‘The First Homosexuals’ exhibited in Kunstmuseum Basel

Kunstmuseum Basel shows the exhibition "The First Homosexuals" Keystone-SDA

The Kunstmuseum Basel is opening the exhibition "The First Homosexuals" on Saturday. With around 80 works, it traces how new images of sexuality, gender and identity were formed from the first use of the word "homosexual" in 1869.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

The exhibition is divided into six sections in three rooms, which are dedicated to different aspects of homosexuality, but also to broader forms of sexuality.

The fourth section, for example, shows coding in art. Female homosexuality, for example, was associated with friendship early on. The painting Contre-jour (Backlight) by Marie-Louise-Catherine Breslau from 1888 shows two women in an everyday scene. However, it was sometimes mislabelled as “the girlfriends”, the museum said during a tour of the exhibition for the media on Thursday.

The coding of male homosexuality in the painting Naked Fishermen and Boys on a Green Shore by Ludwig von Hofmann from 1900, on the other hand, is based on an art historical motif, it explained. This goes back to the painting Bathers, which Paul Cézanne created at the end of the 19th century.

+ Too much attention paid to queer people, says Swiss survey

Hope for more acceptance

“It is the museum’s first exhibition focusing on the art and work of the LBTQIA+ community,” said museum director Elena Filipovic. All over the world, people suffer prejudice because of their identity and their love. “If we succeed in bringing a little more knowledge, tolerance and acceptance into the world, great things will already have been achieved,” she said.

According to Jonathan Katz, US art historian and curator of the exhibition, definitions today are focused on the European view. This is characterised by the contrast between homo and hetero and has been globalised by colonialism together with a negative attitude. In Japan, for example, homosexuality was “completely normal” before the European influence, he said.

+ Swiss schools struggle with homophobic language and bullying

Similarly, the legal and medical standardisation that emerged in the 19th century meant that ways of describing different forms of sexuality were lost, said Katz. We are not experiencing a “new trans era” today, as there have always been forms of gender and sexual “dissidence”. Rather, young people in particular are increasingly refusing to identify with conventional definitions, he said.

The exhibition will be shown in the new building of the Kunstmuseum and will run from its launch on Saturday until August 2.

Adapted from German by AI/ts

How we work 

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]