IN AN ESSAY titled “The Autumn in Florence,” Henry James reflected on the physical changes in the city that had been, for a brief period in the 1860’s, the capital of the newly formed Italian state. Writing in the early 1870’s, James admired the city for its architecture and its heritage of Renaissance art, an art that was intimately tied to the city’s political leaders and patrons. From its Renaissance origins, James wrote, Florence had been “a daughter of change and movement and variety, of shifting moods, policies and regimes.” In the more recent autumn of 2007, Italy’s first large-scale exhibition of homoerotic art was mounted in Florence, merging politics and art in a slightly different way.
Entitled “Arte e Omosessualita: da von Gloeden a Pierre et Gilles” (Art and Homosexuality: From von Gloeden to Pierre and Gilles), the show brought together over 150 works by Italian and international artists from the past 120 years. Included were works by relatively unknown early 20th-century Italian artists such as Filippo de Pisis and Brancaleone da Romana, as well as more widely recognized artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, and Mauricio Cattelan.
Organized by the non-profit Artematica and curated by Eugenio Viola and Vitorio Sgrebi, the Minister of Culture for the Municipality of Milan and noted art critic in Italy, the show’s focus was on homoerotic imagery since the invention of the camera. As the curators noted, visual representations of homoeroticism are present throughout the history of humanity, adding that such representations often reflect the “specific historic and socio-cultural contexts.” The works were selected for their particular content, absent any concern for the sexual orientation of the artists themselves. “On the basis of that logic some works have an openly homoerotic content, while in others this expresses itself in a less obvious way through codes, symbols, allegories, and metaphors,” explained Viola. (In walking through the show, I must confess it took some time for these underlining themes to emerge.) The show gathered together an odd archive of imagery that crossed the boundaries from artistic to commercial, underscoring the pervasiveness of homoerotic imagery. High points in this range were the early Wilhelm von Gloeden’s sepia-colored, Arcadian photographs of naked Italian boys set in staged tableaux; Brancaleone da Romana’s quiet portraits from the 1940’s of two men, deep in thought and heavy shadows, exposed emotionally rather than physically; and the near-perfect naked bodies of young men in Herb Ritts’ black-and-white photographs. Such works placed alongside two black-and-white photographs of a group of men using drugs underneath a portrait of Jesus from Larry Clark’s Tulsa series struck me as strange, and pointed to the show’s thematic unevenness. But then “Art and Homosexuality” was less about themes and more about the works themselves. The more I contemplated the works, individually and collectively, the more I was struck by how often the subjects gazed directly at the viewer—from Barbara Nahmand’s airbrushed canvases entitled Dana and Luise that capture the two women in sexual foreplay staring back at us, to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ double portraits of gay porn actors Jeremy Jordan and Jason Hawke, who maintain a stern gaze clothed or naked, to the technicolor video installation Futuring by German artists Eva & Adele, which focused on the faces of the two artists looking at us, shaved heads emphasizing their darkly outlined eyes and recalling the faces of Egyptian portraiture. In this way, the homoerotic elements of the show rested in the very act of looking. These subjects did not stare off into the distance while we admired their form, sitting passively for the voyeuristic pleasures of patrons. No, this was an art that often looked back at us, forcing us to confront the subject. And, in doing so, the experience of “Art and Homosexuality” turned the museum visitor from casual viewer to a participant in the very exchange of looks. “Banned in Milan!” could perhaps have been the revised title of the exhibit, which was originally mounted in July 2007 at the Palazzo della Regione in Milan and supported by public funding through the Milan City Council. But as Catholic groups and civic leaders began to voice opposition to the show, and the Vatican offered its own condemnation, the mayor of Milan, Letizia Moratti, began issuing a series of restrictions on the yet-unopened exhibition, such as limiting the show to those over eighteen and eliminating several works that she felt were too controversial. Two works in particular ignited the mayor and the Catholic groups: Paolo Schmidlin’s Miss Kitty (2006), a life-sized sculpture of an aging drag queen wearing women’s underwear and a large gold ring, and bearing a remarkable resemblance to Pope Benedict XII; and Paul M. Smith’s Wide (2001), a wall-sized photo portrait of a naked transsexual, sitting in a green chair, legs spread wide revealing his vagina, the mustachioed subject staring back at the viewer as if asking us what’s so strange. Given the increasing list of restrictions, the curators ultimately decided to cancel the show just days before its opening. The Milan City Council labeled the exhibit offensive to the “sensibilities and the values of our city and our country.” In one report, mayor Moratti claimed to have delighted in destroying her advance copy of the exhibition catalog, a move that unsettled many on both the right and the left who felt such actions held an unseemly historical echo of Italy’s fascist past, recalling book bonfires and the censorship of “degenerate art.” It is perhaps symbolic, then, that “Art and Homosexuality” would finally find a space in the Palazzina Reale in Florence, a beautifully restored annex building to the Santa Maria Novella train station—both buildings completed in 1935 and representing part of Mussolini’s architectural legacy. The train station, noted for its simple design and efficient use of space, was also the place where, in the early 1940’s, the Florentine Jews were boarded onto trains bound for internment camps and, for many, the death camps in Germany. After the controversy in Milan and the refusal of the Florence City Council to support the exhibit, curators had to secure private funding and rent a private, smaller exhibition space, reducing the number of works on display but keeping the two controversial works by Schmidlin and Smith. Curators placed Miss Kitty in an alcove space, hidden behind a white curtain that only added a peep-show appeal to the work. The show garnered months of debate across Italy. Critics complained about the lack of artistic merit in the show. As one museum director put it, the works demonstrated “an interesting sociological phenomenon” but offered few artistic qualities. Still others charged that the curators were using the controversy to promote the agenda of gay groups in Italy. In response, some people noted the irony of the whole controversy. As one critic pointed out, “we are shocked by homosexual art, but no one is opposed to billboards by Dolce & Gabbana.” In “Sex and Freedom,” an essay in the exhibition catalog, Sgrebi noted that the same month the exhibit was canceled, mayor Moretti, in an event at Milan’s La Scala opera house commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Gianni Versace, cited the designer’s great contributions to the culture and economy of the city. “The object of dispute was the opening of the exhibit,” Sgrebi argued, “not its quality,” underscoring the political rather than commercial stakes involved at looking—or not looking—at such art. Less than two weeks after “Art and Homosexuality” closed in early January 2008, the center-left coalition government—an unstable amalgam of politicians from Communists to devout Catholics led by Prime Minister Romano Prodi—collapsed under a “no confidence” vote played out in a familiar display of Italian parliamentary politics. The controversies over homoerotic art were but one moment in the final months of the preceding political turmoil and provided gay groups a visible presence in a country that has lagged behind its EU neighbors in laws protecting gay and lesbian citizens. Just a few months prior to the show’s controversy in Milan, the Italian parliament was considering a bill that would guarantee rights in areas of inheritance and health care for unmarried couples, gay or straight. The bill, sponsored by Prime Minister Prodi, provoked strong condemnation by the Vatican and conservatives in parliament led by the popular former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and added to the growing tensions over the Vatican’s influence in Italian politics. In March of last year, a rally in Rome by gay rights supporters brought out an estimated 50,000 people, many holding up clocks while chanting, “The time is now for gay rights.” When a directive by the Vatican to Roman Catholic politicians stated that they have a moral duty to vote against gay rights legislation, many expressed outrage that the Vatican was trying to weaken the Prodi government. Maria Luisa Boccia, a leftist senator, complained: “This continuous daily interference by the church in parliament’s activity is intolerable. What’s next, excommunication?” Ultimately, the proposed legislation could find little support among coalition members, and by the end of 2007, just a few months before Prodi’s coalition fell apart, the bill was effectively defeated. Amid these “shifting moods, policies, and regimes,” the opening last autumn of “Art and Homosexuality” was a valuable moment, for it demonstrated the crucial place for controversial art within the political landscape of Italy. The works in the show, so often fixed on looking back at us, were emblematic of a moment when the act of looking at homoerotic imagery as art was so implicated in the national identity and historical memory. Responding to the show’s critics who questioned the artistic merits of the show, Sgrebi’s reply was: “Art does not need to be refined. It needs to be strong.” James Polchin is a frequent contributor to the G&LR and teaches writing at New York University.
