Trouble At the Smithsonia

WASHINGTON, D.C.— "There's been an entire history hiding in plain sight," National Portrait Gallery historian David C. Ward told ABC News earlier this week. "Telling the history of art without the history of gay people is like telling the history of slavery without mentioning black people." Well, no. Ward was speaking of "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," an exhibition that he co-curated with National Portrait Gallery curator Jonathan Katz at museum, which explores how gender and sexual identity have influenced modern American art. But being gay is not a prerequisite for being an artist — no matter what some more conservative fringes of the United States may think about the convention-flouting art world — while being black was a requirement for being a slave. Also: at this point, exactly how hidden is the supposedly clandestine history of gays in art?

New York alternative space White Columns recently presented "Act Up New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993," exploring the work of graphic designers and artists who called attention to the politics of the epidemic and its effects on the marginalized gay community. We all know that the ranks of gay artists include such towering figures from Praxiteles, Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio to Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly, and we have all, at times, been fascinated by their overlapping romantic ventures. Artistic depictions of homosexual sex acts have been commonplace for years, and yet they continue to make headlines, inspiring heated debate — from the early 1990s Culture Wars over Robert Mapplethorpe's graphic "X Portfolio" to recent instances of censorship in Russia over the Blue Noses's work "Kissing Policemen (An Epoch of Clemency)." To put it another way, discussions of sexuality in art may still be filled with bigotry and misplaced fury, but they certainly are not stifled or secret.

What the new show offers, an exhibition statement proposes, are abstracted or discreet depictions of the issues at hand. The show's organizers take the twin (vague) themes of "gender and sexuality" and use them to gather together work by some of the greatest artists of the past century, taking a sweeping look at variously coded identities by artists whose own sexual orientations run the gamut from strictly homosexual to strictly heterosexual. The result is that the 105 works on display in the show, which will run through February 13, don't obviously cohere, or rarely cohere in the same way to the proposed theme.