Seeing Queerly

By Faye Hirsch 2/4/11

View Slideshow Paul Cadmus: What I Believe, 1947-48, egg tempera on pressed wood panel, 16 1/4 by 27 inches. McNay Art Museum, San Antonio. © Jon F. Anderson, Estate of Paul Cadmus/ licensed by VAGA, New York.; Marsden Hartley: Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane, 1933, oil on canvas, 30 5/8 by 39 3/8 inches. Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.;

Washington When I visited the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., to see “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” in early December, David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly (1987) had already been removed [see A.i.A., Jan. ’11 and Homepage, this issue]. Across the country, institutions had begun screening the video, and the Association of Art Museum Directors had issued an official statement condemning the Smithsonian’s decision. As I am writing, protests and panels proceed apace (a discussion is scheduled for Jan. 29 at the NPG itself), and the Canadian-born artist AA Bronson is militating, so far unsuccessfully, for the removal from the exhibition of his disquieting Felix, June 4, 1994, a mural-size photograph that depicts his lover and collaborator in the collective General Idea, Felix Pardo, gaunt and open-eyed, just deceased from HIV/AIDS. Unlike A Fire in My Belly, which vanished from the show without a trace (none of the videos in the exhibition are included in the catalogue, so we have no record there, either), the removal of Bronson’s piece, leaving a blank wall, would present an explicit sign of the controversy that has come, regrettably, to eclipse the show itself.

“Hide/Seek” had seemed to have escaped what its co-curator Jonathan D. Katz calls a 21-year-long “blacklist” of gay-themed exhibitions at U.S. government-funded institutions, following the notorious cancellation of the Corcoran’s Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition during the (first) Culture War, in 1989. Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and David C. Ward, historian at the National Portrait Gallery, have mounted a carefully researched, in places ingeniously selected, exhibition. On view are 104 works (A Fire in My Belly made the count 105, at least for one month)—drawings, paintings, photographs and videos—dating mainly to the 20th century. Many of them are little known or rarely seen, tucked away in private collections or belonging to small regional or university museums.

“Hide/Seek” comes at a time of unprecedented inroads into social equality for LGBT persons (though also, as the winter “Intelligence Report” by the Southern Poverty Law Center reveals, during a period when hate-crime violence against gays is on the rise). Gay rights as an issue crosses the political divide, as was demonstrated by the recent repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy and several gay marriage cases that are steadily making their way to the Supreme Court. The appearance of “Hide/Seek” at this relatively staid institution in the nation’s capital is at the very least a symptom of changing attitudes. Moreover, the show’s rather conservative roster of establishment artists, from Thomas Eakins, Grant Wood and Marsden Hartley to Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Georgia O’Keeffe, gives it a further air of legitimacy. This exhibition was designed to outrage no one.

In his excellent if perhaps overly digressive catalogue essay, Katz makes a carefully reasoned argument that portraiture, even heavily coded, is a genre well suited to revealing gay life before Stonewall (1969):

Portraiture plays a key role in understanding sexual difference ina world not yet divided between homosexuals and heterosexuals, a world where the concept of “having a sexuality” did not yet exist. It helps us answer not only the question of what same-sex difference signified socially and how it was marked but also, by implication, how critical an aspect of character it was deemed to be in the accurate portrayal of a sitter.

Katz’s definition of the genre is elastic, however. While the show includes fully identifiable portraits by the likes of Carl van Vechten and Robert Mapplethorpe, there are also some more oblique choices: Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991, one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy piles memorializing friends lost to AIDS; photographs of faceless, anonymous figures by Yayoi Kusama (a “gay wedding” before gay marriage existed) and Tee Corinne (an erotic tableau); and abstractions by O’Keeffe and Hartley. Some of these are truly superb, like the two Hartleys: Painting No. 47, Berlin (1914-15), a “portrait” of a slain World War I German officer, Karl von Freyburg, one of Hartley’s unrequited loves, and the haunting Eight Bells Folly, his homage to Hart Crane, who killed himself in 1932, the year before Hartley painted it.

Katz argues convincingly for reading issues of sexuality into works that might not, at first sight, appear to be “gay,” given the covertness of sexual identity during most of the period covered. By this line of reasoning, the old arguments about Thomas Eakins’s proclivities do not prevent us from reading queerness into his paintings. “How can we discuss Eakins’s sexuality in advance of the very words that convey it?” asks Katz, reasonably. The brightly lit body of a young boxer in Salutat (1898) is pretty frankly erotic, his rippling back muscles and firm buttocks scrutinized by the crowd of men as he enters the arena. Speculation has abounded for years about Eakins, along with many of the artists on view here, but pursuing that line of inquiry is not the curators’ aim. Rather, it is the subtle codes or not-so-subtle eroticism embedded in the works themselves that is of interest. “The wistful youth set against the homoerotic scenes in the background suggests the tension and difficulties faced by gay men who stayed behind in Middle America” (as opposed to gravitating to urban centers), reads the entry on a painting of a prim, somewhat melancholic young fellow in a river landscape by Grant Wood (Arnold Comes of Age, 1930); more blandly, about a painting of a virile, naked blond youth in a field by, of all people, Andrew Wyeth, the entry reads “[the artist] imbues his subject with an undeniably homo-erotic, as well as heterosexual, appeal” (The Clearing, 1979). For better and worse, such an approach liberates researchers from the restraints imposed by scant—even nonexistent—biographical evidence.