A R T S & C U LT U R E
QUEER FINE ART TO A
This Pride season, explore the Museum of Fine Arts’ (unexpectedly) rich holding of LGBTQ-themed art By
Andrew Lear
Given Boston’s reputation for cultural conservatism, you might not expect its art museum to have a great collection of works on LGBTQ themes. But you would be surprised. The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) is in fact the only museum in the US that rivals New York’s Metropolitan as a place to explore gay history. This article offers but an enticing taste of the many queer works of art on display in the galleries of the MFA. Both Greek and Roman cultures approved of certain kinds of same-sex relations – and disapproved vocally of others – and same-sex love is a big theme in Classical literature and art. As a result, the best museums for a gay history tour are museums with strong Classical collections. The MFA is, however, special even among such museums, because of its relationship with the great gay collector Edward Perry Warren (18601928) – famous for the British Museum’s Warren cup – who donated many key pieces in the collection. In fact, Warren made these donations because he wanted to use the museum to teach fellow Bostonians (whom he loathed!) about same-sex love. Our first work of art, a small ceramic vessel (an oil flask, for bathing) from ancient Athens (mid-sixth century BC), is an excellent example of Warren’s donations. It bears three painted
scenes arranged in three distinct registers. The scene in the uppermost register represents male-male courtship. The man on the left is making a set of gestures common in such scenes to the man on the right: with his left hand he reaches for his chin, and with his right for his genitals, indicating a combination of begging and desire. The man on the left is a bearded adult; the man on the right is probably a late adolescent, since he is full-grown but beardless (the Greeks did not shave). The dog accompanying the bearded man indicates that he is a hunter. Men line up behind them on either side bearing typical Greek courtship gifts, including a fighting cock (to the couple’s left) and a live hare (to the couple’s right). Such relationships were, as we know from Greek literature as well as art, typical of Greek upperclass society and supposedly revolved around role modeling. This vase seems to illustrate that idea, because the scene in the lowest register (not visible in the photo) shows what these gifts are for: there is a hare being chased by a dog and a throw-stick that is about to strike the game in the head. Considered together, the scenes seem to tell us that the older man gives the younger man a hare so that he will learn to be a hunter like himself –and presumably develop the military skills that hunting teaches, so Anonymous artist. Archaic Athenian black-figure oil flask. MFA 08.291. Gift of Edward Perry and Fiske Warren. Greek Archaic Gallery (113). Credit: MFA.
154 | Boston Pride 2016
