Before the invention of “the homosexual” there was instead “the Uranian,” a term deployed by writer and activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to suggest a misalignment of soul and body. Writers both hostile and sympathetic argued that a female soul in a male body or a male soul in a female body engendered queerness. The clear fascination with the ephebe, the Classical term for adolescents on the road to manhood, must be understood in this context of a Uranian body/soul binary. These pubescent youth could be viewed as physically combining both male and female traits, and therefore became an example of the representation of mingled maleness and femaleness—as the Uranian term assumed. Around the turn of the 20th century, however, the familiar ephebic model gave way to a new focus on masculinity— proof of the broad success of “homosexuality,” which no longer necessarily assumed a cross-gendered identity. By 1920, as in the Duncan Grant on display here, adult men were depicted cruising other adult men, evidence of the conceptual shift that the use of the term “homosexual” had engendered.

     Extended Labels

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson
Sweden, 1884-1965
Sailor in White in Landscape
1917
Oil on canvas, original wooden frame decorated by the artist
Private Collection
LN200.56

Shapes and colors wrestle in this painting. Eventually we discern two seamen, one in white lying with legs spread-eagle, and one in blue  with his back toward us. Sailors were commonly associated with sexual, particularly homosexual, availability due to their transient lifestyle.  Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, known as GAN, believed art should have movement and vitality. During his studies in Paris and Berlin, he  was influenced by Expressionism and Futurism. He formulated a theory of art as a masculine force, with a physical, almost bodily presence. For GAN, seamen embodied strength, movement, and beauty. Around 1910, he settled in Stockholm. His diaries reveal sexual encounters  with men.

Thomas Eakins
United States, 1844-1916
Salutat
1898
Oil on canvas
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, Gift of anonymous donor; Replica of Thomas  Eakins’s original frame created and given as a partial gift by Eli Wilner & Company with the additional support of  Maureen Barden and David Othmer (PS 1959), 1930.18
LN200.101

Paintings of boxers usually depicted a boxing match in progress, with copious sweat and blood. But here we see a 22-year-old bantam  weight boxer facing away from us. His slight, hairless body is bathed in light in the center of the canvas, the area historically reserved for  eroticized female subjects. There is a spiral of glances surrounding the boxer which we complete as the painting manipulates us into staring at his exposed buttocks. Predating the widespread use of “homosexual” in English outside of medicine, Salutat instead queers a  performatively masculine subject, boxing, causing a viewer to instead stare at a comely young man’s rear.

Circle of Thomas Eakins
United States
Thomas Eakins and students, swimming nude
c. 1883
Exhibition print
Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
LN200.136

This photographic study was made prior to Eakins’ masterful painting, the Swimming Nude. Controversy courted the project; Eakins asked  a group of his students to pose nude in various figural groupings. He joined them—he’s the older man emerging from the water. This was  not traditional pedagogy at the time, much less today. The choice of subject matter, nude youths frolicking, seems inappropriate, as the  painting was intended as a birthday gift from an Eakins supporter to his wife. Indeed, the collector refused it. Both works underscore  Eakins’ determination to push the boundaries of sexual propriety, liberated from traditional social constraints.

Sascha Schneider
Russia, lived and worked in Germany, 1870-1927
Growing Strength
1904
Oil on canvas
Private Collection
LN200.86

Sascha Schneider was forced to leave Germany repeatedly because of his sexuality. But his painting never camouflaged his sexuality. He built a professional gymnasium in his studio to attract handsome young men to train who would also model for him. Given his high rates, he had only older clients and eventually closed the facility. Growing Strength marks a pivotal shift in “homosexual” painting: It depicts the  familiar ephebic youth now joined by a muscled older man, a manifest change in homosexual representation from the genderqueer youths of 19th century art to the resolutely masculine men of the 20th.

Ludwig von Hofmann
Germany, 1861-1945
Shepherd in the Mountains
Oil on canvas
National Gallery, Prague
LN200.64

Ludwig von Hoffmann’s nude shepherd boy guarding his flock makes sense in the context of turn-of-the-century Germany which modeled  itself after the ancient Greeks, who defined the Classical ideal of developing mind and body together. This national emulation of all things  Greek, evident in German architecture and art circa 1900, led to the development of Frei-Körper-Kultur, a cultural movement encouraging  nude athletic activity in public, as in Ancient Greek sport. Early advocates for homosexuality were especially fervent in this neoclassicism,  hoping that, like the ancients, the new Greece-inspired Germany would naturalize same-sex desire.

Duncan Grant
England, 1885-1978
Bathers by the Pond
c. 1920-21
Oil on canvas
Hussey Bequest, Chichester District Council (1985), Pallant House Gallery
LN200.90

Duncan Grant, a major figure in the Bloomsbury Group, one of England’s early modernist cohorts, was a painter and decorator. Although  most of his relationships were with men, he and Venessa Bell fell in love, and lived together for decades, often with Vanessa’s husband,  live, and Clive’s mistress. Bathers by the Pond is characteristic of Grant’s work in the 1920s, with strong, blocky shapes and deliberately  crude brushwork. The scene of a men’s pond—public bathing in the U.K. was often sex-segregated— certainly included men attracted to other men, and Grant offers just such a homoerotic interaction in this painting.

Robert Tait McKenzie
Canada, United States, 1867-1938
Relay Carnival
1925
Bronze
University of Pennsylvania Art Collection
LN200.107
Robert Tait McKenzie was a Canadian physician, educator, athlete, and sculptor who became Director of Athletics at the University of  Pennsylvania (UPenn). He contributed hundreds of bronze homoerotic images of athletic young men to UPenn, where many are still on  display. He was influential in sports medicine and rehabilitative medicine, designing prosthetics for wounded soldiers. He extolled the  value of exercise early, especially for those who worked primarily with their minds. He turned from sketching to sculpture, to better show the body in movement and utilize his knowledge of anatomy. Despite the undeniable homoeroticism in his work, he was married.

George Minne
Belgium, 1866-1941
Kneeling Youth
c. 1900
Bronze
Michael Sodomick Queer Art Collection
LN200.118

George Minne moved sculpture away from its usual allegorical or portrait functions, towards the depiction of psychological states. His 1898 Kneeling Youth, one of his most celebrated sculptures, began as a fountain as one of five adolescent figures. Dubbed the “Narcissus  Fountain” for its images of young men staring at their reflections, it evoked the psychological complexity of self-discovery. He subsequently  produced many versions of Kneeling Youth, including this one. Most of Minne’s work focused on nude male adolescents and their psychological state.

Eugène Jansson
Sweden, 1862-1915
Bathhouse Study
Black chalk on paper
Michael Sodomick Queer Art Collection
LN200.102

One of the most important Swedish artists of the turn of the century, in 1904 Eugene Jansson essentially abandoned the night scenes and cityscapes that made him famous and turned his attention to the male nude. A sickly man, he began to swim and exercise in his early 40s,  and the men he encountered became his favorite subjects. This is likely a preparatory drawing for one of his most famous works, the 1907  Naval Bathhouse, an enormous painting of a large outdoor pool crowded with male nudes. Jansson lived with his brother, also homosexual,  and his mother his entire life.

Glyn Philpot
England, 1884-1937
Study for The Resting Acrobats
c. 1900
Oil on paper mounted to board
Michael Sodomick Queer Art Collection
LN200.119

Glyn Philpot, one of the great figures in British art at the turn of the century, lived for a while in Chicago with his wealthy, art-loving  partner, Robert Allerton. The Allerton family were significant Chicago philanthropists. This study for one of Philpot’s most famous and  enigmatic paintings differs in significant ways from the final version. Philpot was celebrated for his striking portraiture—often of young  men—and unusual for his time in creating numerous, respectful images of Black British subjects.

Manuel Rodríguez Lozano
Mexico, 1896-1971
Untitled (Three Male Nudes)
1934
Ink on paper
Michael Sodomick Queer Art Collection
LN200.103

Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, a Mexican painter from a wealthy family, later moved to Europe. Upon his return, he refused an invitation to  join the burgeoning Mexican muralists, believing that art should not carry politicized content. He married after pressure from his wife’s  politically powerful father, but it was an unhappy union; even she called him a homosexual. In 1940, he became Director of the National  School of the Plastic Arts in Mexico City, where he invited leading muralists such as Diego Rivera to teach. These blocky nudes, focusing on he working class, are characteristic of his 1930s social realist works.

Ludwig von Hofmann
Germany, 1861-1945
Bathers
c. 1905
Black chalk and watercolor on paper
Michael Sodomick Queer Art Collection
LN200.108

Von Hofmann’s Bathers features a nude youth playing and bathing near a body of water. His focus on public nudity, fully representative of  its time, is sharpened by his contrast between the placid, Arcadian scene and the sharp angularity and schematic detail of his figures,  making what could be a classical scene feel distinctly modern.

French school
France
The Death of Narcissus
c. 1900
Oil on canvas
Michael Sodomick Queer Art Collection
LN200.89

The Death of Narcissus was a common subject at the end of the 19th century. Of course, part of its popularity was the opportunity to look,  in a socially acceptable way, at handsome young men in the nude—much rarer in art history than representation of females. Part of it may also have been the then widely accepted idea that homosexuality was a thinly veiled form of narcissism. Furthermore, before the invention  of “homosexuality,” the image of a thin, boyish youth potentially emblematized the period’s construction of the same-sex loving individual  as a body and soul with contrasting genders.

Wilhelm von Gloeden
Germany, lived and worked in Italy,
1856-1931
Untitled
ca. 1885-1905
Albumen silver print
The Shin Collection, New York
LN200.144

Wilhelm von Gloeden, scion of a minor German aristocratic family, first traveled to Italy in 1872, at 21. He would live there virtually his  entire life. He eventually moved to Taormina, Sicily, becoming a leading figure in town through his photography. Like many northern  Europeans—he was born near the Baltic sea—he found in Italy both an agreeable climate and a different attitude towards sex and money.  The Italians were distinctly poorer than Germans at this time, and their attitude towards same-sex desire looser. A foreigner with money could buy the services of local boys without any social sanction.

Wilhelm von Gloeden
Germany, lived and worked in Italy,1856-1931
Untitled
c. 1890
Albumen silver print
The Shin Collection, New York
LN200.145

Von Gloeden was taught photography by his cousin, Guglielmo (Wilhelm) Plüschow, who began the practice of photographing the local  youth and selling the images to northern Europeans. However, von Gloeden soon overshadowed his practice and became an innovator  especially notable for his naturalism and command of light.

Bernard Karfiol
Hungary, lived and worked in the United States, 1886-1952
Boy Bathers
1916
Oil on canvas
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
LN200.93

Bernard Karfiol was born in Budapest but grew up in Brooklyn, attending Pratt Institute before the age of 15 and subsequently winning a  scholarship to the National Academy of Design. He returned to Europe after college where he met many of the leading modernists such as  Matisse and became a member of Gertrude and Leo Stein’s early circle in Paris. He returned to the U.S. to teach, working in a late Post-impressionist manner, and won several national art awards.

Waléry Manuel and Henri G.L. Manuel Freres
France
Untitled [Postcard of Josephine Baker]
Exhibition print
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
LN200.169

Josephine Baker, a St. Louis-born entertainer famous for headlining the celebrated revue at the Folies Bergère in Paris, was one of the the  most renowned Black women of her time. Her immensely popular work in her adopted country of France included genre-busting  performances that played with and against gender and sexual expectations. She would, for example, come on stage in the haute couture of Paris’ most celebrated designers, then, after a quick wardrobe change, return wearing a tuxedo and tails. When Baker died, she donated her collection of haute couture, some 3,000 designs, to Paris’s most prominent “female impersonator.”

Pathé Frères
France
Untitled [Josephine Baker – dans revue des folies bergere, danse avec plumes]
1925
LN200.147

Baker, in this rare surviving film, wielded irony and appropriation. She worked to perform, and thereby satirize and ridicule, the delimited  social prospects open to women, especially Black women. From her bare-breasted banana skirt dance along a jungle tree to her funny-faced Charleston, Baker performed her audiences’ stereotypes of her to the hilt. In so doing, she signaled both her awareness of their sexism and  racism, and her intention to transcend their expectations.

Fred Holland Day
United States, 1864-1933
Untitled [Nude youth with laurel wreath and staff]
1906
Exhibition print
The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
LN200.158

The laurel wreath and staff continue Day’s classicizing aesthetic, a pictorial plea for a return to the classical past’s accomplishments:  developing a sophisticated art that is still inspiring artists today coupled with a social world that not only naturalized, but celebrated, same- sex desire.