Exhibition of the week Queer British Art, 1861-1967

Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk). Until 1 October

Until fairly recently, an exhibition of homosexual art in a major London gallery would have been “unthinkable”, said Ella Cory-wright on Culturewhisper.com. Now, though, Tate Britain has “taken the plunge” and mounted this long overdue survey of gay British art, bringing together paintings, drawings, films and archive material to show how artists expressed their sexuality in defiance of the law. The exhibition spans the period from 1861, when the death penalty for sodomy was lifted, to 1967, when homosexuality was at long last decriminalised. In its course, we encounter everything from the mannered portraits of John Singer Sargent to Francis Bacon’s “copulating beefcakes”. Though some will undoubtedly dismiss the show as a “stunt”, the Tate must be commended for “righting wrongs” and giving queer art the “proper platform” it deserves. That, surely, is “a cause for celebration”.

The exhibition is “often silly, sexy and fun”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. For example, a photograph of the artists Denis Wirth-miller and Richard Chopping is complemented by a biscuit tin they once owned, filled with more than 200 buttons taken from soldiers’ tunics. Each one is a “souvenir of a sexual liaison” with servicemen stationed near their home after the Second World War. But just as frequently, the show is “heart-wrenching and tragic”. We see a painting of Sappho embracing her lover Erinna by the PreRaphaelite artist Simeon Solomon, who was arrested for his homosexuality and spent the last 20 years of his life as an alcoholic labouring in a workhouse. Elsewhere, a full-length portrait of Oscar Wilde is accompanied by the door to the cell in which he was imprisoned in Reading jail.

The show’s “real revelation” is the work of the painter Edward Burra, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. Though Burra rarely left his Sussex home town, and “in all probability, never had any sexual relations with a man”, works such as 1941’s Soldiers at Rye translate “repressed desire” into “something nightmarishly sinister”. On the whole, though, the show is a mixed bag. Paintings by the likes of the Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan Grant are of debatable artistic value, while objects of social historical interest, such as a set of library books lewdly defaced by the playwright Joe Orton and his lover (for which crime they were ultimately jailed), are “disappointing” when seen up close. For all the “radicalism” proposed by its title, this exhibition is a “rather numbing” experience.