During the first half of the 20th century, when homosexuality was a crime, the act of even depicting it could land an artist jail time.
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“A lot of the art that I found was not work that had been exhibited or reproduced before,” says Jarrett Earnest, author of The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York 1930-1955 (David Zwirner Books) and curator of the 2019 exhibition of the same name. “It was private art, made for their own pleasure and needs.”
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“The work lived in the collections of friends, as museums wouldn’t have wanted it. It got passed to friends and lovers, and was circulated and preserved through those relationships, which were overlaid with artistic, intellectual, sexual, and romantic interests.”
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Categories: Art