Weena Perry: NYC Museums’ Representation of LGBT Artists and Art, August 2007

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Original full title:

Weena Perry. “New York City Museums’ Representation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgendered Artists & Art”. DRAFT Three: August 2007

Introduction

Since the 1980s, the sexuality of famed 19th century American realist, Thomas Eakins, has been exhaustively researched, dissected, and argued over by art historians and critics.[1] The intensity of the debate over Eakins’ sexuality, which has breathed new life into recent studies of the artist’s work, is part and parcel of the larger climate of historical revisionism that has swept both the academy and the popular media since the 1980s: iconic American figures and events—not to mention principles (freedom vs. slavery) or ideology (Manifest Destiny)—are being re-examined or questioned.[2]


Ambiguities in the historical record coupled with the contemporary climate of ongoing culture wars have served to raise the stakes for those scholars and critics invested in the possible connections between Eakins’ sexuality and his work. For instance, the once suppressed reports of Eakins’ troubling interactions with female students and relatives have been seized upon as supplying conclusive evidence of heterosexuality, or at least “hypermasculinity”.[3]


As a growing number of writers point out, for socially conservative art historians or critics, the mere posing of Eakins’ sexuality as a question seems to potentially threaten Eakins’ status in the canon of American art history.[4] On the other hand, the artist’s Whitmanesque exclamations about the beauty of the male body and the emotional intensity of his male friendships have provided speculation that the artist was not strictly heterosexual.[5]


Opinions about the lived sexual experience of Thomas Eakins are indeed varied, but no one presumes to apply the anachronistic term “gay” to a 19th century man. Most scholars and critics discuss the homoerotic cast to Eakins’ images of male nudes, or “homosocial” bonding depicted between men or described in the artist’s life.[6] Indeed, “homoeroticism”, as a description of the intimate emotional and sexual charge given off by Eakins’ depictions of male nudes frolicking al fresco (such as in his famous painting Swimming), has become a commonplace term in the scholarly and mainstream press.[7] However inconclusive the evidence about the man’s life may be, the artist’s work would at least seem to merit consideration of its homoerotic implications.


Apparently the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York begged to differ. When presenting a major retrospective of Thomas Eakins’ work that was organized in Philadelphia in 2001, and traveled to New York the following year, both museums completely excluded the discussion that has stimulated Eakins scholarship for over twenty years. Museum staff and catalog contributors not only banished all references to homoeroticism in its didactic materials and catalog essays, but the catalog’s writers did not even pay the backhanded compliment of burying references to the subject in the footnotes. Even the bibliography for the exhibition catalog, which was produced by the Philadelphia Museum and featured at the Met’s gift shop, did not reference studies dealing with the subject of sexuality. In his recent assessment of contemporary scholarship on American art, John Davis, writing for the highly respected journal, The Art Bulletin, wrote that, “amazingly, the organizers of the exhibition ignored one of the most fruitful and prolific avenues of Eakins scholarship.”[8] In short, viewers of the exhibition were completely kept in the dark about the sea change in Eakins scholarship: a significant oversight in a major retrospective.


The Met’s museum staff, who acknowledged that the museum was presenting “the first comprehensive survey since 1982 of this great artist’s achievement” proceeded as if Eakins scholarship did not continue after this date.[9] The choices that were made certainly do not fit in with the museum’s professed awareness of generational shifts in scholarship, the awareness of “[m]atters of scholarship and connoisseurship being ever fluid.”[10] Art historian Jonathan Katz, then an Associate Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, approached the Met over a year in advance of the retrospective’s opening in New York to propose organizing a scholarly symposium discussing the very issues ignored by curators in Philadelphia. In short, Katz hoped to give New York the opportunity to redress Philadelphia’s puzzling oversight. According to Katz, Barbara Weinberg, the Met’s curator of American paintings and sculpture, declined his offer.[11] Katz, along with Jennifer Doyle, then organized their own symposium under the auspices of SUNY Stony Brook: “The Forbidden Eakins: The Sexual Politics of Thomas Eakins and His Circle.”[12]


Given the now considerable body of scholarship dealing with sexuality in Eakins’ life and work, “The Forbidden Eakins” is a rather ironic choice of title for a symposium in 2002. For over twenty years Eakins scholarship has encompassed many different and opposing points of view on this topic. “Homoeroticism” is now a term casually bandied about in discussions of Eakins’ work. Yet a major retrospective managed to somehow turn back the clock on Eakins scholarship.


I offer this account of Eakins and the Met, set at the dawn of a new century, as a cautionary tale. During an era when many participants in the art world take for granted the right to represent and discuss issues of sexuality in art, this climate of openness does not necessarily extend to the museum world, where most of the public have their first hand encounters with objects of art. Thus this project began with one question: how do major museums in New York, the art capital of the United States, approach the issue of homosexuality in art?


It is something of a cliché that high culture is deeply, even intrinsically, marked by a gay presence. From Ancient Roman vase painting to the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, art historical scholarship has become increasingly inclusive in its treatment of homosexual or homoerotic themes in art. Yet upon investigation, one finds that there is a striking absence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered (LGBT) representation in major museums, either through exclusion of certain artists or through suppression of LGBT history, context, or subtext of the work on display. For example, the Metropolitan Museum, one of the most conservative museums in New York, discussed LGBT themes in only 1.8% of its exhibitions over the period from 1995-2005. The Museum of Modern Art, popularly understood to be one of the most liberal in the city came in at a mere 3.04%. Some museums, like the New York Historical Society have never, in any context and in any way, mentioned any LGBT theme in ten years. The best rated museum in the study, the Guggenheim, earned a score of 12.9% but even this relatively healthy number is deceiving, because a single group exhibition, Gender Performance in Photography[,] accounted for the majority of LGBT representation in the period under study. Whether one imagines heterosexual viewers desiring to better understand the artists or the art on view or young LGBT viewers struggling to recognize themselves in the common culture, what is being said or left unsaid about LGBT produced or themed works of art is of paramount concern to all participants in the culture.


The first study of its kind, this report aims to open a dialogue with the public, with the academy, with the LGBT community, and not least, with museums themselves, about how the museum world approaches the issue of sexual difference in art. Today, a wide range of cultural outlets acknowledges sexual diversity. Sexuality is a key thematic in cinema and popular culture, but research indicates that in the fine arts, the world of the museum has not caught up to even the mainstream media’s handling of LGBT issues. For example, even today’s cinematic epics exploring the legendary figures of western civilization, such as Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy or Oliver Stone’s Alexander, acknowledge the absence of homosexual taboo among men of the ancient Greco-Roman world. On the other hand, the recent reinstallation of the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries, which presumably presented an ideal opportunity to redress its historical silence on Greece and Rome’s very different sexual mores, failed to do so. While newly attentive to a work’s social and historical context in a range of respects, the reinstallation nonetheless remained silent about the abundant evidence of same-sex sexuality everywhere on display [see sidebar].[13] Historical accuracy and good scholarship are standards museums profess to seek: this omission violates the museum’s own scholarly mandate.


Since the 1960s, women, racial and ethnic minorities have critiqued museum culture on its dismal record of inconclusiveness.[14] The questions this report raise on behalf of the LGBT community simply continues the valued tradition of institutional critique that is a hallmark of a democratic society. However, it should be emphasized that the primary objective of this study is not to demand that a requisite percentage of exhibitions include LGBT artists. The study does ask that LGBT artists and LGBT themed work exhibited by museums be presented openly and accurately. The study asks only that traditional standards of art historical accuracy be extended to every kind of subject matter in the works under a museum’s care. That said, it should also be noted that the absence of LGBT issues from exhibitions at the New York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York is a significant concern to the LGBT community because both institutions purport to represent all New Yorkers and are funded in part by public monies.


New York’s major cultural institutions reach hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. As some of the most respected museums in the nation and in the world, these institutions do more than reflect the taste of a given period, they help create and legitimate the long-lasting cultural significance, authority and indeed meaning of these works. They are the key repositories of the collective cultural history, which makes their decisions regarding LGBT representation of central moral and political importance. Moreover, because many museums receive financial support from public tax funds, the issue of LGBT representation has outstanding political significance. Evaluating New York museum’s representation of LGBT artists and art is thus an important aspect of the Task Force’s overall project of gaining national equality for the LGBT community.


Who’s Included in the Study?

This report studied exhibitions since 1995 at the following museums in New York: the Solomon R. Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), the New Museum, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), and the New York Historical Society (NYHS). When determining the parameters of the project, the starting date of 1995 was chosen to allow for a period of study long enough to gauge significant shifts in museums’ attitudes or approaches to LGBT artists. In assessing the representation of sexual difference in museums, the report employs the most contemporary understanding of sexuality and sexual identity, one that recognizes the diversity of human sexuality, and thus escapes the “straight/gay” binary as itself an historical model less than 50 years old. Therefore, the study includes artists with a range of sexualities, including some unknown. For example, it is anachronistic to use the term “gay” to label 19th century artists, for neither the word nor the concept would have made sense to them. Yet it is as equally important to address the strong current of homoeroticism in, say the work of 19th century artist Thomas Eakins. Indeed, by opening the report with an account of recent trends and controversy surrounding Eakins scholarship and the exhibition of his work, the report emphasizes the diverse approaches to exploring representations of human sexuality that abounds in LGBT studies.


This study also addresses the issue of living closeted artists, meaning artists who have refused or dodged association with a gay identity but whose work has been invaluable to the development of fellow LGBT artists and to LGBT critical studies. However, I use the term “closeted” advisedly because the major LGBT artists included in the study have either produced work or generated biographical material whose LGBT aspects have proven significant enough to merit discussion in the public sphere of scholarly and art-critical venues, or in the news media. This study outs no one.


What kinds of questions does the study ask?

The first of its kind in the United States, this study attempts to answer some basic questions about how New York museums represent LGBT artists and themes. Notably, this study recognizes that an artist need not identify as LGBT in order to produce art that deals with LGBT concerns: Mathew Barney is a prime example of a contemporary heterosexual artist producing work that questions assumptions about the boundaries between male and female, or how the presumed constitutive or immutable elements of sex and gender achieve cultural significance. This study attempts to answer such questions as: How many LGBT artists or themed works have been included in special exhibitions (as opposed to permanent collections) in New York institutions between 1995 and 2005? What is the percentage of LGBT artists and/or themed works in relation to the total number of exhibitions per museum for the period? Among exhibitions of LGBT themed artists or works, do museums forthrightly acknowledge sexuality on their exhibition web pages and in catalog essays? Do these materials discuss LGBT issues raised by the works, or by the artists, or by extant scholarship? Is their any discernable pattern in the increase in LGBT representation or shift in analytic tone over the period of time covered by the study? What tone do individual museums take when discussing LGBT artists or issues? Are the references to LGBT issues veiled or forthright? Are museums more frank when discussing the work of younger artists (in other words, is there a generation gap)? Is there variance between museums and within museums exhibiting the same artists and similarly themed works? What kinds of LGBT issues predominate in the exhibited works?


Why are these questions necessary? The Stonewall riots, which signaled the modern LGBT civil rights movement, occurred in 1969. LGBT people, on a national and regional level, are still missing most of the basic civil rights taken for granted by heterosexuals in the United States. We have no national right to form civil unions or marry, protect our children, jointly file our taxes, make medical or financial decisions for our partners if they become incapacitated, serve openly in the military, etc. The art world is the one realm that many people assume to be LGBT friendly. Unfortunately, the chief New York museums —the most respected venues for the display of artistic production, in a city popularly understood to be a LGBT mecca—have often downplayed or even ignored LGBT issues in their exhibitions. Moreover, there has never been a single exhibition devoted to LGBT art in New York. On the whole, LGBT artists remain under-acknowledged as LGBT artists and LGBT themed art remains insufficiently contextualized.


Methodology

The research period for the study was summer of 2006. Research materials included not only exhibition catalogs but also museum web pages.[15] After consulting the museums’ exhibition web pages and online library catalogs, as well as research databases available through university libraries, a list of exhibitions for each museum was compiled. It was then determined which exhibitions featured or included LGBT artists or themes. Academic and art critical publications, as well as online LGBT encyclopedias were frequently consulted to identify or confirm LGBT artists and themes, especially when exhibition materials made no such identification or acknowledgment.[16] Acknowledged scholars and experts on LGBT culture, such as Jonathan Katz, were routinely consulted in the preparation of the report.


In order to quantify collected data, categories for museum explication were created under the heading “interpreted or presented as LGBT”. Other data headings were “known LGBT artists or figures mentioned” (in the essays or online materials) and “same sex partners/lovers identified.” Cabrini Vianni, the Task Force’s sociology Fellow during fall of 2006, then processed the data by using SPSS software to create a database, from which she created frequency and cross tabulation tables.[17] With this information, it was possible to construct the tables and charts included in the study in order to demonstrate the frequencies and percentages of LGBT artists and themes, both per museum and relative to the other museums included in the study.


The “yes”, “no”, or “unavailable” designations, so necessary for constructing a base for quantitative analysis, obviously mask the rich range of interpretative strategies undertaken by museums when presenting and interpreting cultural production. In other words, human language can often be packaged in layers of nuance that reveal, hint at, or mask meaning. Yet in order to start a dialogue about what is being said or left unsaid about homosexuality and other LGBT issues represented in works of art, unambiguous accounts of sexual difference are crucial. Assigning “yes” or “no” or “unavailable” to the question of museum interpretation or presentation of LGBT themes, however, does makes it possible to get an idea about how individual museums or exhibitions compare with one another over a period of time. Museum catalogs are also fundamental tools for gaining an understanding of how curatorial staff or catalog essay contributors contextualize the work on display. The report therefore provides analysis of key passages in a selection of exhibition catalog essays in order to better understand how museums communicate LGBT issues to the public.


Continued at: Weena Perry: NYC Museums’, Part 2

See also:

Jean Carolomusto and Jane Rosett: "Gay Men's Health Crisis: 20 Years Fighting for People with H.I.V./AIDS", April 21-September 10, 2001

Museum of the CIty of New York: LGBT Programs

OutHistory.org Releases Unpublished Art Report

Publicity release about publication on OutHistory of this report.


Notes

  1. ↑ As Henry Adams has demonstrated in a recent biography of Eakins, art historians began to address the question of Eakins’ sexuality back in the mid-1970s. Adams sums up the various points of view over the years, namely which scholars or art critics have used biographical information and art objects to claim that Eakins’ sexuality was ambiguous, possibly homosexual, or strictly heterosexual in Eakins Revealed: the Secret Life of an American Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Like a number of authors sympathetic to exploring the issue of homoeroticism in Eakins work, Adams himself does not go as far as to claim that the artist was homosexual.
  2. ↑ The Smithsonian’s revisionist exhibition, “The West as America” (1992) is often given as a prime example of the controversy that arises on the rare occasion when a major museum does critique the ideological underpinnings of American ideals and myths. See John Davis, “The End of the American Century: Current Scholarship on Art of the United States,” The Art Bulletin 85.3 (September 2003), 544-580; Alan Wallach, “Revisionism Has Transformed Art History but Not Museums,” Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), 1998.
  3. ↑ In her review of Henry Adams’ biography of Eakins, Jennifier Doyle (who has written on Eakins and gender issues) notes that Adams is one of the few scholars to take reports of Eakins’ disturbing behavior toward women seriously. Doyle also points out that accounts of molestation or misogyny have actually been used to lend support to the notion of Eakins as “hypermasculine” (whereby the excessively masculine is rather naively assumed to correlate to the securely heterosexual). Doyle gives Sydney Kirkpatrick’s The Revenge of Thomas Eakins (2006) as the example of the most recent and egregious use of misogyny as somehow proof of Eakins’ heterosexuality. Jennifer Doyle, “Secrets and Lies: Gossip and Art’s Histories,” American Quarterly 59.2 (June 2007), 511-521.
  4. ↑ See for example, John Davis, “The End of the American Century: Current Scholarship on Art of the United States,” The Art Bulletin 85.3 (September 2003), 565-568; Jennifer Doyle, “Secrets and Lies: Gossip and Art’s Histories,” American Quarterly 59.2 (June 2007), 511-521.
  5. ↑ Whitney Davis, “Erotic Revision in Thomas Eakins’s Narratives of Male Nudity,” Art History 17 (September 1994): 301-41; Michael Hatt, “The Male Body in Another Frame: Thomas Eakins’ The Swimming Hole as Homoerotic Image,” Journal of the Philosophy of the Visual Arts: the Body, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Academy Group, 1993), 8-21.
  6. ↑ For a thoughtful exploration of the “homosocial” ethos of Eakins’ world, see Martin A. Berger, Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood (Berkely: Univesrsity of California Press), 2000.
  7. ↑ See previous citations for examples of comfortable discussions of the issue of homoeroticism in Eakins’ paintings featuring male nudes. A Washington Post reviewer of Sidney Kirkpatrick’s biography of Eakins (Kirkpatrick refuses to allow for a homoerotic, let alone homosexual understanding of the work or the artist) casually uses the term “homoeroticism” to describe Eakins’ work without making a claim one way or another about the artist’s personal life. John Loughery, “Disrobing the Artist: this study celebrates a 19th-century American painter as a champion of artistic freedom, [The Revenge of Thomas Eakins by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick]” Washington Post (Sunday, March 12, 2006): BW09. Even when the subject of homoeroticism is treated with some delicacy, it still remains acknowledged. See, “’Wrestlers’ finds home at LACMA; The art museum calls the donation of the Thomas Eakins painting a `fantastic gift.' Eakins' `Gross Clinic' may remain in Philadelphia, Los Angeles Times [HOME EDITION] Dec. 22, 2006, E.37: “Some art historians have offered the opinion that there is a homoerotic quality to many of Eakins' sports paintings. Govan said that such commentary has only added to the intrigue.”
  8. ↑ John Davis, “The End of the American Century: Current Scholarship on Art of the United States,” The Art Bulletin 85.3 (September 2003), 565-568
  9. ↑ See the Met’s webpage for the exhibition, Thomas Eakins, June 18 – September 15, 2002, http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={C9AAB347-859E-11D5-93FE-00902786BF44}.
  10. ↑ Director’s introduction to the museum: http://www.metmuseum.org/press_room/full_release.asp?prid={059F2A3B-556C-4686-BD85-0960243639F1}.
  11. ↑ According to Katz, Weinberg didn’t expressly refuse the offer, but instead delayed and stalled until, she said, it was “too late.”
  12. ↑ The Queer Caucus for Art, comprised of artists and scholars affiliated with the College Art Association, apparently considered protesting the Met’s decision outside the museum, but elected not to. Davis, n.96, p.578.
  13. ↑ The sidebar was omitted from the draft.
  14. ↑ For a rich collection of documents about the feminist art movement, which includes the battles longed waged against the exclusionary practices of the art world made by white and minority women, see, Hilary Robinson, Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing), 2001.
  15. ↑ Exhibition catalogs were restricted to those available at university libraries in New York, or through interlibrary loan. During the research period it was not possible to gain access to most of the museums’ archives. MOMA’s archives closed during its move from Queens to Manhattan. The Whitney’s archives closed to outside researchers during its summer internship program. The New Museum closed while awaiting the completion of its new quarters. The Guggenheim suffered a fire at its archival offices and had only recently relocated during the research period (thus certain materials were not available because of damage; others were not available in time because of deep storage.) Of course, any future archival research would be determined by the policies of individual museums and staff members, which vary from museum to museum, and curator to curator.
  16. ↑ glbtq: an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture. http://www.glbtq.com; Claude J. Summers, ed. The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004.; Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, eds. Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History:From Antiquity to World War II. London & New York: Routledge, 2001.; Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, eds. Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day. London & New York: Routledge, 2001.; Harmony Hammond. Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2000.; Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.; James Smalls, Homosexuality in Art. New York: Parkstone Press, 2003.; Jonathan Weinberg, Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2004.
  17. ↑ Internal memo in draft footnote omitted.


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