An exhibition on homosexuality at the Kunstmuseum Basel, with about 100 works from the 19th and 20th centuries

From March 7 to August 2, 2026, the Kunstmuseum Basel is hosting the exhibition The First Homosexuals. The Birth of New Identities, 1869-1939, which grew out of a project conceived by Alphawood Exhibitions and initially presented at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, with research and curatorship by Jonathan D. Katz, joined by associate curator Johnny Willis. For Basel, the project was reworked in collaboration with Kunstmuseum curators Rahel Müller and Len Schaller.

Through approximately one hundred works, including paintings, photographs, sculptures and works on paper, the exhibition aims to reconstruct how new visions of sexuality, gender and identity have developed since 1869, when the term homosexual first appeared in written form. The exhibition aims to take a wide-ranging approach, offering perspectives on queer, intimate portraits, desires expressed in symbolic form, colonial dynamics, and unconventional life choices.

Many artists approached the theme in different and often experimental ways: they portrayed friends and lovers, depicted the everydayness of couples, and questioned gender roles. Art became a space of freedom, capable of giving visual form to experiences and ideas for which there was not yet a shared vocabulary.

The exhibition thus aims to explore the emergence of this creative engagement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Organized in thematic sections, it highlights artists and writers who openly investigated, and sometimes claimed, homosexual and transgender identities. It follows the evolution of the nude in relation to changes in thinking about sexuality and highlights how traditional concepts, such as friendship or family ties, were used as visual codes, sometimes discreet, sometimes explicit, to express homosexual desire.

The exhibition project’s gaze also extends beyond Europe, analyzing the way in which many European artists associated homosexual desire with colonial territories, seeing it as their supposed inherent characteristic. This view is contrasted with the responses of artists from different parts of the world, who through their works challenged and questioned colonial domination. The project interweaves art history and social history, reconstructing the early stages of the LGBTQIA+ community and showing how homosexual and transgender identities were formed. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of a specific trans identity as elaborated by modern artists after the coining of the term trans in 1910.

Important international loans come to Basel for the occasion, many of them exhibited for the first time in Switzerland, with works from the Kunstmuseum’s collection.

On the occasion of the first presentation at Wrightwood 659, Monacelli Presshas published an extensive catalog featuring 22 original essays signed by scholars of queer art and history. Each contribution is devoted to a specific geographic area, from Japan to Australia to the indigenous peoples of South America. The creation of the exhibition is made possible through the support of the Alphawood Foundation Chicago.

An exhibition on homosexuality at the Kunstmuseum Basel, with about 100 works from the 19th and 20th centuries

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