One of most profound distinctions governing the lives of those inclined to their own sex was the degree to which their inclinations were forcibly made private. Heterosexuality owned the public realm and therefore had access to its own history, while homosexuality was forced into the shadows, thereby made historically invisible. Everyday actions, such as which pronoun to use in reference to a partner or friend, attention to how one sat and walked, even something as seemingly benign as which photographs to display on one’s desk or in one’s home, made clear how defining, and dangerous, the distinction between public and private could be. Given the privatization of homosexual lives, it is perhaps not surprising that a number of artists sought to confuse or repudiate the distinction between public and private. For these artists, homosexuality and the realm of public life are not divorced, and they worked to expose a queer viewpoint on dominant culture.

     Extended Labels

Elizaveta Kruglikova
Russia, 1865-1941
Café Chantant
late 19th-early 20th century
Paper on cardboard, tempera, watercolor
Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine
LN200.116

Elizaveta Kruglikova, like Konstantin Somov, belonged to the World of Art group. The ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev was its head  before he founded the Ballets Russes. The most active members of this art association were largely homosexual artists and critics, including  Kruglikova, who never married and had no known love affairs with men. Inspired by Edgar Degas’s ballet scenes viewed from the point of view of the orchestra pit, this drawing is distinguished by the eroticization of the dancer’s body as it writhes in very unballetic movement, with her shoulder strap daringly sliding down, revealing her naked shoulder.

Elizaveta Kruglikova
Russia, 1865-1941
Chansonette
1914
Monotype on paper
Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine
LN200.121

Elizaveta Kruglikova was fascinated with famous Paris cabarets and was a habitué of many. The Russian novelist Alexei Tolstoy, who  accompanied her, recalled how Kruglikova, wearing a man’s suit, danced with ladies without a break and then drank black-currant brandy “like a poisoned rat.” This monotype is remarkable in Russian art for its early depiction of a woman with short hair. Despite the Parisian  subject, Kruglikova created this monotype in Russia in 1914, marooned there at the beginning of World War I. She had spent the previous  19 years in Paris.

Lionel Wendt
Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 1900-1944
Nude with a light bulb
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
Thomas Gensemer and Gabriel Brotman, Private Collection, Brooklyn, NY, Acq: 2019
LN200.92

This image is about exposure—literal and metaphorical. It alternates between revealing and concealing, echoing the social status of homosexuals, between public and private, acknowledgement and dissimulation. The model is in the foreground, naked and vulnerable. He  turns his back to us, obscuring his identity. Though his face is exposed to bright light, we are denied the view. Lionel Wendt was a  significant photographer, pianist, and filmmaker born in Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) to a Burgher father and Sinhalese mother. The  founder of the ’43 Group, a Sri Lankan modernist art collective, Wendt was a pioneer of queer modernisms in South Asia.

Marsden Hartley
United States, 1877-1943
Berlin Ante War
1914
Oil on canvas with painted wood frame
Columbus Museum of Art, Gift of Ferdinand Howald
LN200.120

Hartley moved to Berlin in 1913 and became interested in the military pageantry and its attendant comely German soldiers. His early works romanticize Germany’s cult of masculine rectitude. But with the outbreak of World War I and the death of his beloved German officer, Karl  von Freyburg, Hartley changed. Berlin Ante War depicts a pre-war idealized version of Germany in the lower panels. The upper half displays religious transfiguration. Von Freyberg ascends into heaven on a horse amidst Greek crosses. The military lance is inscribed with a cross that is also the letter H, symbolizing von Freyberg’s death, Christian religious fervor and Hartley’s own identity.

Charles Demuth
United States, 1883-1935
Eight O’Clock (Early Morning)
1917
Watercolor and graphite pencil on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Gift of Carl D. Lobell
LN200.94

Charles Demuth, an American painter, pioneer abstractionist and master watercolorist, was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the center of  Amish country. He left home for New York and quickly established himself within the city’s queer art world. This is one of a number of  watercolor images after stories by the likes of Henry James, Émile Zola and Frank Wedekind illustrating contemporary domestic life and its  attendant sexual tensions. Here a melancholic figure, likely modeled after the artist himself, is addressed by a man in underwear as  another young nude man washes himself in the bathroom.