Paris Is Burning Over "Painting Men"
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| Gustave Caillebotte, Man at His Bath, 1884. Museum of Fine Arts Boston |
Some French writers attribute the insinuations to the exhibition's American co-organizers—curators at the Getty and Art Institute of Chicago.
Nothing is recorded of Caillebotte's sexuality. He was however a wealthy eligible bachelor who never married and had a career in the arts. You do the Bayesian math. I would put the probability of Caillebotte being gay somewhere less than that of John Singer Sargent and more than Mary Cassatt.
"Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men" focuses on the artist's male-gaze paintings of men, a speciality distinct from the familiar female subjects of Manet, Degas, and Cassatt. The exhibition will be at the Getty Center Feb. 25 to May 25, 2025, before traveling to Chicago.
Comments
I wonder what LACMA's major exhibits will be next year? Something that would be a better fit for (or confused with something at) MOCA, the Hammer, the Broad or Hauser & Wirth?
> who lived with a woman, was gay,"
> wrote Philippe Lancon in Liberation.
Hey, maybe Caillebotte was the "B" of the LGBTQ!
All the gay master painters of history are rolling over.
"For centuries after antiquity, friendship was a very important kind of social relation: a social relation within which people had a certain freedom, certain kind of choice (limited of course), as well as very intense emotional relations. There were also economic and social implications to these relationships — they were obliged to help their friends, and so on. I think that in the 16th and 17th centuries we see these kinds of friendships disappearing, at least in the male society. And friendship begins to become something other than that. You can find, from the 16th century on, texts that explicitly criticize friendship as something dangerous. […]
Once friendship disappeared as a culturally accepted relation, the issue arose, “What is going on between men?’ And that’s when the problem appears. And if men f*** together, or have sex together, that now appears as a problem. […] [T]he disappearance of friendship as a social relation, and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem, are the same process.
— Michel Foucault, Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity
... See the problem. In any case, one would think the French critics would know their Foucault.