Dora Carrington had relationships with men and women but loved and was loved by Lytton Strachey, who was attracted to men. The Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers famously ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’.
As long as there was no public suggestion that artists had acted on their desires, there was much that could be explored and expressed. Queer subcultures developed: new scholarship on same-sex desire in Renaissance Italy and ancient Greece allowed artists to use these civilisations as reference points, while the beautiful youths in Wilhelm von Gloeden’s photographs attracted communities of collectors. These ambiguities offered scope for artists to produce work that was open to homoerotic interpretation. Instead, this was a world of fluid possibilities. Yet for most people, there seems to have been little sense that certain sexual practices or forms of gender expression reflected a core aspect of the self. Sex between women was not illegal and society sometimes tolerated such relationships. The death penalty for sodomy was abolished in 1861 but it was still punishable with imprisonment. Yet other works which might look queer to us passed without comment. Simeon Solomon attracted sustained criticisms of ‘unwholesomeness’ or ‘effeminacy’ – terms which suggest disapproval of alternative forms of masculinity as much as same sex desire. In spite of the Victorian era’s prudish reputation, there are many possible traces of transgressive desire in its art – in Frederic Leighton’s sensuous male nudes, for instance, or Evelyn De Morgan’s depictions of Jane Hales. Rather, we hope this exhibition will be part of a bigger conversation that will encourage more material, more stories and more lives to be discovered. This is not a definitive selection of queer British artworks. Queer experience is diverse and there are some perspectives for which we have found little surviving material. Much material has been lost or destroyed – this is a history punctuated by bonfires and dustbins. We have used the broader term ‘queer’ to avoid imposing more specific identity labels.
Often their approaches do not fall easily into these categories. Terms such as ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘trans’ were not widely recognised for much of this period and would have been unknown to many of the artists and audiences whose perspectives we explore. Legal persecution affected many, yet for some, this was a time of liberation – of people finding themselves, identifying each other and building communities. The exhibition begins in 1861 when the death penalty for sodomy was abolished and ends in 1967 with the partial decriminalisation of sex between men.
Queer British Art 1861–1967 explores connections between art and a wide range of sexualities and gender identities in a period of dynamic change.