Queer British Art show leads Tate 2017 programme
The first major exhibition to explore the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in the UK 50 years ago will feature works by artists who dared to be different, including David Hockney and Ethel Sands
There will be the downfall of Oscar Wilde and his two years in jail, and the ruination of pre-Raphaelite Simeon Solomon who was spurned by his friends after his arrest in a public toilet. But there will also be stories of happiness, community and joy, in a major exhibition Tate is calling “Queer British Art”.
Details were announced last week of a show for next year at Tate Britain marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in the UK.
It will be the first major exhibition to explore the subject, and spans the period from 1861, when the death penalty for buggery was abolished, to the decriminalisation.
It will include works by David Hockney, John Singer Sargent, Francis Bacon, Dora Carrington, Ethel Sands and Keith Vaughan, and explore a century when it was not easy to be different.
“There is definitely a bit of torture and misery in the show,” says its curator, Clare Barlow. “But it will be a show with a lot of quieter moments and really beautiful moments, and art which just celebrates the humdrum, the backdrop to people’s everyday lives, the houses they shared with their lovers. That is often every bit as radical as the stories and court cases we gasp over.”
The best known of those stories is that of Wilde, imprisoned in 1895 for “gross indecency”. But Barlow says the show would also explore lesser-known lives such as Solomon who was rejected from polite society after he was arrested in a public toilet in 1873 and found guilty of attempting to commit sodomy.