Whether French Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte was gay is not known, although it is frequently noted that he never married. (The artist died young, at 45, in 1894 from what is thought to have been a stroke.) Certainly, however, Caillebotte was homosocial. Evidence of the importance to him of strong social interactions with other men, rather than women, is all over his work.
Workmen scraping wood floors in a room that would become the artist’s studio. A man leaning casually against a cafe table, other men across the bar reflected in the mirror behind him. Men rowing boats on the river, reading books or newspapers, playing the piano, working at a desk or merely sitting in a comfortable chair lost in thought. Men playing cards at home. Men looking out over the city from balconies or gazing at it through the crisscrossed steel girders of a bridge. Men toweling themselves dry after a bath.
The emphasis on men’s daily lives is very unusual, given the prominence of women as subject matter in scores of paintings of the period by Manet, Degas, Morisot, Monet, Renoir, Cassatt and more of his Impressionist friends and colleagues in Paris. Feminine activity as seen by artists both male and female is a primary focus of those artists’ works. But in Caillebotte’s art, it’s raining men.
At the J. Paul Getty Museum, the first Los Angeles museum survey of Caillebotte’s paintings in 30 years brings the atypical subject to the foreground in engrossing ways. The artist has been routinely positioned as “the forgotten” or “the unsung” Impressionist, his name hardly as familiar as so many others, although there has been no shortage of scholarly and museum attention to his art since the 1970s. He’s far from overlooked. But, oddly enough, his distinctive theme of masculinity emerging in a modern context has been largely unnoticed in museum exhibitions before now.
“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” fixes that.
With more than 60 paintings and almost as many drawings and studies, the show shifts attention away from stylistic analysis of Impressionist painting’s formal structures and working methods, at which Caillebotte was not always adept, to issues of identity explored in subject matter. Forget close study of broken brushwork. In the French Republic’s revolutionary motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, which cracked open modernity, brotherhood’s place in ideas of freedom and social equality gets examined.
Caillebotte’s actual younger brother, René, was the model for “Young Man at His Window,” a terrific 1876 painting acquired by the Getty in 2021, and one spur to organizing this show. Getty curator Scott Allan worked with Paul Perrin, director of collections at Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, where the exhibition was seen last fall, and Gloria Groom, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it concludes its international tour beginning in June.
René, shown from behind, face unseen, is anonymous in “Young Man at His Window,” a nearly 4-foot vertical painting. Elegantly dressed, he holds a firm, wide stance, hands thrust in pockets, as he looks out over a smart urban intersection from an upper floor of his wealthy family’s new home in Paris’ fashionable 8th arrondissement. A few carriages are passing by; near the center, a chic young female pedestrian about to arrive at the curb is a possible focus of his regard.
A plush, red velvet fauteuil tucked into the lower right corner of the picture is like an upscale launching pad, which has propelled the man to the balustrade along a tall French window. Opposing diagonals of the room and the opened right-hand window meet at a pointed angle where René stands, placing him smack at the center of a jutting space. It’s as if he’s plowing forward on the prow of a ship. The clever composition emphasizes his dynamic placement as a commander of the modern city, spreading out below.
Caillebotte’s best paintings exploit such savvy compositional drama, which signals a keen awareness of performing for a viewer standing in front of the canvas. “Floor Scrapers,” a personal favorite, assumes an intimate vantage point of looking down toward the workmen’s vigorous labor, which results in a floor that appears vertiginously tilted up. It’s as if the shirtless workmen might soon tumble into a viewer’s space.
“Paris Street, Rainy Day,” easily Caillebotte’s most famous (and largest) painting, is a push-pull extravaganza of male urban energy. A vertical lamppost splits the scene roughly into halves. In the closely cropped right half, a man confidently leads a woman toward us by the arm, while in the left half, mostly men bustle about in the space opened in a broad intersection created by dramatically thrusting buildings.
Way over to one side, the front end of a carriage miraculously — and impossibly — vanishes behind two pedestrians. The visual trick may have been created by the artist’s use of a common optical viewing aid called a camera lucida. If so, the painted visual surprise, which the painter surely knew, is one more nod to our status as keen observers.
The urban push-pull of “Paris Street, Rainy Day” becomes the recreational play of looking at art. The game continues in “Boating Party,” which puts us inside a rowboat right up close to a top-hatted rower whose exertion will paradoxically pull the boat away from where we stand. Our vision zooms in, while the rower is poised to zoom out.
In the rarely seen “Man at His Bath,” the tug assumes a culturally determined tension around male nudity. We unexpectedly find ourselves in an ordinary guy’s presence after he has just gotten out of the privacy of a bathtub and is toweling himself off. He’s nearly life-size. Caillebotte has jettisoned the usual classical trappings of Greek and Roman heroes, which typically cloak male nudes in sober history and myth. How closely should we — male or female — be examining this man’s lovingly painted buttocks?
Sometimes the composition gets away from Caillebotte, despite the best of intentions. Another painting accomplishes a snappy cultural reversal by putting Charlotte Berthier, his longtime female companion (whom he chose not to marry), in the extreme foreground reading a newspaper, while a man in the background is stretched out on a sofa reading a book. It’s a pointed swap of the usual reading material shown in traditional Western pictures of women and men.
The composition portrays her alert perusal of a text connected to the public world of action, and him relaxing with a text connected to a contemplative interior life. Unlike the lovely woman, however, the man on the couch is awkwardly drawn, and the shift in scale is all wrong. Overwhelmed by big, floral-patterned cushions, he looks like a child or a doll. The clumsiness derails the scene.
Indeed, each of the show’s seven thematic sections is anchored by a single strong painting. The rest are subsidiary — helpful in fleshing out the period themes of masculinity based on family, work, friendships, sports and the like, but also evidence for why Caillebotte doesn’t rank in the top tier of Impressionist painters. Overall, with most paintings bland, unadventurous or ungainly, he just isn’t that good — perhaps unsurprising for a serious career that didn’t last much more than a decade.
That fact has been unmistakable since 1976, when Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts sparked the general revival of interest in his work with the artist’s first full retrospective exhibition in the U.S. (The Getty’s is the fourth.) Here was a fresh Impressionist face from America’s favorite modern art movement, but just a handful of pictures were top-notch. He made around 500 paintings during his lifetime, so the ratio is poor.
The date of the Houston show is revealing. It coincides with the efflorescence of 1970s feminist art history. Among the many benefits of feminist scholarship and its focus on the complex nature of identity has been the subsequent study of homosocial experience. For men, same-sex socialization must also deal with the conventional oppression against homosexuality — a categorizing term invented when Caillebotte was 20 and in common usage by the time he died. In modern life, men can get close to other men — just not too close.
Think again about “Young Man at His Window.” For all we know, Caillebotte’s brother René could be looking to see who’s riding in the far carriage passing by in the distance, or getting out of the carriage pulled up by the curb just below his window. Maybe it’s a man. Maybe the prominent placement of a lone young woman in the center intends to provide a protective shield, offering another ambiguous prospect. Painting men in late 19th century France meant that caution had to be taken. Today, when issues of marginalized identity are under massive political assault, the Getty show opens up tantalizing questions.
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