It begins with a question mark: does art have a gender? What makes art queer? Which life is political? What is a queer gaze? These and other questions appear on a huge banner at the start of the exhibition “Queer Modernity. 1900–1950” at K20, one of the exhibition venues of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
These are guiding questions meant to spark discussions and offer orientation for visitors to the show. They cannot be answered definitively, and that very fact makes them fascinating — and complex, the more you think about them and the more works you have seen.
Two Highlights Right at the Beginning
But first, a step back in history: In the first chapter, the prologue, the painting “Rosa Bonheur with a Bull” by the French painter Édouard Dubufe from 1857 is presented. The lesbian animal painter is confidently paired with a bull bearing male overtones. The brief retrospective is meaningful and necessary because it makes clear: queerness may be a modern term, but life and love arrangements that diverge from heteronormativity existed long before.
The following chapter, “Modern Arcadia,” shows how artists grappled with queer themes in their works without contradicting moral norms or clashing with the law. Here hang two absolute highlights: “The Critics” by Henry Scott Tuke, which served as the cover of the recently published volume “A Short History of Queer Art,” and “The Source” by Ludwig von Hofmann.
The Painting Thomas Mann Saw at His Desk
The homoerotic painting of naked boys against a radiant blue is regarded as Thomas Mann’s favorite work. The writer bought it in 1914 and hung it in his study, whether in Munich, California, or most recently near Zurich.
Here, as in other parts of the exhibition, non-European perspectives are also given space, offering an intersectional view: the sculptures by the Black American Richmond Barthé, for example, let “the Black male body become a place where his homosexuality is negotiated,” as the wall text puts it.
Gertrude Stein and Her “Second Family”
How important not only individual artists but the salon exchanges were (and are) is made clear by the sections “Sapphic Modernism” as well as “Queer Avant-Gardes and Intimate Networks”: The actors had influence beyond their circles — and across the Atlantic — as Tirza True Latimer illustrates in her catalog essay (Amazon Affiliate Link) with Gertrude Stein and her “second family.”
The artistic exchange illuminates “dimensions of modernity that had long been hidden,” writes the art historian. And: “I contend that these initiatives did not merely contribute to the development of alternative languages but also to alternative value systems within modernity.” A revealing contribution, just like the other essays in the catalog, published by Hirmer Verlag.
Queerness Is More Than Sex
The exhibition also attends to queer desire, with Jean Cocteau’s pornographic drawings or Beauford Delaney’s Untitled Nude. That he painted a Black man with a white man shifts “the prevailing power and gaze relations of the time and engages with questions of intimacy and representation.”
A major achievement of the show is that queerness is not reduced to sexuality. It is not hidden, yet access is broader: the works are presented as “testimonies of a profound expansion of aesthetic and societal horizons.”
A Few Years Ago This Might Have Been Too Bold
This is most evident in an unexpected chapter: “Queer Readings of Abstraction” may not reveal itself at first glance. Yet we learn that the creator of strict geometric compositions, Piet Mondrian, assigned gendered attributes to abstraction and adhered to a hierarchy of binary sexes. Marlow Moss, who broke with traditional gender roles in her own life, broke Mondrian’s logic as well, along with the double lines.
Just a few years ago, such an exhibition would have been considered too daring, says guest curator Anke Kempkes at the opening night. In parts of the Western world, it could soon be that way again, that inevitability lingering in the air. And so director Susanne Gaensheimer emphasizes the present relevance of giving visibility to queer creative work.
A Comprehensive, Thoughtful Sweep
The connection to the present is thankfully not overdone, yet the penultimate chapter, “Queer Resistance Since 1933,” points to today: Freedoms were curtailed, and artists such as Jeanne Mammen, Hannah Höch, Toyen, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, or Jean Cocteau, found their own strategies between internal emigration, opposition, or collaboration. Aesthetics and politics were and are intertwined.
The exhibition, described by its organizers as the first of its kind in Europe, succeeds in offering a comprehensive sweep: it makes the long-overlooked or suppressed queer contribution to modernity visible without getting bogged down in theoretical art-historical discourse. The works are contextualized precisely and accessibly, though the section “Surreal Worlds” could have benefited from even more explanations. Whether every intended perspective yields the desired added value remains an open question.
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Passion and Pursuit of Insight
“Queer Modernity. 1900–1950” is far from aiming to please alone; it also relies on landmark works and their own captivating appeal. The pieces borrowed from many renowned museums and private collections across nearly every medium make the exhibition not only high-caliber but also a unique place to gain a better understanding of queer art.
You can feel the show’s passion, the curatorial concept, and, not least, the catalog and the intellectual curiosity with which the team approached the project. The exhibition was also created in collaboration with a queer advisory board. Together with “Sex Now” at the NRW-Forum, it makes Düsseldorf the queer art hotspot of the season.
