Oscar Wilde was here
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British artist Maggi Hambling was about seven when a teacher read Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories to her class. She was gripped by what she describes as “a voice from the imagination”. She asked her parents for his complete works for her 12th birthday and still has the books, bound in blue leather. “His writing was unlike anything I was surrounded by in Suffolk as a child,” she says. “It took me to another place.”
Hambling is one of 16 contemporary artists included in De Profundis: Oscar Wilde, a new exhibition at L’Hotel in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the room where Wilde was staying when he died in 1900. The show pays homage to “De Profundis”, the weird and wonderful 50,000-word letter the Irish poet and playwright wrote to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, while imprisoned in Reading Gaol for “acts of gross indecency”. Regulations dictated that Wilde wasn’t permitted to work on novels or plays, but he was allowed to write letters, and so, in solitary confinement, he described a sometimes thrilling, sometimes torturous affair.
The show’s curator, Daniel Malarkey, reread the letter while staying at the hotel last year. One quote stood out: “I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature – this is what I am looking for.” That’s what Malarkey hopes to give Wilde with this show. “Every piece I’ve chosen has a mystical quality to it,” he says. He wants the works – all of which are for sale – to come together, then disperse, carrying with them a “Wildean perfume”.
Central to the show is Hambling’s portrait Wilde and the Wallpaper, referencing his final words: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” His head lolls on a murky wash of grey, encircled with a fiery-orange floral motif – done with a “particularly nasty stencil”, says the artist. Wilde made his debut in Hambling’s work in a 1985 painting. In 1998, she created the first monument to him outside his native Ireland, near London’s Trafalgar Square, portraying him rising from a bench-like green granite coffin.
Untitled, 2020-2022, by Francis Offman
Household god V (Molière), 1989, by Derek Jarman
Works by the late artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, who was among those calling for a public sculpture dedicated to Wilde in London, also feature. Sands of Time, with its hourglass motif, crucifix and bullet, could be seen as a nod to Wilde’s altered sense of time in prison (and his lofty self-comparisons to Christ), while Household God V (Molière) is a play on Wilde’s more theatrical side. “Wilde is an essential part of queer history,” says Malarkey. “If you look at Jarman and artists working today, you can see his influence, whether it’s conscious or subconscious.”
Ashley Joiner is founder and director of Queercircle, the LGBTQ+-led charity. “For people who are forging new spaces and new identities, art is a powerful tool. In the context of Wilde, you could say that we’ve made a lot of progress,” they say, noting that this year is the 20th anniversary of the repeal of Section 28 (which prevented local authorities and schools from “promoting” homosexuality) in the UK. This month, Queercircle will offer tours of more than 30 galleries presenting LGBTQ+ artists at Frieze. “It’s a marker of how far we’ve come,” says Joiner. “But it’s also important to remember that there are lots of people who are risking their lives to be openly queer and to present this work.”
Paul Mpagi Sepuya looks at photography through the lens of queerness and blackness. His work Daylight Studio Mirror (0X5A1713), which features in De Profundis: Oscar Wilde, centres on a lush black-velvet curtain, a camera on a tripod and a pair of partially obscured legs. It is as much about the construction of images as it is about queer and social spaces.
Such dualities are fundamental to Wilde’s continued appeal. “On the one hand, his work and life were about glamour, wit, a heightened state of intellectual repartée, confidence – and, some would say, gluttony and debauchery,” says Malarkey. “On the other, you have this character writing a letter who is deeply interested in spirituality, our relationship with nature, and wanting to find meaning in life.”
Eleanor Lakelin plays with this dynamic in her elegant yet crumbling vessels created from the horse-chestnut trees outside what was once Wilde’s cell in Reading. Likewise, Katerina Jebb’s image of Tilda Swinton, created at L’Hotel, is both clinical and otherworldly: the actress in profile, gaze lowered, glowing gold against the dark.
“He was this great combination,” says Hambling of Wilde. “Big and strong and yet also feminine.” His letter to Douglas is a calm and chaotic, passionate and painful paean to forbidden love.
“There was an element of [the queer community] creating a universe for ourselves through art back then,” says Joiner. “And that still exists today.”
De Profundis: Oscar Wilde at L’Hotel, 75006 Paris, 18 to 22 October, by appointment at wilde@danielmalarkey.com
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