Art, color and history: a queer spectrum on display.
Reviewing Queer British Art 1861–1967, an exhibition at Tate Britain.
Your eyes jump to her jacket first: a deep, scarlet red. Her back is turned, but you can see her profile — she looks away as if deep in thought. In Self-portrait (1913), Laura Knight depicts herself painting a female nude model. Neither the model nor Knight’s figure exude sensuality, yet there is something distinctly subversive about the painting. Something proudly and definitively queer.
Knight’s painting is just one work in Tate Britain’s current exhibition: Queer British Art 1861–1967. The exhibition features paintings, sculptures and other work by LGBTQ+ artists through eight contextually themed rooms.
Much like the term “queer” itself, the Tate’s exhibition embraces the wide range of sexualities and gender identities that British artists have adopted.
The art displayed highlights both flamboyant theatrics and carefully coded intimacy, illuminating a spectrum of art and identity through history and giving a beautifully fluid meaning to the exhibition’s name.
In the second room of the exhibition, a portrait of author Oscar Wilde and the door from his prison cell (he was famously sentenced for “gross indecency” in 1895) reminds viewers that queer expression was once vehemently taboo. Yet in the next room, titled “Theatrical Types,” the viewer sees the way performance and theatre offered an early public outlet for queer people. Here you see the very beginnings of today’s drag performance: the roots of RuPaul’s Drag Race, if you will. Even in the 19th century, queer expression had a public form, however limited.
The real highlights of this exhibition, however, are the more intimate depictions of desire and identity, which become more prominent in the later rooms. Works by and about women, particularly, reveal a fascinating duality in lesbian expression after the turn of the 20th century.
For example, the exhibition’s room focusing on the famed Bloomsbury Group features Ethel Walker’s Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa (1920). The painting is a scene of women bathing, the canvas crowded with figures who seem to be in dance-like motion. It is a repeated study of the female body, each woman posed artfully and bathed in soft, muted color.

Though lavender had yet to acquire political significance for lesbians at the time of the painting, it is hard to separate that sapphic color symbolism from the all-female utopia Walker presents. Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa is intimate: a beautiful meditation on female desire.
Yet walk into the next room, where Knight’s Self-portrait hangs, and you see women whose queerness goes beyond just imagination — it begins to be a bold encroach upon the male sphere.
In painting the “female gaze” on both nude model and artist in Self-portrait, Knight subverts patriarchal and traditional male voyeurism not once, but twice. Her figure is in sharp relief, not misty color.

Next to Knight’s painting hangs William Strang’s Lady With a Red Hat (1918), in which Vita Sackville-West gazes defiantly at the viewer from under a scarlet hat brim. The women of this room are not drowned in coded intimacy: they are in focus. Between these different expressions of color — bold, defiant red and soft, intimate lavender — is a captivating spectrum of lesbian emotion and identity, beautifully on display across rooms.
The same can be said of Tate Britain’s exhibition as a whole: it has many stories to tell, and through its rooms, the viewer better understands the many different meanings of “queer art.”
Queerness, especially when expressed through art, is not just about sex, gender or political labeling. The term and exhibition also encompass fluidity, intimacy, contradiction and change. The result, now displayed at the Tate, is thought-provoking and visually stunning; Queer British Art 1861–1967 does not disappoint.

