FINDING THE FIRST HOMOSEXUALS
Conférence de Jonathan David Katz*
Professeur associé d’histoire de l’art, Université de Pennsylvanie.
Commissaire de l’exposition The First Homosexuals: la naissance de nouvelles identités (1869-1959) au Kunstmuseum de Bâle (7 mars - 2 août 2026)
The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869-1939 is a major international loan exhibition that illustrates how the European invention of the concept “homosexual” in 1869 forever changed world culture. We’ll see that as language became restricted to but the two opposing sexualities of homo and hetero, art picked up the slack and offered a vastly more expansive vision of sexuality for which there was often as yet no language. The exhibition further considers how the imposition of a European taxonomy of sexuality—following the trajectory of other lines of colonial domination—rewrote indigenous sexuality with the end result that some of the cultures that were once most accepting of sexual and gender differences, including such nations as Iran and China, are now among the most homo and transphobic. In this talk, Katz will analyze a selection of little known LGBTQ works of art from among the nearly 400 works in the original exhibition.
*Conférence en anglais, sans traduction
Some of the paintings on display at the Kunstmuseum Basel :
Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, Laundress (La Blanchisseuse/ Sur le quai de Paris en automne), 1880, Private collection
Louise Abbéma, Sarah Bernhardt et Louise Abbéma sur le lac au Bois de Boulogne, 1883, Collections Comédie-Française.
Andreas Andersen, Interior with Hendrik Christian Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence, 1894, Oil on canvas, 128.5 x 160 cm, Museo H.C. Andersen.