Midwest Museum Talks | Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape

Watch the replay here. 

Midwest Museum Talks is a new program of online curatorial talks organized by Villa Albertine Chicago in collaboration with the museums in the Midwest. In this second installment, join us for a virtual discussion with Jacquelyn Coutré, Eleanor Wood Prince associate Curator in Painting and Sculpture of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago and Pascal Beausse, Curator and Head of the Photographic Collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris. 

This exceptional transatlantic conversation, hosted by Villa Albertine Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago, is grounded in the paintings currently on view in the Art Institute exhibition, Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape. 

Between 1882 and 1890, five artists—Vincent van Gogh, along with Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand—flocked to villages on the fringes of Paris. Unlike the earlier Impressionists, who in the previous decade had spent significant time in suburban locations further from the city, this next generation of ambitious artists preferred the northwestern suburbs around Asnières. This area along the Seine River had long been a popular spot for recreation and relaxation but was becoming increasingly populated with coal, gas, and manufacturing facilities in the last decades of the 19th century. And while its industrial development was an unappealing aspect to many, these artists found in the changing physical and social landscape a fresh and rich source of creativity, as Van Gogh himself described in a letter.

Ever-changing cities have always inspired visual artists. Whether painters or photographers, they cannot remain insensitive to these urban upheavals. Through these landscapes, humanity and its way of inhabiting the world are revealed. Gloria Groom, Jacquelyn Coutré and Pascal Beausse will share their points of view on the question of representing the city, and in particular Paris and its suburbs. This city, already in the midst of change when van Gogh depicted it in the late 1880s, is still undergoing major urban transitions in the run-up to the 2024 Olympic Games, and remains a major source of inspiration for many artists.

This discussion will be moderated by Gloria Groom, Curator and Chair of Painting and Sculpture of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

The Speakers 

Gloria Groom, Curator and Chair of Painting and Sculpture of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago

Gloria Groom, Chair of Painting and Sculpture of Europe and the David and Mary Winton Green Curator is an internationally acclaimed and widely published scholar of nineteenth-century French painting. She has been involved in numerous major exhibitions and catalogues and has led the museum’s initiative for digital scholarly catalogues on the Impressionist collection which bring together international teams of scholars, conservators, and scientists.  In 2016, she was awarded by the French government the title of Chevalier in the Legion of Honor. Her current project is Caillebotte: Painting Men, which will open at the Musée d’Orsay in fall 2024.  

Jacquelyn Coutré, Eleanor Wood Prince associate Curator in Painting and Sculpture of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago

Jacquelyn N. Coutré is the Eleanor Wood Prince Associate Curator in Painting and Sculpture of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago and the curator of Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape. She received her PhD from New York University and has held several curatorial positions, most recently that of Bader Curator and Researcher of European Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre of Queen’s University, where she organized the traveling exhibition Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges in honor of the 2019 Rembrandt Year. She has received fellowships from, among others, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fulbright Foundation, and has published widely on 17th-century Dutch art and the curatorial act.

Pascal Beausse, Curator and Head of the Photographic Collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris. 

Pascal Beausse is head of the photography collection at the Centre national des arts plastiques (Paris). An art critic, he teaches the history and theory of photography at HEAD, Haute école d’art et de design de Genève. He is a researcher in the Curatorial/Knowledge laboratory, Goldsmiths, at the University of London. He curated the Regards du Grand Paris exhibition in June 2022, presenting the works of 38 photographers who were laureates of the eponymous photographic commission launched in 2016, with the aim of building up, year after year, a corpus of images and authors’ views on the evolution of “le Grand Paris”.