Queer to a Fine Art

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 (1860- 1928) – 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.

Paul Gaugin. D’où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous? MFA 36.270. Sidney and Esther Rabb Gallery (255). Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Rosso Fiorentino, Dead Christ with Angels. MFA 58.527. Museum Council Gallery (254). Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

important to elite Greek society. Once mature, the mentee will in turn become the mentor to an attractive ephebe of his own.

There are also a number of homoerotic works in the museum from Renaissance Italy. Renaissance Italy was, of course, a Christian society and should not have approved of same-sex love; nonetheless same-sex love and gender ambiguity are common themes in Renaissance Italian literature and artworks, indicating (as do other historical sources) that society was more flexible or at least more complicated than you would expect. Astonishingly, many religious images are particularly homoerotic, and even more astonishingly, Christ in crucifixion and deposition scenes is frequently portrayed in a homoerotic way. Complicated theories have been proposed to account for this, but the most likely is simply that artists tended to treat any nude figure erotically. The MFA has one of the great examples of this theme, Rosso Fiorentino’s Dead Christ with Angels (1524-1527). In this painting, Christ does not appear dead. Rather, he seems to be lounging in the arms of a group of singularly beautiful angels. His body is sinuous and gender-ambiguous; this effect is heightened by the way his thighs conceal his genitals – although his pubic hair is visible, which is highly unusual. His nipples almost seem to be erect, and his facial expression indicates pleasure rather than pain. The markedly phallic candles held by the angels contribute to the scene’s almost lurid sexiness.

We are much better informed about men’s private lives than women’s in most historical periods, among other things because so many writers and artists were men. As a result, female-female love is less common in museums. Nevertheless, the MFA does have a number of works referring to female-female relations. One, for instance (not currently on display, however) is the 18th-century Chinese painting album Secret Spring by Meng Lu Jushi, which depicts women engaging in sex together in the privacy of the women’s quarters. At least one famous painting in the MFA also contains a person with a non-binary gender identity. This is Paul Gauguin’s monumental canvas D’où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous? (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?), completed in 1897-1898. The composition centers on a figure who is plucking a fruit from a tree, perhaps analogous to the Tree of Wisdom. The figure resembles the other women in the painting except for the lack of breasts. For this reason, the person is generally believed to be a mahu, one of the several intergender categories traditional to Tahitian society. Gauguin was fascinated by mahus and portrayed them numerous times in his works.

So we have male-male courtship, a homoerotic Jesus, femalefemale group sex, and a genderqueer person in the center of a huge canvas. And this is a just a small selection of the many pieces of LGBTQ interest in the MFA. Not as conservative as you might have thought, eh?

Andrew Lear, Classicist and gay historian, is the leading expert on same-sex love in ancient Greek art. He has taught at Columbia, Pomona College, and New York University. In 2013, he founded Oscar Wilde Tours (www.oscarwildetours.com), the first company to offer tours worldwide focused on gay history and art. During Boston Pride Week, Lear will lead a ‘Gay Secrets’ tour in the MFA. For more information visit the Pride Arts page.