The good, the indifferent and the simply awful

‘There is only one thing worse than homosexual art,’ the painter Patrick Procktor was once heard to declare at a private view in the 1960s. ‘And that’s heterosexual art.’ It would have been intriguing to hear his views on Queer British Art at Tate Britain. All the more so since it includes several of his own works, including a fine line-drawing study of the playwright Joe Orton, completely naked except for his socks — which he kept on because he felt they were sexy — and reclining somewhat in the manner of Manet’s Olympia.

In fact, many of those included might have had reservations — Oscar Wilde, for example, one of whose characters observed, ‘The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists.’ There are quite a few of those included here. Then again, strictly speaking Queer British Art is not about art at all, but defined by law, and those who fell foul of it.

In other words, it’s concerned with a clandestine and persecuted group. Its para-meters are the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy in 1861 and the legalisation of sexual intercourse between consenting adults in 1967 (Oscar’s fate is grimly documented by a cell door from Reading Gaol).

The result, from the artistic point of view, is a lot of promiscuous mingling of the good, the indifferent and the simply awful (though sometimes, as in the case of Glyn Philpot’s paintings, also quite fun). Frankly dreadful items such as Walter Crane’s enormous, pallid, silly ‘Renaissance of Venus’ (1877) get in for the sake of a good story. Apparently, on first seeing this canvas Lord Leighton exclaimed, ‘But my dear fellow, that is not Aphrodite — that is Alessandro!’ He meant that the body was that of Alessandro di Marco, a successful male artists’ model.