Sapphic Modernism

This panel examines the intersections of modern art and the rise of lesbian and queer subcultures throughout the early and mid twentieth century. Beginning in the 1980s, when critic Makiko Minow coined the phrase “lesbian modernism,” historians and literary scholars have produced a sustained multi-decade discourse that examines the contributions of lesbian artists and writers to theorizations of modernity, with notable studies by Susan Gubar, Shari Benstock, Terry Castle, Karla Jay, Laura Doan, Jodie Medd, Elizabeth English, and the authors in the recent anthology Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres (2023). By contrast, with the important exception of Tirza True Latimer’s Women Together, Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (2005), the discipline of art history has had relatively few analyses of this robust field. Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of Latimer’s study, this session asks what role sapphic modernism might play in the shaping of art history today. Potential papers might examine: the visual cultures of Bloomsbury or Natalie Clifford Barney’s salon; queer abstraction in the paintings of Betty Parsons and Sonja Sekula; processes of queer assemblage in the photomontages of Hannah Höch and Claude Cahun; lesbian portraiture in the art of Berenice Abbott, Marie Laurencin, Romaine Brooks, Gertrude Stein, or Tamara de Lempicka; and sapphic eroticism in the commercial works of Jeanne Mammen, Gerda Wegener, and Germaine Krull. Inspired by Monique Wittig’s bold assertion that “lesbians are not women,” this panel also asks how sapphic modernism might contribute to the study of genderqueer, nonbinary, and transgender art histories.