HYBRID IN-PERSON AND ONLINE PROGRAM
Caillebotte – Painting Men at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, from October 8th, 2024 to January 19th, 2025
Chris Boïcos, art historian and director of Paris Art Studies
Reception 1 – 1:30 pm
The exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in autumn 2024 focuses on Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) and his predilection for masculine forms and portraits of men. It seeks to examine this artist’s radical modernity through the lens of our changing perspective on 19th-century forms of masculinity.
In a desire to produce a new, authentic form of art, Caillebotte took his subjects from his surroundings (Haussmann’s Paris, the country houses around the capital) and his male acquaintances (his brothers, the workers employed by his family, his boating friends). In response to the Realist movement, he introduced new figures into his paintings: an urban worker, a man on a balcony, a sportsman, and even an intimate portrait of a male nude after his bath. In an era when virility and republican fraternity prevailed, but traditional masculinity was also in crisis for the first time, these new, powerful images challenged the established order, both social and sexual. The exhibition, which presents around 70 pieces, includes Caillebotte’s most important paintings of people, as well as pastels, sketches, photographs, and documents.
$15 fee for guests and subscribers (no fee for members)
