Location: Galleries
Registration is required.

Explore From Gérôme to Monet: Stories from the 19th-Century Collection in Hackerman House at 1 West Mount Vernon Place with Jonathan Katz, a trailblazing queer art historian, curator, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

By the last half of the 19th century, the art movement of Classicism became the most acceptable mode for addressing the erotic by allowing Northern European sexual fantasies to be visualized through depictions of Greek myths. But Classical culture’s permissiveness of same-sex desire was controversial, so artists such as Alma Taddema instead sought to “straighten” up the Classical past, as in his oil painting Sappho and Alcaeus from 1881. In this talk, Katz addresses how queerness often manifested more as an absence than a presence.

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This program highlights From Gérôme to Monet: Stories from the 19th-Century Collection opening on October 30.

Queering the Collection is an in-gallery program series that invites artists and scholars to participate in conversations that connect queer-identifying perspectives with artistic and art-historical knowledge about works in our collection. Speakers will discuss works of art in our galleries, followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

About the Speaker

Jonathan D. Katz is a founding figure in queer art history, responsible for the first queer scholarship on a number of artists. His scholarship spans a period from the late 19th-century to the present with an emphasis on the U.S., but with serious attention to Europe, Latin America, and Asia as well. He has written extensively about gender, sexuality, and desire, producing some of the key theoretical work in queer studies in the visual arts. His books include Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (co-authored with Moira Roth), and the anthology Art AIDS America. His recent exhibit The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939 explored a sea change in the way society regarded homosexuality in the wake of coining the term “homosexual.”

Available resources: Assistive Listening Devices, Seating, Sensory Kits
Accessibility resources and accommodations are available for programs and events. Please email [email protected] with questions and requests. We will make every effort to provide accommodations. Visit our accessibility web page for more information.

Photo credit: Douglas Levere