PARIS.- This exhibition features over 500 works and documents, mainly from the Centre Pompidou collection. Starting in the early 20th century, it illustrates how artists have helped to transform the representation of “minority” sexualities and participated in campaigns by LGBTQIA+ communities to gain recognition of their rights, supporting an emancipation movement after witnessing the formation of transgressive, sometimes clandestine subcultures opening up the way to the assertion of open activism in the public sphere in the late 1960s.

Rather than providing a unidimensional account, “Over the Rainbow”* proposes a constellation of diverse works with one point in common: each in its own way asserts what homophobic representation denigrates. Rooted in an eminently social dimension, the works exhibited are mainly deployed in disciplines involving mechanical reproduction such as film and printed works, which are in a unique position to ensure widespread circulation. The Bibliothèque Kandinsky collections have thus been largely represented: thanks to institutional support from Gilead Sciences, it now boasts hundreds more items including illustrated books, photographs, magazines and queer zines, to form a vast archive of visual LGBTQIA+ culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The exhibition includes a series of sets put together from the Centre Pompidou collection: Natalie Clifford Barney’s lesbian salon, buzzing with alternative artistic endeavour involving various disciplines; the homoerotic work of Jean Cocteau, following in André Gide’s footsteps to author one of the first literary works taking an activist stance, Le Livre blanc (The White Notebook - 1928); photography from the inter-war period, the preferred medium for the expression of homosexual desire for Florence Henri and Raymond Voinquel; the theatre of inversion in Roaring Twenties Paris, where genders blurred and swapped over before the eyes of Brassaï and Gerda Wegener; “black homosexuality” as portrayed by Jean Genet in Querelle de Brest (Querelle of Brest - 1947) and Un chant d’amour (A Song of Love - 1950); the emergence of leather culture in the late 1960s, with Kenneth Anger and Nancy Grossman; graphic output and activist videos, in the 1970s, with the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire (Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action or FHAR); the response of artist collectives fighting AIDS like Boy / Girl with Arms Akimbo in the face of inaction and even denial by public authorities; the assertion of queer theory in the 1990s and the development of contemporary art forms touching on issues such as sexuality, gender, ethnic origin and/ or social classes.

This alternative vision of the Centre Pompidou collection highlights artistic contributions to the struggles of the LGBTQIA+ community since the early 20th century.

* Judy Garland’s classic song from The Wizard of Oz, Over the Rainbow 1970, was associated with the LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex and Asexual) rainbow flag and has become one of its anthems.