Hide/Seek
Curated by Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward
At the National Portrait Gallery
YOU CAN GET TO Hide/Seek, the groundbreaking exhibit of gay art at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., which runs through February 13, 2011, in one of two ways. The first is down a corridor lined with photographs of Elvis Presley. The second is through an exhibit called The Search for Justice displaying black civil rights figures, Earl Warren, and two white feminists.
It’s no accident that Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture abuts The Search for Justice, since on the wall near both entrances we read that the first show of this kind in a major museum has been mounted to demonstrate “how, as outsiders, gay and lesbian artists occupied a position that they turned to their advantage, making essential contributions to both the art of portraiture and to the creation of modern American culture,” so that “people and groups can claim their full inheritance in America’s promise of equality, inclusion and social dignity.” Even so, there’s only so much wall space. One can go through the show wondering why even pieces the National Portrait Gallery owns (a Don Bachardy portrait of Isherwood, Paul Cadmus’ Night in Bologna) are not here. But then the tale of what art historian Jonathan D. Katz and co-curator David C. Ward did—what they could and could not get—to assemble this mix of abstract and realistic, male and female, contemporary and historic art, is yet to be told. The main thing is that this show exists at all—because what’s here is a treasure, an embarrassment of riches, an astonishment. Turn left from the big Warhol portrait at the Elvis entrance, for example, and you run immediately into a very large painting called Frank O’Hara Nude with Boots (1954) by his lover Larry Rivers; across from that is a male nude by, of all people, Andrew Wyeth. Enter through Search for Justice and you begin with a painting by Thomas Eakins called Salutat depicting a nearly naked boxer raising his arm to the audience like a gladiator. Then, beside a small albumen print by Eakins of Walt Whitman, who sets the tone for all that follows, a drawing by John Singer Sargent of Thomas McKeller, the young African-American man that Sargent used as a model for his murals in the Boston Public Library. Next is a 1917 print by George Bellows of a bathhouse in New York where a fat customer is sticking his towel-covered dick at a queen looking over his shoulder. Next, a Bellows painting of young men swimming in the East River while a dandy watches; and then a painting by J. C. Leyendecker, the commercial artist who created the Arrow Collar man, of two fellows reading in a sort of men’s club library. It’s merely an advertisement, but it’s charged with homoeroticism: the man (inspired by Leyendecker’s own lover) has put his book down and looks in contemplation at the other, a blond god hidden behind a newspaper, utterly indifferent. Beside this work, a curiosity: a painting by Paul Cadmus of the composer Reynaldo Hahn (Proust’s boyfriend). Beneath it hangs another Cadmus called What I Believe. Cadmus believed in the bodies of men—like Charles Demuth, whose two watercolors emphasize the butts of dancing sailors, and Carl Van Vechten watching them. Next to them, portraits by Van Vechten of Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, and two lovers from the dance world in 1940, Anthony Tudor, and Hugh Laing, serene in their sartorial perfection and good looks—and the fact that they’re holding hands behind their coat sleeves. Hide/Seek is not all about men by any means; it’s equally full of women as both artists and subjects: Romaine Brooks, Nan Goldin, Alice Martin, Stein and Toklas, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, not to mention the image being used to advertise the show—a Robert Mapplethorpe of Susan Sontag on her back in a dark sweater, luxuriating in being beautiful, or in being Susan Sontag. The rooms take us from one era to the next—from Eakins and Whitman to Stonewall, AIDS, and after, from the 1890’s through the 30’s and 40’s (Van Vechten, Cadmus, Bellows, Marcel Duchamp), the 50’s (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg), the 60’s and 70’s (Warhol and Hockney, Mark Morrisroe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie), the 80’s and 90’s (AIDS), to the present. Deborah Bright puts herself in the driver’s seat in a photo of a car carrying Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn, her obsession. The show’s last alcove is occupied by a huge photograph called Felix, June 5, 1994, taken by A. A. Bronson a few hours after his partner died of AIDS, his eyes still open because his wasting was so severe that there was not enough flesh on his eyelids to close them. Not far away is a small plate on which Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children has been recreated in lipstick mixed with the ashes of a friend of the artist Jerome Caja who committed suicide because of AIDS (Charles Devouring Himself), and Felix Torres-Gonzalez’s memorial to his lover Ross Laycock: a pile of brightly colored wrapped candy, which we are invited to eat, so that the pile will gradually diminish and disappear, the way the dying man did. There is, in short, from Eakins to Warhol, from Brooks to Bright and beyond, the most astonishing progression—so rich, and in many cases, so witty, even about AIDS, that one is tempted to think that there is a gay sensibility, after all. The theme of the show is precisely that: the idea that wit was required of these artists, especially those who had to conceal all references to their sexuality. The main example is Jasper Johns, according to Katz in a lecture at the time of the opening. Katz sees lots of gay symbols, but the “poignant” reticence that the Washington Post art critic spoke of (poignant, because of the closet) produced a code so dense it’s impossible to figure out without a docent. But that is the theme of most objects here: a repression that Katz argues spurred creativity, leading him to wonder whether thirty years from now, when homosexuality is less “fraught” than it is today, there will be any art like this. Or will we just have art historians arguing that the shift in Georgia O’Keefe from the female genitalia of flowers to the “vagina dentata” of the skulls of dead cows reflects her refusal to be pinned down on a sexual spectrum, echoed here in the painting of a goat’s horn done from the inside, not the outside? We don’t need to know this to enjoy the show. Even without a docent, one notices before very long something going on in Hide/Seek: a sort of roundelay, a conversation, among the show’s subjects. In a gallery talk with the photographer Jack Pierson, David Ward points out that gay people are not born into a family, they must find their own. Here we have it. Eakins photographs Whitman, Whitman inspires Hockney, Cadmus alludes to E. M. Forster (whose essay “What I Believe” Cadmus admired), Romaine Brooks paints Carl Van Vechten, Van Vechten photographs Langston Hughes and Bessie Smith. George Platt Lynes photographs Marsden Hartley, Marsden Hartley paints a memorial to Hart Crane. Mark Morrisroe photographs Jack Pierson, Jack Pierson photographs cute guys, Wynn Chamberlain paints the poets Joe Braniard, Joe LeSueur, Frank Lima, and Frank O’Hara, O’Hara inspires Jasper Johns to paint In Memory of My Feelings (an O’Hara poem about a break-up—in Johns’ case, with Robert Rauschenberg, whose painting hangs opposite his). And so it goes. Then there are the unexpected one-of-a-kinds: the haunting portrait of a young man by Grant Wood (Arnold Coming of Age), the Leyendecker, the photo by Nan Goldin of two drag queens in a taxi in New York; the Wyeth, Eakins, and Sargent nudes; not to mention Larry Clark’s picture of David Roper. Beauty will have its day. And death. The enormous photograph by A. A. Bronson of Felix lying in bed “arranged to receive visitors” is overwhelming, though (aren’t museums wonderful) the stranger who began talking to us as we stood before it was soon bemoaning the death of her cat. Why not? A show like Hide/Seek makes one’s mind wander in interesting ways. What does one make of a painting inspired by choreographer Freddie Herko, a member of the Warhol set who promised his friends a suicide performance and danced right out the window of a fifth floor apartment in l964, leading Warhol to comment that it would have been better if he’d been able to film it? It’s all so heady, you go back again and again. After leaving via The Search for Justice one afternoon, I had to sit down on a bench to collect my thoughts; and when I looked up, found myself between a bust of George Washington as a Roman emperor and a Rembrandt Peale portrait of his wife Martha—Martha in her bonnet, this stalwart woman who, the wall text says, kept her husband’s spirits up during the Revolution by living with him in camp. How far she seemed at that moment from Hide/Seek! Yet it’s only been about 240 years.
