The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939, a major international loan exhibition which has been six years in the making, will be presented by Alphawood Exhibitions at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, from Friday, May 2 to Saturday, July 26, 2025. The exhibition features more than 300 paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and films, many presented for the first time within the context of global queer and colonial inquiry. These range from well-known masterpieces to unexpected works by little-known or anonymous artists. Drawn from over 100 museums and private collections around the world, the exhibition takes as its starting point the year 1869—when the term “homosexual” is first coined and proceeds through the subsequent seven decades, amplified by a selection of earlier art, as context. An international team of 22 scholars led by art historian and curator Jonathan D. Katz and associate curator Johnny Willis organized The First Homosexuals project. Katz is Professor of Practice in the History of Art and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a founding figure in Queer Studies in Art History. Willis is Curatorial Fellow at Wrightwood 659.
Says Chirag G. Badlani, Executive Director, Alphawood Foundation, “Alphawood has been committed to this project since its very conception. We are proud to have supported it at the scale it required through more than six years of global research, and are even more proud to support it now amidst a global wave of anti-LGBTQ actions. A little over two years ago, in the midst of the global pandemic, Wrightwood 659 offered a taste of The First Homosexuals’ approach and scope in a small presentation of the same name. The upcoming showing is the long-awaited and full version of The First Homosexuals and comes at a pivotal time.”
According to Professor Katz, “Before the coinage of the word ‘homosexual,’ same-sex desire marked something you did, not necessarily who you were. The First Homosexuals examines how, after this watershed moment, for the first time homosexuals were cleaved from the rest of the population and given an identity which turned on their sexuality. Art can tell this story uniquely well. While written narratives must necessarily use specialized words to describe ideas, visual imagery is more elastic, allowing for coincident layers of meaning.”
Among the Featured Artists
One hundred and twenty-five artists are represented in The First Homosexuals including such well-known artists as Berenice Abbott, Thomas Anshutz, Léon Bakst, George Bellows, Giovanni Boldini, Rosa Bonheur, Claude Cahun, Jean Cocteau, Honoré Daumier, F. Holland Day, Beauford Delaney, Charles Demuth, Duncan Grant, Marsden Hartley, Florence Henri, Harriet Hosmer, Katsushika Hokusai, Frederic Leighton, Lumière Brothers, Gustave Moreau, Glyn Philpot, John Singer Sargent, Egon Schiele, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Henri de Toulouse-Laurec.
Also represented are artists whose work is lesser-known in the United States and who deserve more scholarly and public notice. These include Jacques-Émile Blanche (France), Benjamín de la Calle (Colombia), Florence Carlyle (Canada), María Izquierdo (Mexico), Van Leo (Armenia/Egypt), Manuel Rodríguez Lozano (Mexico), Ladislav Mednyánszky (Slovakia/Hungary), Roberto Montenegro (Mexico), Gabriel Morcillo (Spain), Ismael Nery (Brazil), Daniel Stepanov (Russia), Lionel Wendt (Sri Lanka), Emilio Baz Viaud (Mexico), Florence Wyle (Canada), and Kristian Zahrtmann (Denmark).
Museum Lenders
Among the international museums which contributed to the exhibition are: Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil; Slovak National Gallery, Slovakia; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate, London; The Courtauld Institute of Art, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London; among others.
The Exhibition: Eight Sections
The First Homosexuals occupies all three floors of Wrightwood’s Tadao Ando-designed building. An establishing section, Before the Binary, begins at the top floor to illustrate how same-sex desire and different-sex desire were not always seen as distinct opposites before the late 19th century. The array of works here ranges from an oil painting (1835-1837) of Sac and Fox tribe dancers by George Catlin to an exquisite marble relief (1823-24) depicting the homoerotic story of Anacreon and Cupid by the Danish-Icelandic sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. Catlin’s painting chronicles an actual feast paying tribute to a Two-Spirit spiritual leader (then pejoratively called a “berdache”), a person born male who lived and performed duties as a woman. It is among a good number of objects in the show recording indigenous sexualities. Notable among these are a collection of erotic Japanese prints, including two by the masters Utamaro and Hokusai, which make absolutely no value distinction between homosexual and heterosexual acts.
On the floor below is Portraits, a large section devoted to artists and writers who openly explored and, in some cases, presented a homosexual identity. These works include Félix Vallotton’s magnificent 1907 portrait of Gertrude Stein; the only full-size portrait of Oscar Wilde painted in his lifetime; Florine Stettheimer’s fanciful self-portrait with a faun; and Thomas Eakin’s poignant oil sketch of his friend and lover, Walt Whitman, which seems to barely catch the poet as he fades into old age. Also in this section is Manuel Rodríguez Lozano’s self-portrait depicting himself in mourning following the death of his lover Abraham Ángel; as well as self-portraits by the Armenian-Egyptian photographer Van Leo subverting traditional gender norms. Of note is a rarely seen pastel sketch of the great artist Rosa Bonheur by her lover Anna Klumpke, a work on loan from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
On the same floor are paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and books conveying the amplitude and variety of relationships forged during the late 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. The section, entitled Relationships, includes boldly transgressive photographs by the Staten Island-based artist Alice Austen; a pair of playful Cubist-inflected paintings of young women dancing by the French painter Marie Laurencin; and a painting by the Norwegian-American painter Andreas Andersen which captures an intimate moment between his brother Hendrik and another man.
On the second floor, a subsequent section illustrates how shifts in language around same-sex love had surprising consequences. In Changing Bodies, Changing Definitions, the exhibition examines the evolution of the genre of the nude in relation to shifting conceptions of sexuality. While artists often depicted ambiguously gendered adolescents in the 19th century, the 20th century saw the rise of nude adult representations, including fantastically macho portraits of muscular men and women. For example, Romaine Brooks’ sleek, ethereal nude study of her lover Ida Rubenstein represents the dancer as ephebic and androgynous, while a later painting by the Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka’s emphasizes a female model’s maturity and muscularity.
Works of art harkening back to an idealized classical past are encountered in a section entitled History. A highlight here is a large-scale oil by Hans von Marèes, whose unusually fragile paintings seldom travel outside of Germany. His Five Men in a Landscape (c. 1900) suggests no specific historical period at all, but, rather, an ideal arcadian past. The Australian artist Rupert Bunny draws on a particular myth for Hercules in the Garden of Hesperides (1922) which centers around a brawny Hercules rearing back to slay a dragon.
Nearby, in Colonialism and Resistance, images in different media illustrate how European artists saw same-sex desire as a quality almost inherent in colonial territories. This section explores the homoeroticism of the Orientalist genre, wherein Europeans imagine the East as rife with forms of sexuality foreclosed in the West. Several works here help illustrate the European political tactic to characterize the Ottoman Empire as overrun with decadent homosexuals, and thus weak and easy to conquer. In turn, artists around the world resisted this colonial domination. The painting Nuestros dioses antiguos (Our ancient Gods) (1916) demonstrates how one artist, Saturnino Herrán of Mexico, did so by idealizing pre-colonial indigenous sexual relations. On this floor, the viewer will also encounter a number of objects by Harlem Renaissance artists and entertainers. These include a photograph by Carl van Vechten of Bessie Smith shouldering a carved head of a grinning Black minstrel, which encapsulates the latent racism in white America’s attitude towards African Americans as the ‘other.’ One of the masterworks of the period, Richmond Barthé’s signature sculpture of the Senegalese cabaret dancer Feral Benga, melds together classical European sculpture and new attempts to create a distinctly African American art and ethos.
Then to Performing, highlighting the way the world of entertainment showed the existence and joy of same-sex love, with Léon Bakst’s sensitive Portrait du danseur, Léonide Massine (1921), and a bronze bust by Lady Una Troubridge, partner to lesbian icon Radclyffe Hall, which portrays the sensational Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in L’après midi d‘un faune (c. 1913).
Beyond the Binary, the final exhibition section, represents one of the most extensive investigations of the mutuality of homosexual and trans identity in their earliest formations. Here are featured some 60 works, including the first self-conconsciously trans images in the history of art: the Danish artist Gerda Wegener’s depictions of her partner, Lili Elbe, who was assigned male at birth. Wegener shows Lili as she wished to be portrayed—louche, feminine, and seductive. This section also brings to the fore images from The Elisarion, an art-filled villa and grounds established on Lake Maggiore in Switzerland early in the last century, whose founder Elisàr von Kupffer helped promulgate Clarism, a new religion proposing the division of people by gender was a perversion of divine will. Eight paintings from The Elisarion, never before exhibited in the United States, have been conserved specifically for this exhibition. One even depicts the first same-sex wedding scene in the history of art.
Publication
The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939 is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Monacelli Press, a Phaidon imprint. Featured are 22 original and illuminating essays by leading experts in art and queer history, each focusing on one geographical region – from Japan to Australia to the Indigenous populations of South America. In addition to Katz and Willis, contributors include Juan Vincente Aliaga, Eduardo Carerra, Brian Curtain, Niharika Dinkar, André Dombrowski, Thadeus Dowad, Patrick Carland Echavarria, Esther Gabara, Pavel Golubev, Catherine Gonnard, Michael Hatt, Wenquing Kang, Tomasz Kitlinski, Tirza True Latimer, Paweł Leszkowicz, Peter McNeil, Ara H. Merjian, Douglas Pretsell, Joseph Shaikewitz, and Patrik Steorn. With 400 pages, 500 illustrations, $74.95. The catalogue officially publishes on July 23, but a limited quantity of early copies will be available for purchase online at https://wrightwood659.org/publications and at the museum beginning May 2, while supplies last.
Symposium: May 9 and 10, 2025
The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939 is accompanied by a two-day scholarly symposium at the Alliance Française in Chicago on Friday, May 9, and Saturday, May 10. The symposium features many of the international scholars contributing to the exhibition catalogue, expounding on their regional explorations of the exhibition’s themes. Details to come. Please check https://wrightwood659.org/programs for updates.
Film Series: June 4, 11, 18 and 25, 2025
In conjunction with The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939, Wrightwood 659 is participating in Facets Film Forum’s Film as a Cultural Bridge programming, part of its 50th Anniversary celebration. The weekly series will feature LGBTQ-related film screenings starting June 4, 2025, curated by Dr. Laura Horak, Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the Transgender Media Lab and Transgender Media Portal. Details to come. Please check https://wrightwood659.org/programs for updates.
