Queer British Art 1861-1967 at the Tate Britain
Queer
British Art 1861-1967 at the Tate Britain
Queer
British Art 1861-1967 at the Tate Britain
The title of this
exhibition sets out a definite temporal limit which does not stretch to the
present day but stops at 1967. The
publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957 paved the way for
legalisation. It concluded that
homosexuality was not a disease or an illness and the committee commissioned to
produce it almost unanimously recommended legalisation. The report was a response to various
sensational legal cases of the era which included the conviction of the scientist
Alan Turing and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.
Thus, an era of semi-legality for homo-erotic acts is defined which also
corresponds to the zenith and then fading strength of the British Empire. This is no coincidence since the two are
intimately connected. In 1861 the death
penalty for sodomy was abolished.
Britain therefore left the ancient and medieval worlds behind. The year 1861 also coincided with new
movements like Marxism which had begun to influence major political events such
as the revolutions of 1848, the so-called Spring of Peoples. Not only was Marx active in London, since he
had been expelled from the continent for his work during the revolution, but
Frederic Nietzsche had begun to outline a radical critique of Christianity
based on the new evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin. Inventions like the machine gun, barbed wire
and the rise of steam power in the form of trains and ships meant that the
world of 1861 now resembled the world of globalised commodity capitalism.
The exhibition considers
early pioneers like Simeon Solomon (1840-1905), a Jewish
artist whose ambiguous
works attracted sustained criticism, even though other even more controversial
work of the era was lightly criticised and even ignored. In 1873, he was gaoled for buggery and died
in penury in the work house. Frederic
Leighton (1830-1896) was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose works
feature naked, nubile young men and attracted criticism from predictable
quarters. An era defining work of
literature was Walter Pater’s (1834-1894) Studies
in the History of the Renaissance (1873) which came to an aesthetic
conclusion endorsing art for art’s sake.
The work was perceived by the public to be anti-religious and hedonistic
but it became Oscar Wilde’s bible. Two
infamous trials began to impinge on Victorian and post-Victorian attitudes and
were clearly landmarks towards legalisation.
The first was that in 1895 of Oscar Wilde, the second the trial of
Radcliffe Hall’s novel The Well of
Loneliness (1928) for supposed obscenity.
The exhibition includes a full-length portrait of Wilde aged 27, at the
very beginning of his rise to fame and then notoriety but also Wilde’s yellow
cell door from Reading Gaol replete with numerous bolts and locks, a potent
symbol of repression and moral hypocrisy.
There are salacious, risqué works by another member of Wilde’s circle,
Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), his drawings and designs for the plays Lysistratus (1896) and Wilde’s work Salome (1890s). Even though Beardsley does not seem to have
taken any interest in homo-erotic acts he still lost his job as editor of the fin de siecle journal The Yellow Book, convicted in a kangaroo
court of guilt by association. The
exhibition also details the influence of the German psychiatrist Richard von
Krafft-Ebing who had begun to classify gender and sexual practises in relation
to the neuroses, work that had also been implicated in Freud’s identification
of the Oedipus Complex as the root of the neuroses and a determinant in the
growth of the individual. Sexuality was
therefore defined in relation to the taboos but also the legal status of
supposed sex crimes.
The ensuing period after
WW1 is defined by the exhibition in terms of the Bloomsbury set which included
authors like Virginia Woolf who pursued lives of private Bohemian enjoyment. Her novel Orlando
depicts a trans-gendered person but this complex novel was never prosecuted or
banned and passed unnoticed beneath the censor’s gaze. The work of Duncan Grant (1885-1978) who
produced works such as Bathing (1911)
for private enjoyment not public display, is also featured. These works display technical innovation,
interestingly, such as Grant’s Bathers by
the Pond (1920-1) which displays the artist’s use of the pointillist
techniques pioneered by Georges Seurat in Paris in the late 19th
century. Popular culture had begun to
impinge on the public’s consciousness too but also sometimes included queer
perspectives. Songs like Noel Coward’s Mad about the Boy (1932) which has been
subsequently covered by many female recording artists and Masculine Women and Feminine Men (1925) sung by Gwen Farrar and
Ricky Mayerl. Included in the exhibition
is Noel Coward’s dressing gown, a big scarlet dressing gown with the monogram
NC embroidered on the right pocket. Like
the yellow door of Oscar Wilde’s cell, the dressing gown is symbolic of the
attitudes of the era for the sexuality of stars like Coward had now become an
open secret. Everyone knew (although as
Coward himself admitted, there may be one or two old ladies in Worthing who
don’t…) but no one admitted they did.
There is also a portrait
of PC Harry Daly (1930) by Duncan Grant.
Daly happened to be the lover of author E.M.Forster. The relationship was only acceptable because
of Forster’s connections with the upper-class world of Oxbridge and publishing
too. Had Forster been an ordinary
working man there would have been no question of such a relationship existing
but this underlines the increasingly apparent hypocrisy and double standards
that eventually resulted in legalisation.
Oddly enough the exhibition makes no comment on those class
dimensions. Most of the individuals
discussed had two things in common. They
were middle class and they were often in trouble with the law because of their
desires.
There are also works by
American artist Edward Burra (1905-1976) which includes Izzy Orts (1937), a depiction of a dance hall in Boston’s docks,
and Soldiers at Rye (1941). A group of soldiers gather clad in Venetian
masks, once the favoured gear of prostitutes and courtesans. The soldiers resemble birds, the atmosphere
presented is simultaneously disconcerting and powerful.
The exhibition takes us
up to the 1950s and 1960s when calls for legalisation were often heard in
relation to supposedly infamous trials and the law became to be regarded as a
blackmailer’s charter. London was a
magnet for artists in the 1950s and 60s.
Soho was the centre, described by Francis Bacon as “the sexual gymnasium
of the city.” The playwright Joe Orton
(1933-1967) and Kenneth Halliwell (1926-1967) were living together but
prudently slept separately in single beds.
They also transgressed norms by purloining books from local libraries
around Islington and doctoring their covers in various humorous ways,
undermining the often salacious, titillating or even ridiculous content. For this they received the absurdly harsh
prison sentences of 6 months each. Orton
profited from the experience for some reason but Halliwell declined into
alcoholism before killing his lover and himself. This tragic conclusion to their lives must be
mitigated by the joyfulness of their interventions. The exhibition includes the collaged book
covers they created and works by Francis Bacon and David Hockney (b 1937).
The exhibition veers
between social history, a history in 1000 objects, fine art, scandal and
popular culture. As a result, works of
profound seriousness become bathed in a mellow light of kitschy affectation. Perhaps it is because their creators never
supposed that we would guess their true intentions. Perhaps they could not even see the
connection between the work and their own desires. For whatever reason, this is an exhibition
that is almost compulsory to understand the human spirit. It indicates a rich seam of British social
history that is rarely discussed openly.
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