Queer British Art 1861-1967, exhibition review: Landmark show tries to do too much

Victorian paintings riskily radiate implied homosexuality, but this show suffers from diminishing returns as it approaches our own times
Sex please, we're British: Duncan Grant's Bathing (1911)
Tate
Matthew Collings4 April 2017

Each work in Queer British Art conveys some sort of experience of sexual difference. Some of the artists were gay, some may have been and some weren’t. The show’s time limits are 1861, the lifting of the death penalty for sodomy, and 1967, when sex between consenting men over 21 was decriminalised in England and Wales.

The first couple of rooms feature late Victorian Neoclassical scenes. This kind of art, with its crisp outlines, anatomically accurate drawing, complex geometric compositions and magnificently designed gold frames, is likely to be impressive anyway. But it is delicious to realise, as well, that chosen examples are not about the highest and noblest ideals only. They are also about lightly hidden buggering and snogging.

They have fabulous titles such as Hope Comforting Love in Bondage, and Aurora Triumphans. The first of these was created by a man, Sidney Harold Meteyard, the second by a woman, Evelyn De Morgan. There is no evidence that either of them was gay though each depicts unusual longing.

Meteyard’s picture, exhibited in 1901, shows a pseudo-classical scene, actually made up by the artist. A rejected female looks quizzically at a male whose face is turned away. This is Eros, a beautiful young man with a sad expression who is decorated with flowers but restrained by severely tight bonds. It’s the famous love that daren’t speak its name.

De Morgan, on the other hand, trumpets it to the heavens in a picture of dawn gently slipping from the bonds of night. A goddess in dark drapery represents Night while Dawn, also female, is radiantly nude. Further strapping goddesses blast-off a morning symphony on golden instruments.

De Morgan used a model called Jane Hales. She was hired as nursemaid to De Morgan’s sister in 1866. By the time of this painting, 1878, Hales was still in the De Morgan household and had been painted naked by De Morgan many times.

De Morgan was married but it is possible that the figures of Dawn and Night stand for a long-sustained love affair between mistress and servant (Dawn’s bonds are light and flower-strewn and she stares across the painting at Night). Surprisingly, an upper-echelon wife with female lovers wasn’t an unknown arrangement in this period. An essay in the catalogue reveals that the wife of Edward Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883-96, went in for it.

William Blake Richmond’s The Bowlers, 1870, was criticised for being over-sexy heterosexually as well as for its offensively homosexual intimations. Of the 15 figures depicted, most are nude or semi-nude. Homosexuality is subtly present in the way women are confined in one pictorial zone and men another.

A more obvious element is in the bodily actions: two males bend over suggestively and there is even a youth posed besides one of them to suggest the dominant sexual position. The figures are displaced spatially so it’s a hint not an outright statement.

Some of the poses in The Bowlers would be recognisable by Victorian viewers from classical statues seen in museums in Europe. Classicism is loaded in Victorian art where there might be an undercurrent of sexual drift. This is because knowledge of the culture of antiquity had two contradictory associations for Victorians. One, as the catalogue puts it, was “the foundations of British civil culture: philosophy, law, morality, even aesthetics itself”. The other was aberrant sexuality.

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That the latter was present in The Bowlers was complained about in dainty language. A critic spoke of “a certain indulgent state of mind”. Dismay at excessive sexiness — simply too much nudity — was expressed directly. Lady Frederick Cavendish described the painting as depicting “ancients playing at bowls with nothing on, which I cannot appreciate”.

A painting of the birth of Venus by Walter Crane, from 1877, seems a typical male fantasy since all the figures in it are naked women. But male fantasies of a different kind pertain, since the model for the goddess of love was actually a famously beautiful youth, Alessandro De Marco. His androgynous appeal was recognised by another painter, W G Robertson, who wrote: “She’s a fine upstanding slip of a boy.”

Throughout the 1860s Simeon Solomon was one of the most successful artists in Britain, even though he was criticised for “unwholesomeness” and “effeminacy”. His picture here from the middle of the decade showing Sappho embracing her lover Erinna is intriguing precisely because it wasn’t controversial. Art representing same-sex love between women was harmless if there was a classical context. Legally, male homosexuality was outlawed but female wasn’t, because it just couldn’t possibly exist, it was considered, from the point of view of the common people. Or if it did exist it was thought that having a law about it might give it too much attention.

Solomon’s career crashed because of his homosexuality. His first arrest was in 1873 in London for soliciting in a public lavatory, followed by another in Paris for the same thing. (In London he was charged with “attempted buggery” and in Paris for “indecent touching”.) The papers reported that his sexuality was an illness. The show includes works from the last period of his life but during it he was a social outcast. The art world was semi-bohemian but after the scandal of his imprisonment he could not be allowed to re-enter it.

Something wrong — exhibition-wise rather than psychosexually — sets in after this initial rewarding section. Gender-bending experimentation comes across in myriad ways but with diminishing returns. The curators get lost in Modernism’s stylistic variety.

That is not to say there is nothing visually intense on display — magnificent oil paintings and gouaches by Keith Vaughan from the early Sixties in particular stand out — but no works by individual artists ever seem to be visually enhanced by other artists’ works in the same room. Or by the many documents and relics featured. Because the show loses visual focus the rooms get more and more tiring.

The last one is mostly devoted, with underwhelming results, to a couple of works each by David Hockney and Francis Bacon. Suppressing yawns by this point, few viewers will be likely to care when the explanatory wall label announces that a Bacon exhibition in 1955 was investigated by police for obscenity, and that Hockney once called his early work propaganda for homosexuality. Sadly the show tears itself apart between a narrative and an aesthetic experience.

Queer British Art 1861-1967 is at Tate Britain, SW1 from tomorrow; tate.org.uk