, a decorated spy who often presented himself as a woman, was recognized as female by King Louis XVI. The print, showing a middle-aged Chevalier in female accoutrement and wearing the Cross of St. Louis, a medal awarded to French officers for merit and distinguished service, is a study in supremely confident self-awareness and actualization.
Beyond the Binary on the second floor marks the show’s final chapter and includes “the first self-consciously trans image in the history of art.”. Also, and from the perspective of an artist’s gaze, it looks at the promotion of a new religion in Switzerland that believed that “the division of people by gender was a perversion of divine will”.
The segments bookended by the two binaries cover a tremendous amount of ground highlighting the people, history, artistic influences and geo-political forces that shaped queer culture and continue to impact how it's viewed today.
Portraits celebrate the personalities who’re now considered trailblazers and champions in queer history. Lush, virtually majestic images of Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman are individually and together powerfully arresting. Whether executed by a master or a gifted intimate, each portrait sheds precious insight into character, will and purpose. Another painting, one of a young James Baldwin, captures genius in fresh flower.
The complexity of human relationships has likely been the norm since civilizations originally took root. The First Homosexuals looks at them during the late 19th and early 20th century through queer eyes and those of empathetic others. The range of perspectives is riveting, sometimes humorous and often telling. One large scale painting is particularly memorable for both its subject matter and its painter. In Hendrik Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence, a serenely intimate moment is shared by two men in a tranquil bedroom. Completed in 1894, it shines with a type of peace—a blissful aura—that hardly seems imaginable. That it was painted by one of the men’s brothers, Andreas Andersen, is equally significant and indicative of a generosity of compassion that’s been present throughout time but rarely recognized.
Nudes have always been a vital genre of art and Changing Bodies, Changing Definitions delves into how they’ve evolved from the vantage point of sexuality. The array of artistic viewpoints in this section of the exhibition is wonderfully overwhelming and just as edifying. Le Trajet (The Journey) stands out in the way it repudiates the norm to attain its own singular standard of beauty. On loan from the Smithsonian, Romaine Brooks' nude study of her lover, the dancer Ida Rubenstein, is ethereal, haunting and seems to float in some distant future, despite it being completed in 1911. Carrying none of the objectification we associate with general depiction of nudes, instead it inscrutably embodies the spirit of its title.
Throughout The First Homosexuals, the consequences of conquest on sexual self-expression and behavior keeps resurfacing and is confronted directly in the show’s Colonialism and Resistance galleries. Prior to the age of exploration and the race for empire, much of the world was either quite accepting of or benignly tolerant of same sex involvements. Japan was one such country, which, before being exposed to Western influences, considered same sex love another fitting expression of personal intimacy. Japanese artwork included in the exhibition illustrates that expansiveness of outlook. Similar representations from China, art saved from destruction during the Cultural Revolution, not only acknowledge but showcase and exalt the elasticity of human sexual expression.
Through domination or the leverage of trade, Western mores and religions began penetrating the wider world and became instilled in foreign cultures. In addition to acts of personal defiance, some of the resistance to those forces were reflected in art. Paintings and photographs from Egypt and other parts of northern Africa provide their own vivid view of how distant and ancient cultures blur the lines when dealing with matters of sexuality. Although their placement on a map may be different from the origins of other art pieces in the show, there’s a continuity of truth and naturalness they share with every other item in the exhibition. There's a universality of being that’s best expressed and appreciated en masse. Despite its sweeping breadth, curators would have liked the exhibition to have been even broader. Efforts to obtain representative works from India proved futile and there are also none from central or southern Africa. Even with their absence, it’s difficult to absorb the show’s bounty in a single viewing.
Although curators Katz and Willis anticipate taking the exhibition to Europe, Chicago is currently the only city in this country fortunate enough to host it, thanks to Wrightwood 659’s steadfast commitment to presenting outstanding, and often incomparable, socially engaged art.
The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869-1939 is on display through July 26 at Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood Ave. For more information, go to the gallery’s website, https://wrightwood659.org or call 773-437-6601. Wrightwood 659 is open Thursday (June 5 to July 3 only), Friday and Saturday. Advance tickets are required.
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