The Hidden Queer History of Modernism

In Bank Holiday Monday (1937), queer desire unravels in plain sight within a crowded carnival ground. The kaleidoscopic painting, by British nonbinary artist Gluck, centers on two fashionable, androgynous figures: One, with close-cropped brown hair (like the artist’s own), looms over her peroxide-blond partner’s shoulder, seductive and sinister. The two are physically present in the scene, standing in the trash-strewn grass, but seem to exist in a bubble—speaking a language of forbidden yearning and coded self-expression.

These are the visual cues on view throughout “Queer Modernism: 1900 to 1950,” a comprehensive new exhibition of over 130 works by 34 artists at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s K20 space in Düsseldorf, Germany. Rewriting a half-century of Western art history through a queer lens is noble—and necessary. Although modernism was defined by its rejection of traditional values and embrace of experimentation, it was a cadre of straight, white, male artists like Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh who came to dominate the canon. The new exhibition reframes modernism as a movement shaped by queerness, not merely touched by it.

The vibrancy of Bank Holiday Monday helps to define the show. It’s also a moment of new visibility for the mononymic British painter who dropped their given name, Hannah Gluckstein, in 1918, and became one of England’s most prominent gender-defying artists. This inclusion reflects a broader trend across the art world, where galleries and institutions have sought to reevaluate historical movements in recent years to recognize the impact of marginalized artists.

Of the 331 participating artists and collectives in the main exhibition of the 2024 Venice Biennale, for instance, there were dozens for whom queerness was central to their practice. The art market has also begun to catch up: early queer icon Rosa Bonheur’s Emigration de Bisons (Amérique) (1897) sold for $773,500 in 2019, while other artists represented in the exhibition, including Richmond Barthé, Leonor Fini, Beauford Delaney, and Paul Cadmus, have also sold works in the upper six figures or higher at auction in recent years.

There is a growing appetite for this long-overlooked history, and “Queer Modernism” makes a persuasive case for rewriting it. “It cannot only be about integrating seemingly marginalized artists into the center of the discourse on modernism,” said curator Anke Kempkes. “An exhibition like this is changing our perspective on the history of modernism, which has usually been told linearly. We see now that the whole picture is so much broader and more complex and complicated.”

The exhibition contains work from across five decades, when queer artists turned to the very materials of modernism—abstraction, fragmentation, and reduction—to encode desire and difference in plain sight. At the very start of the show is Untitled (Seated Man, Multiple Images) (1927), by Russian Surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew, whose partner, Charles Henri Ford, co-wrote The Young and Evil, a salacious (and quickly banned) novel about New York’s gay underground scene in the 1930s.

The moody, cerebral portrait shows a lone figure in a shabby gray suit, his face split into three overlapping expressions as his limbs abnormally intertwine. The faces suggest layers of identity, while the tangle of limbs can be read as either a lover’s embrace or a desperate struggle to reconcile a fractured identity.

“Tchelitchew criticized Picasso’s analytical Cubism and sterile modernism for being lifeless and for not being able to capture life, sexuality, desire, and physical forms of embodiment,” said Kempkes. Elsewhere in the show, works explore the expression of queer identities in the early 20th century, when homosexuality was still criminalized for men and socially taboo for women across Europe and the U.S. In Glyn Warren Philpot’s Penelope (1923)—a standout painting, which sold for over £337,000 at auction in 2021—queer desire is camouflaged in Greek mythological imagery. Though the title refers to Odysseus’s wife from Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope almost recedes into the canvas as she’s depicted on a chair, weaving a shroud.

Instead, Philpot focuses on the three male suitors surrounding her—particularly one whose barely covered backside dominates the foreground, with his groin just inches from her upturned gaze. The work simmers with repressed sexuality, reflecting the artist’s own conflict as both a gay man and a practicing Roman Catholic. By rendering homoeroticism through gazes and the male form, Philpot navigated the tension between desire and the moral codes of this era.

Greek mythology as a lens for queerness recurs most vividly in the story of Narcissus, the handsome young man who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. This became particularly salient due to Freud’s dominating influence on 20th-century thought. The psychoanalyst famously pathologized homosexuality as a kind of “misdirected love of the self.” But artists of the time took that diagnosis and flipped it, navigating their same-sex desires not through shame, but reclamation.