ABSTRACT: This presentation, on the occasion of the Caillebotte exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay and in collaboration with the Getty and Art Institute of Chicago, where it will open in the spring and summer of 2025 respectively, will look afresh at some of the artist’s most iconic images. These seemingly straightforward images of Paris and its environs are in fact deeply inflected by perceptions of manhood in the French Third Republic. This talk explores Caillebotte’s work through the lens of fraternité, or more specifically, the sense of brotherhood he experienced with the friends and family who were often the subjects of his paintings as well as other groups of men, including urban laborers, suburban gardeners, and boatmen.
BIO: An internationally acclaimed scholar of 19th-century French painting, Gloria Groom is Chair of Painting and Sculpture of Europe and the David and Mary Winton Green Curator at The Art Institute of Chicago. She has been involved in major monographic exhibitions and catalogues, including those about Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Geaorges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and thematic exhibitions such as Beyond the Easel: Decorative Paintings of Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard (2008), Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity (2012-2013), Van Gogh’s Bedrooms (2016) and Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist (2017) Manet and Modern Beauty, (2019) and the current touring exhibition devoted to Caillebotte.
