When it comes to the likes of Monet, Manet, and Renoir, it seems there’s little left to unearth beneath the impressionist sun. But when it comes to Gustave Caillebotte, their less colorful colleague, tales remain to be told. Not that the artist has gone unrecognized. In 1977 Columbia University professor Kirk Varnedoe (later chief curator of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art) organized Gustave Caillebotte: A Retrospective Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1994 the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay marked the centennial of the artist’s death with Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, and in 2015 the National Gallery and the Kimbell Art Museum joined forces for Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye. Nonetheless, scholars have yet to exhaust the artist’s oeuvre, in part because so much of the work has remained in private hands. The latest take comes with Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men, organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Cushioned by a family fortune, and therefore less career-driven than his artistic peers, Caillebotte was as much a financial supporter of the impressionist movement as he was a participant, bankrolling the group’s exhibitions and collecting the output of its artists. In his will he bequeathed dozens of works to the French state, none by his own hand.
H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection.
Painting Men, which opened in Paris last fall and is on view at the Getty from February 25 to May 25, before opening in Chicago on June 29, was sparked by the Getty’s 2021 purchase of Young Man at His Window, and, shortly thereafter, the Musée d’Orsay’s acquisition of Boating Party, both of which depict a single male figure. “It’s a striking fact,” observes Scott Allan, curator of painting at the Getty, “that the majority of his figure paintings focus on male subjects.” And while some images present men doing manly things—rowing a boat, or laboring—as in Floor Scrapers—others, suggests Allan, enter more convention-ally feminine territory. “Renoir did pretty young ladies at the piano, a bourgeois pastime associated with women. Caillebotte paints his brother Martial at the piano. Degas paints female bather after female bather. Caillebotte, in one bold, provocative statement, shows a naked man in the bath. He enters into dialogue with his fellow artists by flipping the script gender-wise and, for want of a better word, intentionally masculinizing certain subjects, certain genres of painting—to speak to the conventions of art making—as well as social conventions. For example, Renoir is famous for scenes of attractive men and women flirting, dancing, carousing, as in Dance at le Moulin de la Galatte or Luncheon of the Boating Party. Caillebotte gave us all his bachelor friends, playing cards.”
to the exclusive patronage of LVMH.
Several French critics took issue with the conceit of the current exhibition, slamming it as the fruit of American gender studies and an unnecessary attempt to identify the artist as gay, a criticism the show’s organizers have dismissed. American viewers will see what they wish to see. One hopes they will not overlook Caillebotte’s distinctive take on modernity and the strategies (the unusual angles, the abrupt cropping) that generate an almost immersive experience, drawing the viewer into the scene. After seeing Paris Street; Rainy Day (which entered the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection in 1964), Emile Zola opined, “When his talent will have softened a little, Mr. Caillebotte will certainly be one of the boldest of the group.” Did it soften? Who’s to say. But bold? Ah, yes.
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles • February 25 to May 25 • getty.edu
