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.