The Kunstmuseum Basel is opening the exhibition "The First Homosexuals" on Saturday. With around 80 works, it traces how new images of sexuality, gender and identity were formed from the first use of the word "homosexual" in 1869. +Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox The exhibition is divided into six sections in three rooms, which are dedicated to different aspects of homosexuality, but also to broader forms of sexuality. The fourth section, for example, shows coding in art. Female homosexuality, for example, was associated with friendship early on. The painting Contre-jour (Backlight) by Marie-Louise-Catherine Breslau from 1888 shows two women in an everyday scene. However, it was sometimes mislabelled as "the girlfriends", the museum said during a tour of the exhibition for the media on Thursday. The coding of male homosexuality in the painting Naked Fishermen and Boys on a Green Shore by Ludwig von Hofmann from 1900, on the other hand, is based on an art ...
