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Chicago Tribune
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: The Art Institute defends the title of ‘Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World.' A catalog contributor is skeptical
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.
UAE Moments
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- UAE Moments
The Six Best Paintings by Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh is one of the most celebrated and influential artists in history. Known for his expressive use of color, bold brushstrokes, and emotionally charged works, van Gogh created around 900 paintings during his lifetime. Though he faced personal struggles and limited recognition while alive, his artwork is now considered priceless. Here are six of the best paintings by Vincent van Gogh that exemplify his visionary talent and enduring legacy. 1. The Starry Night (1889) Arguably van Gogh's most iconic work, The Starry Night captures a swirling night sky over the village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Created while van Gogh was in a mental asylum, the painting expresses both turbulence and serenity with its dynamic sky, cypress trees, and quiet town below. The bold colors and rhythmic brushwork make it one of the most recognized and loved paintings in the world. Location: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York 2. Irises (1889) Painted during his time at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, Irises showcases van Gogh's fascination with nature and color. The vivid blues, purples, and greens highlight his attention to detail and unique composition style. Each iris is given its personality, making the painting feel alive and full of motion. Location: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 3. Sunflowers (1888) Van Gogh's Sunflowers series is among his most celebrated works. The version created in Arles features a vibrant bouquet of sunflowers in a simple vase. The yellows range from golden to ochre, reflecting van Gogh's mastery of color and light. The painting symbolizes friendship and gratitude and was created to decorate the guest room for his friend Paul Gauguin. Location: National Gallery, London 4. The Bedroom in Arles (1888) The Bedroom is a deeply personal painting that represents comfort, solitude, and van Gogh's longing for stability. The use of flat colors and skewed perspective gives the room a dreamlike quality. This painting was one of van Gogh's favorites, and he created three versions of it. Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 5. Wheatfield with Crows (1890) Believed to be one of van Gogh's final works, Wheatfield with Crows conveys a sense of foreboding and emotional intensity. The dark sky, swirling crows, and divided path reflect the inner turmoil he experienced shortly before his death. The painting is often seen as a haunting yet powerful farewell from the artist. Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 6. The Avenue of Les Alyscamps (1888) Painted during his time in Arles, The Avenue of Les Alyscamps depicts a tree-lined Roman necropolis path in rich autumn colors. Van Gogh was inspired by the changing seasons and often painted this site with Gauguin. The vibrant oranges and yellows highlight his skill in capturing the mood and atmosphere of a setting. Final Brushstroke Vincent van Gogh's work transcends time, emotion, and artistic convention. These six paintings reflect his unique vision and the intensity with which he saw the world. Whether you're an art lover or a curious admirer, exploring these masterpieces offers a deeper appreciation of one of history's greatest painters.
New York Times
27-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
Scorched Stumps and Spotless Art at the Reopening Getty Villa
When visitors arrive at the Getty Villa's gate and granite pillar, they will almost immediately be confronted by a Los Angeles hillside that has been changed — and charred. The eucalyptus trees have been intentionally pruned, their blackened stumps protruding from the ground at sharp, jagged angles. The devastation is hard to miss, said Camille Kirk, the Getty's sustainability director. 'We have to acknowledge the burn,' she said. The museum that is as famous for its stunning landscape as for its art collection is reopening on Friday on grounds that have been licked by flames. Nearly six months after the Palisades fire carved its way through the neighborhood and came knocking at the museum's door, the best way to understand its significance may be to notice what is no longer there. Roughly 1,400 trees burned beyond saving, many which once shaded the now barren hills that stretch out around the 65-acre property. The melted P.V.C. pipe that had made up the museum's irrigation system in those hillsides has been removed. Gone too is the rosemary, zapped by flare-ups, that once decorated the concrete ledges that encircle the museum. That is how close the flames got. Less than a football field from a Greek and Roman treasure trove. But while the grounds were damaged — the hills on all sides were enveloped, the museum quite literally surrounded by fire — officials say the campus buildings and galleries were never ablaze. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Queer Lens' is the provocative photography show only the Getty would be brave enough to stage
'Queer Lens: A History of Photography' is a sprawling survey of more than 270 works from the last two centuries that looks at the ways cameras transformed the expression of gender and sexuality. Scores of artists as well-known as Berenice Abbott, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray and Edmund Teske hang with more than a dozen unknowns. The Getty Museum's groundbreaking Pride Month show is provocative and important, and the timing packs a wallop. The exhibition has been in the works for years (since 2020), but coincidentally, it opens during a state of national emergency. The ACLU is tracking 597 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in state legislatures across the U.S., including six in California. (Texas leads the hate-pack, with 88.) Most won't pass. All, however, mean to intimidate just by being introduced. The show conjures an oppressive frame of social reference again and again. Often it is subtle. Take the simple black-and-white photo booth snapshot in which a kissing couple of twentysomething young men was memorialized around 1953 by Canadian-born American artist Joseph John Bertrund Belanger. Their mouths smashed together, one man looks with a heavy-lidded gaze at the other, his eyes shut but his open hand raised, fingers brushing his beloved's throat. Tight framing in the contained privacy of a photo booth underlines an image of passionate intimacy. However, imagine if they were to step outside the curtain and into Vancouver's Playland Amusement Park, where the picture was made, for the very same kiss. They would face possible arrest and imprisonment for 'gross indecency' under the country's antigay criminal code. (That law wasn't lifted until 1969.) Belanger was a World War II veteran who fought with ordinary distinction against a fascist German regime rampaging across Europe — one that launched its reign of terror with the 1933 burning of a homosexual's library on a Berlin public square. In 1944, the fellow pilot with whom Belanger had a private wartime romance was killed in combat. This modest postwar photograph resounds because it pictures the photo booth as a closet. Was that the artist's intention in making it? We don't know, but the result is compelling because it is at once profoundly personal, which is obvious from the deep kiss, while extremely exotic, since queer images like this are rarely seen, never mind celebrated. That bracing fusion recurs in gallery after gallery. The vivifying dichotomy is even announced in advance. Climb the stairs in front of the museum, its risers smartly painted as a cheerful rainbow flag that visually sets the art museum atop a queer pedestal, and you'll encounter the inviting billboard for 'Queer Lens.' Reproduced is a publicity image by Frederick Spalding, a self-taught British portrait photographer. Fanny and Stella, middle-class lovelies in hoop skirts, engage in a warm embrace. The couple, otherwise known as Thomas Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park, appeared on the London stage — and often out and about in public — in snazzy women's attire. The photograph dates from about 1870. Today, when drag queens and trans people, especially women, are innocent targets of hysterical conservative attacks as some new liberal phenomenon signaling imminent social collapse, a 155-year-old photograph casts a witty and jaundiced eye on the stubbornness of irrational anti-queer hate. Good on the Getty for not mincing visual words. Getty curator Paul Martineau has organized 'Queer Lens' in nine chronological sections. (His catalog, compiled with historian Ryan Linkof, is very good.) Each one is pegged to social conditions around LGBTQ+ life, principally in the United States and Europe. 'The Pansy Craze,' for example, takes note of pre-Prohibition-era underground clubs, often gay, where drag and other performers gained local fame, in addition to bohemian European establishments, some with a vibrant public face. Show business is prominent in Baron Adolph de Meyer's atmospheric portraits of entertainer (and later spy) Josephine Baker and Carl Van Vechten's Bessie Smith, empress of the blues, resplendent behind a huge, feathered fan. Buoyant members of a Harlem social club of drag kings and queens posed for James Van Der Zee, while Brassaï cast his quietly voyeuristic eye on a relaxed and tender lesbian couple enjoying a Paris nightclub. Artist and designer Cecil Beaton performed a coy fashion magazine pose in full drag, his slender form crowned by an enormous picture hat that transforms him into something approaching a human flower, photographed by the duo David James Scott and Edgar Wilkinson. Such portraits create a surprisingly revealing context for Surrealist Man Ray's 'Rrose Sélavy,' the famous photographs of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp in drag, bundled up in a cloche hat and fur-collared coat, eyeliner carefully smudged and lip gloss crisp. Two straight male artists are scrambling establishment gender, but here it's less a singular statement than part of a larger cultural phenomenon. Art and science are analytical tools in some photographs, especially those of nudes. (The show includes considerable nudity, mostly male.) Two images from about 1860 are early textbook cases. In one, photography pioneer Félix Nadar pictured an intersex person from the neck down. Careful cropping maintains privacy for clinical study. In the other, Gaudenzio Marconi helped to launch what would become a standard trope over a century's time for using an artistic pedigree to legitimize homoerotic images. With a flesh-and-blood male model, his picture replicates the famous, much-admired Hellenistic marble sculpture known as the 'Barberini Faun,' a muscled god with splayed legs, dredged up during the Renaissance from a moat below Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo. Strict gender separation common to early 19th century social structures underwent unexpected transformation after the binaries of heterosexual and homosexual were invented in 1869. Karl Maria Kertbeny, an apparently closeted Hungarian journalist, who was living in Berlin, coined the two terms barely a generation after the camera's 1839 invention. The show's first image is even earlier. A small cut paper silhouette from 1810 shows Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant gazing into each other's eyes, their profiles framed in entwined strands of their hair. The artist is unknown. But silhouettes like this are evoked by the phrase 'the art of fixing a shadow,' which is how William Henry Fox Talbot described his earthshaking invention of the negative-positive process that made photographs possible. The lesbian silhouette's inclusion reminds that same-sex love predates cameras and the modern era, while implying that things were about to change. And change they have, for good and ill. These days, the Getty is probably the only major art museum in America that could open an exhibition like 'Queer Lens.' Others wouldn't dare. Some smaller institutions would, like the young Chicago exhibition space Wrightwood 659, where the large international loan exhibition 'The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939' is currently on view. (Curator Jonathan D. Katz, a respected scholar, has said that four out of five of his requests to museums and private collectors for loans to the show were denied, and no American museum would accept the show for a tour, even when offered for free.) Meanwhile across town, the mainstream Art Institute of Chicago is about to unveil 'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World,' a traveling exhibition virtually identical to the one already seen in Paris and Los Angeles, where it was notably titled 'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.' The show explores the late-19th century artist's homosocial themes, distinctive for Impressionism, whose common human subjects were typically women and girls. A spokesperson at the Art Institute of Chicago says the name change, made long before the show's Paris debut, is simply meant to reflect 'Caillebotte's full lived experience and daily life.' Maybe, but all three prior Caillebotte retrospectives at American museums since 1976 have already done that. In the current repressive climate, the explanation is frankly unconvincing. The Getty has the prestige and immense financial resources to ignore thuggish political attacks on queer people — and on the arts — which now gush from various statehouses and, most dangerously, Washington's halls of government. An absurd, now notorious New York Times front-page story in 2016 claiming presidential candidate Donald J. Trump would be 'the most gay-friendly Republican nominee for president ever' has been disproved by what is widely considered to be the most vicious such administration in American history. It surpasses even the 1980s Reagan Administration, recalled in '$3 Bill,' a companion Getty Research Institute show also on view. A furious 1987 Donald Moffett poster, dedicated to Gay Men's Health Crisis Director Diego Lopez, juxtaposes the AIDS-indifferent Hollywood president, smirking vapidly above the phrase, 'He kills me,' next to a screaming orange bullseye. '$3 Bill' is a rather jumbled amalgam of minor artworks, documents (books, fliers, pamphlets, magazines, etc.) and ephemera assembled by GRI curator Pietro Rigolo, meant to compile evidence of contemporary queer lives. Its most affecting moments reference the AIDS epidemic's abject cruelty. Powerful forces of oppression are of course still at play. The day after 'Queer Lens' opened, the Supreme Court ruled that individual states may ban healthcare for minors based on the identity of the patient asking for it: cisgender, yes; transgender, no — parents and doctors be damned. The blatantly bigoted decision will someday be overturned, but not without inflicting enormous pain in the interim. A few features of 'Queer Lens' are surprising. A lone film projection — Andy Warhol's short movie 'Blow Job,' in which an actor's face performs the role of fellatio recipient — seems out of place, when many other queer films could as easily be included. In fact, like Marconi using the classical Barberini faun sculpture as a high-art pretense to legitimize ogling male nudity in a photograph, Warhol used ink and acrylic paint as 'makeup' to legitimize the mass media photographs he appropriated for paintings. Since almost all of Warhol's classic 1960s silkscreen works are best described as photographs in painting drag, including one would have been splendid. Omissions are inevitable. (The show makes no claim to being encyclopedic.) Luis Medina, who chronicled Chicago's queer scene in the 1970s, and Jeff Burton, who photographed the almost surreal margins of the huge 1990s pornography industry in the suburban San Fernando Valley, are especially missed. Through no fault of its own, 'Queer Lens' peters out a bit at the end, when the final section declares 'The Future is Queer' in 18 works from the last decade. (Happily, two-thirds are from Getty's own collection.) The world got along for thousands of years without the enforced binaries of heterosexual and homosexual, and in recent decades the fences erected around that century-old split have been coming down. The simultaneous 21st century digital revolution is dramatically changing the contextual terms of the image game, as surely as the analog camera did after 1839. Given that a digital camera is now in most every pocket, queer photography's bracing fusion of the personal and the exotic is pretty threadbare, since exoticism no longer applies to being queer in American life. It simply is what it is. We can be grateful for the shift. And we can also be grateful pictures will continue to shape and affirm queer existence, as pictures always have the capacity to do.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
This painting survived the Beirut explosion. Here's how conservators restored it
After a long-forgotten painting of Hercules and Omphale was punctured by glass and coated in debris during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, the monumental oil-on-canvas, painstakingly restored over more than three years, has gone on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In the wake of the tragedy, the painting, dated to the 1630s, was finally properly attributed to the great Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter who has become one of the few female artists of her era to be recognized today. Having passed only between three private collections over four centuries, the 'Artemisia's Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece' exhibition marks the first time the painting has ever been on public display. The canvas depicts the Greek mythological hero Hercules, who was enslaved by the Queen of Lydia, Omphale, and made to do tasks traditionally associated with women, such as weaving — in Gentileschi's composition he raises a spindle of wool — before they fall in love. Gentileschi often gave her mythological and Biblical female figures a striking sense of agency, such as her most widely known scene of the widow Judith violently beheading Assyrian general Holofernes. In the newly attributed painting, she toys with subverted gender roles as her lovelorn protagonists close the gap between them, their pearlescent skin adorned in sumptuous draped fabrics. For decades, 'Hercules and Omphale' hung in the Sursock Palace, a private and opulent mid-19th century townhouse owned by Beirut's Sursock family for five generations. The explosion in the Lebanese capital, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands, caused devastation to the building and its owners, with the matriarch of the family, 98-year-old Yvonne Sursock Cochrane, eventually succumbing to her injuries. A receipt from the family showed that the painting entered the Sursock collection from an art dealer in Naples, where Gentileschi lived the later years of her life. At the time of the explosion, the artist's then-unknown masterpiece was hanging in front of a window, according to the Getty, which exploded through the canvas. The broken glass riddled it with holes and a wide, L-shaped tear through Hercules' knee. 'It was really severe. It's probably the worst damage I've ever seen,' said Ulrich Birkmaier, the Getty Museum's senior conservator of painting, in a phone call with CNN. Beyond the sudden violence to the painting and its frame, the artwork had already suffered flaking paint, cracks and cupping from humid conditions, Birkmaier said He added that Gentileschi's vision had been further marred by discolored varnish and overpainting from a previous restoration attempt centuries earlier. When Birkmaier saw it for the first time in Beirut, one year after the explosion, he gathered debris that had collected behind its surface in case the miniscule paint fragments clinging to the glass could be puzzled back together in Los Angeles. Though mended, cleaned, and carefully restored with analysis from X-rays and XRF mapping, the painting has been rehabilitated into its luminous and poetic intent, though, in Birkamaier's view, it will never look quite as it did. 'You'll always see some scars of the damage,' he said. If not for the explosion, 'Hercules and Omphale' may have continued to be an unidentified work, only considered a Gentileschi painting by a Lebanese art historian who had seen it decades earlier. In the early 1990s, Gregory Buchakjian was a graduate student at Sorbonne University in Paris and writing his thesis the Sursock collection. It was then that he made the connection between 'Hercules and Omphale' and another painting, 'Penitent Magdalene,' to Gentileschi, but he didn't pursue publishing his research more widely, according to the arts publication Hyperallergic. In an article for Apollo magazine in September 2020, Buchakjian attributed both paintings to the Italian artist, leading to wider acknowledgement of his research and consensus over her authorship. Over the course of her career, Gentileschi, the daughter of the Mannerist painter Orazio Gentileschi, was commissioned by top artistic patrons — the Medici family in Italy as well as monarchs Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England — before being lost to history following her death in 1653. Some 60 paintings or more exist today, though a few have been contested as copies or collaborations. 'She was very, very famous during her day, but all but forgotten in the centuries after, which is true for many Baroque painters, but for women, of course, particularly,' Birkmaier said. Rediscovered in the 20th century and amplified by the 1970s feminist movement, Gentileschi's resurgence helped pave the way for researching and foregrounding female artists of the past. Still, there are too few technical studies of her work, according to Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, compared to her male counterparts. The Getty's report provides insight into her techniques and materials and how she revised the composition over time, such as altering the position of Hercules' head and gaze to strengthen the emotional charge, which is 'very much Artemisia,' Gasparotto said. 'We are gradually building better knowledge of her way of painting, but I think we need more, especially because she's a painter that changes quite a lot in terms of stylistic development over the course of her career,' he explained. 'She's an artist who looks a lot at what is going on around her, and she absorbs (it).' Gentileschi trained with her father, but was also influenced by her Baroque peers and predecessors, such as Caravaggio and Guercino. She traveled widely in Europe, trained in Venetian techniques and adopted other skills from Naples, where she took up residency later in life and set up a workshop. Her time in Naples in the 1630s has been considered 'less interesting' by scholars, Gasparotto said, but he disagrees — and can now cite 'Hercules and Omphale' as further proof. 'Her paintings grow in size. They are monumental paintings, ambitious compositions, multi-figure compositions,' Gasparotto said. He believes Hercules in this work is her most accomplished male figure — 'especially for a painter who couldn't study male nudes after a living model, because being a woman, she wasn't allowed to do that.' When the glass tore through Gentileschi's painting, it missed many of the painting's focal points, though part of Hercules' nose and eye suffered damage. That was the trickiest area to reconstruct, Birkmaier said, but he was able to see Gentileschi's earlier draft of Hercules' head in the X-ray to aid in reconstruction. He called in help from a friend: Federico Castelluccio, the Italian American actor best known for his role as Furio in 'The Sopranos,' who is also a painter and collector of Baroque art (and who once discovered a $10 million Guercino painting). (The TV series aired on HBO, which shares Warner Bros. Discovery as a parent company with CNN.) 'He assisted me with another conservation treatment years ago. And so he painted the head of Hercules for me and suggested what the eye that was missing there should look like,' Birkmaier recalled. 'And so I based my reconstruction on that, and it was very helpful.' Restoring an old work doesn't mean making it like new, but maintaining the 'decay from time' that occurs with a 400-year-old painting, Birkmaier said. As he and other specialists gradually worked on the painting, it began to reveal itself. 'You have this painting in pieces, and all you see is the damage and the discolored varnish and the old restoration and the big holes, and then little by little, as you work on it… the image emerges again,' he recalled. 'It's a really interesting process of discovery. I wanted to do her justice.' Some of the identifying features of Gentileschi's work seen in 'Hercules and Omphale' include her renderings of fabrics and jewelry and the subtle gestures she repeats across canvases. 'It's very poetic the way she turns, she turns (Omphale's) head, this upright gaze,' Birkmaier said, explaining that many of her female figures mimic that tilt. 'In the other paintings that we have on loan from her, it's the same exact (position).' It can be seen, too, in 'Susanna and the Elders,' from 1638-40, another recent discovery of Gentileschi's that is in the UK's Royal Collection Trust, painted during her time at the court of Charles I with her father. In 2023, it was identified after a century in storage, deteriorating and misattributed to the 'French School,' according to Artnet. Another rediscovered Gentileschi work, a portrait of David with the head of Goliath, will headline a Sotheby's auction in July. 'There's definitely a lot of room for discovery,' Gasparotto said, though he cautioned that attribution is not always clear-cut considering her workshop is still not fully understood, and she tended to work in conjunction with landscape artists later in life. 'I don't know how many will emerge from museum storages,' he said. 'But within the market, within private collections, there might be other paintings by her that will emerge in the upcoming years.'
