Homoerotic art collection from 1750 to 1920

W. Davis

Most of the principal male homosexual art collections of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries projected a relation between modern art - art of the period and roughly contemporary with the collectors themselves - and non-modern art, specifically the art of classical antiquity and of the Italian Renaissance. Five examples in rough chronological order will make the point. My aim is not, however, to consider each one of these collections in the specific internal terms it adopted. Rather, I wish to consider the historical lineage of the collections and their general structural logic. I will argue that in them homoerotic reference points - canonically beautiful ones - were set in place in relation to one another in what I will call phallic doubling. But the resulting array, though perhaps beautiful for the collector and his circle, could not be canonically received as such. A homosexualized collation had been generated which could only be fully appreciated in clandestine ways.