Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men, Scott Allan, Gloria Groom, Paul Perrin, editors

This is the exhibition catalog for the show Jim and I saw at the Getty in May. By chance, we saw the show again in Chicago at the Art Institute where it moved after closing in Los Angeles. We hadn’t planned to be in Chicago but we had already arranged a July visit to my father in western North Carolina and to spend a few additional days in Asheville. Asheville was lovely, by the way, and I was able to visit the site of Black Mountain College, which I’d always wanted to see. (It’s a boys camp now and we actually only pulled in to the driveway and turned around. They don’t allow visitors.) And then, in June, I learned about a different art exhibit called, “The First Homosexuals” showing at the Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago that I was curious to see. As our plane back from North Carolina was going to connect through Chicago anyway we changed our plans to tack on a few days in Chicago. We saw both “The First Homosexuals” and bought that catalog (which was sold out so we had to backorder it; it should arrive later this month) and as we wanted to tour the Art Institute anyway, went ahead and saw the Caillebotte show a second time.

The catalog includes ten essays, 139 plates of paintings, drawings, and ephemera, a map showing locations in Paris and outside Paris where Caillebotte lived and worked, and capsule biographies of several of the men Caillebotte was friends with and included in his paintings.

The exhibition is called “Painting Men” because of the high number of men included in Caillebotte’s work: more portraits than landscapes and many more men than women, unlike other impressionist painters. Caillebotte was a lifelong bachelor. He did have a long relationship with a woman, but whether they were lovers, or whether he was romantically attached to any of his male friends, no one knows. But certainly his world was homosocial. In Paris, his paintings depict male companions in intimate settings: playing cards, reading, or standing at their apartment windows or balconies gazing at the street scene below. He also painted working men in Paris: two early paintings of floor scrapers, stripped to the waist, preparing the space that would become Caillebotte’s studio, and later paintings of house painters. In the country, he painted his gardener. He also painted street scenes, including the famous “Paris Street, Rainy Day“, owned by the Chicago Art Institute, but again, these paintings, including that one, plus others of the Pont de L’Europe, feature male subjects, though not exclusively. Outside Paris, Caillebotte joined a boating club and painted numerous pictures of his male rowing friends.

The ten essays in the catalog mostly focus on the various types of men Caillebotte chose as his subjects. “Father and Sons” by Michael Marriman, and “Caillebotte and his Brothers, Contiguous Yet Distinct” by Scott Allan, give us some of Caillebotte’s early biography. Caillebotte was the eldest of three sons from his father’s third marriage. There was also an older half-brother from his father’s first marriage. Caillebotte’s father died just as Caillebotte began his painting career, so there are portraits of his mother, but none of his father. “The Shared War: Note on Some Military Presences” by Stephane Guegan, relates Caillebotte’s short military duty following the Franco-Prussion war. He made an excellent portrait of a soldier with a very handsome mustache. Later essays are titled, “Game of Suits”, “Modernity and Masculinity: Caillebotte and Sportsmen”, and “Caillebotte, Painting Naked Men.” That last essay is co-written by Jonathan Katz (with Andre Dombrowski) the curator of the “The First Homosexuals” show.

It was fascinating for Jim and I to compare how the show changed between Los Angeles and Chicago. At the Getty, and also at the Musee d’Orsay (the third of the exhibition sponsors) the show was titled, “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.” The Art Institute, though, changed the title to, “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World”. So we were clued, even before we arrived at the museum, that Chicago wished to downplay the possible homosexual reading of the paintings. The catalog for sale in the bookstore still carried the original title, which must have confused folks. The neutering of the subject was confirmed when we toured the show and saw that Chicago had re-arranged the display of the paintings to alter the narrative. At the Getty, after a few early paintings of Caillebotte’s family, the viewer is confronted with the early, sexy, “Floor Scrapers.” The next gallery further sets the tone by showing “Paris Street: Rainy Day” (featuring a large, nearly full length portrait of a man) followed by several of Caillebotte’s Paris interiors portraying groups of Caillebotte’s exclusively male friends. Whatever his sexuality, it’s clear that Caillebotte enjoyed and chose to live among men. The next gallery confirms the impression when you turn the corner and are confronted with Caillebotte’s full-scale painting of the naked backside of a man toweling off after a bath. Next to that is Caillebotte’s second painting of (probably) the same man, naked again, drying himself while seated on a stool. Caillebotte’s less ambitious and accomplished painting of a nude woman reclining on a couch is positioned on an opposite wall so the viewer sees it last.

In Chicago, the show starts with Caillebotte’s boating paintings, including one of my favorites. These paintings were shown in the last galleries at the Getty. The yacht club men are still plentiful and attractive, but the context is switched to heterosexually acceptable outdoor athleticism rather than interiors. By the time you get to the domestic scenes in Chicago’s layout, the viewer is prepped to read them as athletes taking a break, rather than men happily preferring the regular company of men. And to see the nudes, the viewer must turn away from the main circulation route into a separate gallery, and then enter a second circular gallery built into the center of the room, as though the curator found these naked men (and woman) to be an embarrassment rather than essential.

The catalog is quite interesting to read. I’m glad to have the reproductions of the paintings. I wish that there had been more information about Caillebotte’s training and artistic practice. His relationship to the other impressionists gives Caillebotte the role of patron, which he was, to a degree, organizing several of their shows and providing financial support from the fortune he inherited from his father, but I’d love to know more about the way his artistic interests and production fit into the work of the others. Did they admire his work? Did he and his artist friends inspire or challenge each other? The essays focuses on Caillebotte’s subjects rather than the art or the art-making itself.