A pose suggests the self-conscious deployment of various codes of representation, the crafting of a persona to meet the world. Roberto Montenegro’s frank acknowledgement of a feminized homosexuality is clear today. Even after gender inversion or queerness was no longer the defining component of homosexuality, it still had plenty of partisans, underscoring how homosexuality and gender dissidence can be so close as to be virtually indistinguishable. Moreover, Montenegro’s portrait highlights how the crafting of a pose was not always about hiding one’s difference from dominant culture, but could be intended to have the opposite effect; a proud declaration of homosexual difference that is rooted in historical notions of gendered differences.

     Extended Labels

Marie Høeg & Bolette Berg
Norway
1866-1949 (Marie Høeg)
1872-1944 (Bolette Berg)
Untitled [Marie Høeg and her brother in the studio]
c. 1895-1903
Exhibition print
Preus Museum Collection, Norway
LN200.164

Norwegian photographers Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg set up a studio in southern Norway in 1895, though many of their photographs  were not discovered until the 1980s, when a few cartons marked “Private” were discovered in the Preus Museum’s Collection. The  photographs here show some iconic images from this experimental period. Høeg dresses as a typical male portrait figure or poses as a  rascal on a pillar of stones. The images are a conscious subversion of conventional studio photography, especially visible in the double  portrait of Høeg, dressed as a man, posing with another man dressed as a woman.

Roberto Montenegro
Mexico, 1887-1968
Retrato de un anticuario o Retrato de Chucho Reyes y autorretatro
1926
Oil on canvas
Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico
LN200.80

Roberto Montenegro was an early Mexican muralist, but the scrutiny inherent in this public medium posed problems. For a mural in Mexico City, he painted St. Sebastian, nude and androgynous, that he had to repaint, as the image was not in accordance with revolutionary values.” He had greater freedom in paintings for clients and took full advantage of it in this portrait of an antiques dealer. The image cites  so many stereotypes of dandified homosexuality that it approaches caricature. But the artist’s inclusion of a self-portrait, visible in the  mirrored sphere on the table, testifies to his identification with his subject.

Florence Carlyle
Canada, 1864-1923
The Threshold
1913
Oil on canvas
Government of Ontario Art Collection, 623839, Purchase, 1913
LN200.60

The Threshold portrays Carlyle’s partner Judith Hastings as a bride, although they could not marry. They met in 1911 in Wimbledon, and in  1913 permanently settled together at Yew Tree Cottage in East Sussex. Indeed, the artwork foreshadowed their lifelong commitment to  each other. In a marital context, “the threshold” refers to the groom carrying his bride over the threshold of their home. This bride,  however, is alone, in an intimate moment of introspection. Carlyle’s impressionistic brushstrokes emphasize the ephemeral nature of the scene.

Gerda Wegener
Denmark, lived and worked in Denmark and France, 1885-1940
Ulla Poulsen (Ballerina)
c. 1927
Oil on canvas
The Shin Collection, New York
LN200.139

This is Gerda Wegener’s best-known portrait of Ulla Poulsen, the most famous modern Danish ballerina and actress. It is a superb example  of Wegener’s high modernist, Art Deco style, that sought to tame and domesticate cubism. Its organizing principle is its careful geometry,  especially in the play between the folds of Poulsen’s dress and the streams of light. The portrait depicts Poulsen after her performance of  Chopiniana, still on stage as the instrument protruding from the orchestra and the bouquet at the bottom of the painting signal. Wegener  presents Poulsen as alluring, even seductive, typical of her portraits of women.

Romaine Brooks (Béatrice Romaine Goddard)
Italy, lived and worked in Italy and France, 1874-1970
Gabriele d’Annunzio, le poète en exil
1912
Oil on canvas
Gift of the artist in 1914, Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne/
Center for Industrial Design
LN200.71

Gabriele D’Annunzio was an Italian nationalist and poet who inspired Mussolini’s fascism, and he invented many of its hallmarks, from the  balcony address to black shirts. Romaine Brooks was a wealthy American heiress living in Italy with her lover, Natalie Clifford Barney. Here she portrays D’Annunzio shortly after returning from France in July 1912, where he fled to escape his crushing debts. They shared proto- fascist rightward leanings— in her case due to the threat of communism neutralizing her wealth and position—and faith in the tenets of  Decadence, a romantic art movement akin to English Aestheticism.

Unknown
Untitled [Portrait of Ma Rainey]
Exhibition print
Getty Images/Donaldson Collection
LN200.96

Ma Rainey was hardly in the closet. In 1925, she was arrested for hosting a lesbian orgy, but the state, lacking relevant statutes, charged her with running a brothel. In 1928, she released Prove it on me Blues: “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends. They must have been  women, ’cause I don’t like no men…” The advertisements showed images of a stout, mannish woman talking to two younger, stylish women  while a policeman watched. The copy read, “What’s all this? Scandal?” It worked: Prove it on me Blues was one of the bestselling records in  America that year.