Column: The Art Institute defends the title of ‘Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World.' A catalog contributor is skeptical

Chicago Tribune

30-07-2025

Since it was acquired in 1964, Gustave Caillebotte's 'Paris Street; Rainy Day' has become all but synonymous with the Art Institute.
It appears in the movie 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,' and in Masterpiece, the Parker Brothers game. If visitors follow one of the most common routes into the galleries — through the Michigan Avenue entrance, up the stairs, and into the Impressionism gallery — it's the first painting they'll greet, trading one urban tableau for another.
For the first time, the museum displayed Caillebotte's sketches for 'Paris Street; Rainy Day' as part of 'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World,' a new survey co-curated by the Art Institute alongside the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In his surviving sketch of the central couple, only the man is rendered in any detail. The figure looped around his arm is just a woman-shaped void.
Two things set Caillebotte (1848-1894) apart from his Impressionist peers. One is that he was fabulously wealthy, the son of a textile manufacturer. The other is that he overwhelmingly trained his artistic eye on other men. Men walking down the street in his Paris neighborhood. Men he played cards with. Men he hired as contractors to work his family estate. Men toweling themselves off after a bath — like in one 1884 painting deemed so salacious that, upon completion, it was intentionally displayed in a far-flung corner of a Brussels gallery.
Gloria Groom, an exhibition co-curator and the Art Institute's chair of European painting and sculpture, said she cannot think of 'any other artist' from the period who shared Caillebotte's predilection for painting working-class men, like those depicted in his 'Floor Scrapers' series.
'That's what makes him so distinct from his fellow Impressionists: his comfortableness in the social position that he was born into,' Groom said. 'He's a distinct artist; he has a very distinct way of showing his world.'
Recently, some have claimed the Art Institute is bowdlerizing that world. In the past year, the exhibit 'Painting His World' appeared at the Musée d'Orsay and the Getty under the title 'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.' That the Art Institute alone selected a different title has led some to accuse the Art Institute of queer erasure, reflecting broader fears of institutional self-censorship.
Jonathan Katz, the lead curator of 'The First Homosexuals' at Wrightwood 659, sees similarities between the Caillebotte fracas and the one surrounding the Art Institute's changing of a placard text in 2022. The work it accompanied, Félix González-Torres' 'Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.),' was named for González-Torres' partner Ross Laycock. The original placard noted that Laycock died of AIDS in 1991, the year the artwork was devised; the Art Institute's new placard, quickly replaced after public outcry, had removed mention of Laycock altogether.
'I'm always struck by the way this institution not only seems to be pathologically tied to a '50s mindset, but moreover, doesn't learn from its own stepping in it,' Katz said.
Katz and his husband, fellow art scholar André Dombrowski, were invited to contribute an essay to the exhibition catalog — also titled 'Painting Men' — examining Caillebotte's work through a queer lens. On a recent walkthrough of the exhibition with the Tribune, Katz said he felt those contributions had been toned down significantly compared to the exhibition's first outing at the Musée d'Orsay, where 'Painting Men' had garnered a conservative backlash. In response, he said, the Musee d'Orsay held a conference inviting scholars to submit papers with competing views on the question of Caillebotte's sexuality.
'It was a model of curatorial transparency,' Katz said. 'That is not what this institution (the Art Institute) has ever done.'
Johnny Willis, Katz's associate curator on 'The First Homosexuals,' confronted Groom about the exhibition's downplaying of queerness during an Art Institute Q&A in June. Groom declined to address Willis' concerns at length, saying it was common to change exhibition titles and that she would not 'speculate (about) something that was painted 140 years ago.'
The following week, the Tribune published a letter to the editor objecting to Groom's response to Willis and to the Art Institute's title. 'It's disappointing to see the Art Institute — once a beacon for cultural leadership — kowtow to imagined donor discomfort or a conservative fear of thought-provoking conversation,' wrote attorney Matthew Richard Rudolphi.
In an interview with the Tribune, Groom and a museum spokesperson provided more context on the title change. By their account, the Art Institute finalized the 'Painting His World' title nearly two years ago, based on feedback from a patron focus group that included that title, as well as 'Painting Men,' as options.
The museum declined to provide materials from that audience survey, saying it considered the results proprietary. But Groom and a museum spokesperson, who both reviewed the feedback, said patrons overwhelmingly associated Caillebotte with 'Paris Street; Rainy Day,' which prominently features a heterosexual couple.
'The main thrust of the response was that ('Painting Men') was not what they think of, and it seemed limited when his work is not limited to just painting men,' Groom told the Tribune.
Megan Michienzi, the museum spokesperson, said the Art Institute typically pursues such 'title testing' for its major exhibitions. For example, it title-tested 2023's 'Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape,' as well as the forthcoming 'Bruce Goff: Material Worlds,' opening in December.
'While we do not consider title testing to be definitive, it is directional in helping us determine what resonates with audiences,' Michienzi said in an email.
And just as exhibition titles sometimes change between host institutions — 'Myth and Marble,' for example, is now 'The Torlonia Collection: Masterpieces of Roman Sculpture' at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts — Groom said it's standard museum practice for an institution to write its own exhibition texts, even if the exhibition is co-produced. That meant she and her team started from scratch rather than working from the Musée d'Orsay's or the Getty's wall texts, though she acknowledged that she was 'definitely aware' of what was written in both.
'I would never presume to copy someone else's text,' she said. 'We all know our audiences and Paris' are quite different; Getty's is different.'
'Painting His World' wall texts follow the general approach promised by its title. On this point, it breaks with the more frank discussion of gender and sexuality at the Musée d'Orsay and the Getty.
'Painting His World' views Caillebotte's homosociality as one interpretive frame of many — class, leisure, urbanity, family. Neither the d'Orsay nor the Getty assert that Caillebotte was gay or bisexual, noting, as does the Art Institute, that he had a live-in female 'companion.' (That said, we know little about her: Caillebotte rarely painted her, and census records refer to her only as Caillebotte's 'amie,' or 'friend.') But by leaning into his works' provocativeness and, occasionally, sensuality, both go further than the Art Institute in nodding to the possibility.
To Katz, the Art Institute's approach leads to missed insights. Class tension is discussed in the room with Caillebotte's famous 'Floor Scrapers' — the workers' muscles rippling, their skin glistening like the varnish of the floor. But he believes the Art Institute's wall texts leave too much unspoken.
'While French law permitted homosexuality, it did not permit any form of public solicitation,' Katz said. 'If you were a man of a certain social class, you had a network of others who could provide entertainment for you that didn't entail public exposure. We wouldn't expect to find any kind of smoking gun there, because class protected them.'
Elsewhere, the Art Institute's curatorial approach appeared more evasive. Most rooms in the exhibition flow sequentially — that is, you can only access one room via the previous, predetermining visitors' progression through the galleries. Unlike the Getty and Musée d'Orsay iterations, the gallery with the portraits and nudes, where the question of Caillebotte's sexuality is pointedly addressed for the first and only time, is the exception, sequestered in an area visitors can bypass completely if they choose.
Groom said the placement of the three nudes in the space's gallery-within-a-gallery — featuring two men and one woman — was meant to evoke greater intimacy, as though we ourselves were entering the privacy of the subjects' quarters. Plus, in a clear break from the 19th-century squeamishness surrounding 'Man at His Bath,' the subject is placed so that his buttocks confront viewers from yards away. They could beckon you into that section — or they could drive you away.
'At the same time they deny an erotic reading, they enforce a kind of an erotic reading by creating a strip show in the middle of the exhibition,' Katz said.
Near 'Man at His Bath' hangs 'Self-Portrait at the Easel' (1879-80), one of four self-portraits in the exhibition. Despite its name, that painting does not depict Caillebotte alone. Behind him is another man, lounging on a couch. The man's features are indistinct, but he's lazily reading a newspaper, leading scholars to identify him as Richard Gallo, a journalist in Caillebotte's wealthy bachelor circle.
Gallo is one of the most frequently identifiable subjects in Caillebotte's paintings. He appears in six other pieces in 'Painting His World' alone. Unlike the Musée d'Orsay and the Getty, however, the Art Institute placard doesn't acknowledge Gallo's presence in the 'Self-Portrait.' Instead, it cites the artwork that hangs behind Gallo — Renoir's 'Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette' — as a launchpad to discuss Caillebotte's vast art collection, which eventually became the basis for the Musée d'Orsay.
When I brought up the omission to Groom, she said visitors should consult the catalog — which acknowledges the significance of Gallo's presence early on, in the introduction — if they were curious about the second figure.
'You can only have 120 words in a label, and you have to determine what is most essential. And that was the time when we could talk about Caillebotte the collector,' she said.
Katz doesn't buy that.
'Nobody is asking Gloria or any art historian to speak definitively about anything here. We can't,' he said. 'What we can do is problematize, ask, point out and let viewers draw their own conclusion. What we don't want is the institution to mediate for us in a single voice.'
Policing visitors' impressions is the last thing a museum should do, but how light a touch is too light? On one of my two visits to the exhibition, I entered the gallery with a family who concluded, after reading the anteroom's introductory text, that Caillebotte must have been a misogynist. On the same visit, I watched a couple scour the gift shop for the exhibition catalog; after finding a book called 'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men' but not 'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World,' they left in empty-handed confusion. Revisiting the portraits and nudes section with Katz, I overheard a teasing tête-à-tête between a security guard and visitors about how they'd found the exhibition's 'adult section.'
Seconds after I turned off my recorder during my walkthrough with Katz, a 20-something visitor, overhearing our conversation, approached us and timidly asked if we knew, perchance, whether Caillebotte was queer. Katz and I exchanged glances.
The answer isn't the point. Being unafraid to pose the question is.