Our Self-Discovery In Public

National Portrait Gallery shows how gay hiding evolved into open expression.

BY NATHAN RILEY -

Andy Warhol’s “Camouflage Self-Portrait,” 1986

Art by gay painters or based in a queer sensibility is on display in Washington, in a major exhibition illustrating the birth of a self-conscious community opening itself up to larger and larger publics.

Called “Hide/ Seek,” the exhibition could just as easily have borrowed the title “Present at the Creation”; it successfully illustrates the self-discovery of a community never before organized as such. A major project of the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition came together with David C. Ward, a senior curator at the museum, enlisting the help of Jonathan D. Katz, a SUNY Buffalo art historian, gay activist, and longtime associate of Larry Kramer. The exhibition enjoys a pride of place at the museum, with its entrance directly off the hall of presidential portraits.

The first painting on view is by late 19th century American artist Thomas Eakins, well known for his canvases of handsome youth. In “Salutat,” he is in top form. A young fighter leaves a boxing match victorious, his arm raised in salute to the crowd’s enthusiastic cheers. His lithe body and smooth skin are lovingly detailed, while his shorts are pulled up leaving him draped but his buttocks exposed. When Eakins created this work, it would not have invited comment, but today most people would identify the homoerotic imagery.

“Hide/ Seek” is the first exhibition by a major art museum focused on LGBT themes, and in “Salutat” the gay theme hides in plain sight. At the opposite end of this wall is a floor-to-ceiling painting by AA Bronson that presents a startling change in mood.

Brunson’s close friend “Felix” is shown three hours after his death from a “wasting disease,” presumably AIDS. It is an unflinching portrait of an agonizing death. His eye are open, his face shriveled in a horrifying manner like an anguished figure in Picasso’s “Guernica.” The piercing eyes are lifeless; the skin drawn so taut that his teeth almost protrude from his face. Unlike ancient memorials with sculptured death masks showing calm repose, Felix’s face suggests the literal Greek roots of the word sarcophagus — flesh eating stone.

For all of its grittiness, a warmth suffuses the picture. Felix is surrounded by gay colors. Pillows are stacked high in rich shades of red, yellow, and blue. He wears a beautiful print nightgown, and his blankets are lush. The vibrancy of the colors and the love they betoken soften the agony etched into his face. Felix is presented for his friends to pay their last respects. Color and style become markers for the support and love that allowed the LGBT community to survive the epidemic.


Other works are paeans to creativity. Berenice Abbott, the photographer, was a close friend of Djuna Barnes and Janet Flanner, two prominent American writers in the famous Parisian expatriate community in the 1920s. Their photographs present fascinating women whose creativity is on display and reflect Abbott’s admiration and affection.

Pop artist Ray Johnson, in a personal work for his friends, dabbed drops of blood and darkened the eyes of a photo of Elvis Presley, turning him into Oedipus after he had struck out his eyes.

In a mischievous snapshot of multidisciplinary artist Charles Henri Ford by Henri Cartier Bresson, a man who was a reigning beauty of the 1930s is seen buttoning his fly as he leaves a pissoir. The open-air French toilets, where men and only men could pee, were places for quick anonymous sex. Ford looks away from the camera with a sly smile. At the level of his fly, a poster advertises Krema candies with a giant tongue hanging out, providing a coded message.

This image became universal with the “Tongue and Lip Design” for the 1971 “Rolling Stone” album cover. In later life, Ford lived at the Dakota on Central Park West, wrote books, and took photographs that were “out” years before Stonewall. Ford’s well-lived life lasted until 2002, when he was 89.

Other works of note on exhibit are an Andy Warhol’s “Camouflage” self-portrait, a portrait of James Baldwin, two Mapplethorpe self-portraits, a painting in memory of Hart Crane, and a mordantly funny portrait of Ellen DeGeneres by Annie Leibovitz. Works by turn of the 20th century artist George Bellows show homosexuals in public baths and swimming beaches winning acceptance because they understood the submissive role they played for straight men who were the active partners.

The link between creativity and style is a recurring one in the exhibition; artists used their talent and eye for beauty to create glamour that made homosexuals desirable and subverted gender conformity. Three portraits by Romaine Brooks show lesbian chic in the stylish manner of 1920. Her self-portrait and a painting of two friends dressed to the nines in elegant men’s attire create images of women’s masculine gender presentation still with us. These are masterly works of portraiture that give their subjects a presence and explain how they became were trendsetters.

What was aristocratic and personal in the 1920s became public and classless by the dawn of this century. Metrosexual universes predominated in city neighborhoods all over the world. Cass Bird, a feminist photographer with a wonderful eye, shows that hiding today can produce radical results. In her picture of an adolescent looking like a recruit for a Tea Party rally, there is a baseball cap boasting, “I look just like my Daddy.” The flannel shirt is open exposing a tattooed chest. Concealment has become a subversive practice. The picture’s description notes that the attractive boy is a she and the scene is not Mississippi, but Brooklyn. “Macaulay on her Rooftop,” Bird explains.

“Hide/ Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” gives the contemporary its historical context, reaching back into the emergence of modern gay culture, beginning with Walt Whitman and gradually developing through practice and theory into an assertion that gay equality and the right to sexual diversity represent a basic human right and a new cultural norm. The art on display are the markers of this evolution, chronicling the imaginations that pushed the LGBT community from shame into the mainstream.

Works on exhibition can be viewed at npg.si.edu/ or in a book-length catalogue available on Amazon.

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