Gustave Caillebotte

The exhibition opening this week at the Getty (with previous and future stops at the Musee d’Orsay and Art Institute of Chicago) is subtitled “Painting Men” and purports to address for the first time “the central place he accorded [men] in his painting” and “the singular way in which [he] saw his male subjects.” There’s more than a nod and a wink in the labels, catalogue and exhibition theme itself to the possibility that Caillebotte may have been homosexual or had such tendencies. At the very least, the curators’ invention of the word “homosocial” to describe Caillebotte’s painted world provides innuendo. When the show opened in Paris, some French critics criticized it on these grounds, suggesting that Americans’ fixation on gender issues had infected the presentation–a suggestion strongly denied by the two American co-curators. The relevant question I see, after taking in the show and the catalogue, is not whether Caillebotte’s sexual preference influenced his painting, but whether it influenced his lifestyle. Caillebotte arguably was the most realistic of the Impressionists: he painted exactly what he saw around him. What was largely around him was men. To start, he had two brothers, no sisters. He never married and lived a bachelor lifestyle, sharing an apartment with his younger brother. In addition to painting he was an avid stamp collector, but his passion was sailing and boat design. Based on the 19th-century novels I’ve read, it was quite common for men to spend their evenings with other men at London men’s clubs or Irish pubs and devote their hours to sporting activities without any suggestion of homosexuality.
It is, of course, futile to judge the social mores of another culture 150 years ago without our present views getting in the way. Which is another way of saying that I don’t think it fair to Caillebotte, or more particularly his art, to put this frame around such an exhibition. The other excuse, I suppose, is that this collaboration arose from the d’Orsay’s and the Getty’s both acquiring major paintings by Caillebotte in recent years. One is a close-up view of a single male rower (“Boating Party”), the other an iconic full-length image of a man from behind, standing at an open window looking out over a Parisian street (“Young Man at his Window”). Both are fabulous pictures worthy of celebrating without linking them as “paintings of men.”
I suppose there was a need to put a new frame on the exhibition given that its contents were not in any other way new. I, along with many others, “discovered” Gustave Caillebotte in 1977 when the Brooklyn Museum of Art put on a retrospective exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Not only was every major work in the Getty show found in that 1977 exhibition, but they were also in a retrospective, less provocatively subtitled “The Painter’s Eye,” mounted in 2015-16 by the National Gallery of Art (thank you, Mary Morton) and the Kimbell. By my count, 29 paintings did double duty in the LA and DC shows, including all the important works, all of which had been in Brooklyn 48 years before. Granted, audiences on the West Coast and in the Midwest deserve to get the full Caillebotte experience previously accorded the East Coast and Texas. I just wonder how much of the curatorial need to offer something “new,” rather than serious scholarship, led to the “Painting Men” theme.
Yes, the Getty show does present five or so portraits of men not in the earlier exhibitions, but they are not terribly strong additions. Caillebotte apparently did not need or bother to sell his paintings, and one supposes that some or all of these portraits were made as gifts to the sitters, who were his friends. They don’t have the daring pictorial experiments that make his major works so engaging. And by limiting the show to men, the curators were able to omit the still lifes, landscapes and garden scenes that rounded out the shows in Brooklyn and Washington. Conversely, they threw in additional paintings of men piloting skiffs. For the most part, which I’ll get to next, these additions and subtractions don’t greatly influence one’s opinion of Caillebotte’s art or one’s enjoyment of the show. They do keep the current exhibition from being a complete repetition of what has come before.
Caillebotte’s greatest works came remarkably early: “Floor Scrapers” when he was 27, “Le Pont de l’Europe” at 28, and his masterpiece, “Paris Street, Rainy Day” when he was 29. “The Luncheon,” “Young Man at the Piano,” “House Painters” and “Young Man at His Window” also come from those years. (A remarkable landscape from the Brooklyn show that I later saw at Christie’s, “A Road Near Naples,” was painted at 25.) They are all original in subject matter and composition. They are all painted in, or a few short blocks from, his Paris apartment. Nothing is posed, everything is captured as by a photograph (which Caillebotte may have used). The compositions, while appearing casual, are complex and carefully constructed. I’ll never forget, nor ever quite understand, the 1976 catalogue essay deconstructing the “golden sections” in “Paris Street, Rainy Day.” Visually the works are arresting: as Nigel McGilchrist said of Piero della Francesca, You may like his works or not, but you will never forget them. You get the sense that Caillebotte was experimenting, like a scientist, with what he could do in a painting: what unusual point-of-view or perspective he could use to animate a scene. This innovation almost disappears in his later work, which makes the differences in the three exhibitions less significant. More than his focus on men, the striking bond of these early works is the consistent view they provide of upper-class Paris in the late 1870s: the living quarters, the broad boulevards, the handsome dress. When we see “Paris Street, Rainy Day,” we think, what a nice existence! And vive la France! And the various studies offered at the Getty show how carefully Caillebotte worked to achieve such a casual look.
I named “Paris Street, Rainy Day” my favorite artwork in my prep school 25th reunion questionnaire; it has been a highlight of every trip to Chicago and its image is on our favorite umbrella. Sitting on the couch placed in front of it was sufficient justification (along with my wife’s eye appointment at UCLA) for the drive to Los Angeles. What fun to spot in the distance, amid all the black-coated men, the white-smocked house painter wandering over with his ladder from Caillebotte’s other painting. Unfortunately, “The Pont de l’Europe,” his second most interesting work, didn’t travel to Los Angeles but was represented by several studies. Both those works feature a man and woman strolling together, a somewhat discordant note to the “Painting Men” theme. They also highlight the fact that a Paris street of 1877 was more likely to be filled with men–office workers, laborers, flaneurs, rentiers–than women. Again, wasn’t Caillebotte just painting his world?
Ever since the Brooklyn show I have had my eye out for Caillebotte. I’ve seen smaller shows in Pontoise and Madrid (Thyssen-Bornemisza). There are astonishingly few of his works in major museums, presumably because he was not yet on the list of “important” artists when Americans were building their collections of Impressionism. The Met acquired its first in 2014, a less than exciting close-up of chrysanthemums from 1893, but it has had temporary loans that jumped off the wall. On recent visits to the MFA Boston and the Brooklyn Museum I’ve been thrilled by their Caillebottes. Closer to home, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art recently received a Caillebotte as part of the generous bequest of French art from Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree. It’s a small work and I don’t know its date, but it is just as daring and pleasantly brown as “The Floor Scrapers.” It’s a view of a stable, with a horse’s rear in the foreground and perspective pulling sharply back to the right, where a stable hand is cleaning the floor. A subject no one else is painting, with an experimental viewpoint, a subtle and pleasing palette. I only hope the SBMA will put it on display and keep it there, a companion to its Morisot. Of the 105 paintings and studies in the Getty show, 74 come from private collections, although many of these are studies not major works. The increased attention to Caillebotte makes me think that a number of these works will change hands in years to come and find their way to museums who recognize this hole in their collection.
Perhaps there are even important works by Caillebotte that didn’t surface in the Brooklyn show. For now, though, I didn’t feel that I saw anything new in the Getty exhibit, aside from a couple portraits of his male friends, various ephemera, some half-hearted late paintings and the portrait of a dog. It was, nevertheless, a happy reunion of many old friends, including “Nude on a Couch” that was a conversation piece all my years in Minneapolis. And it provided an excuse to go back into my library and rediscover the pleasure of art history.