2024-10-26 10:38:00
Parquet sanders instead of water lilies: Gustave Caillebotte discovers himself at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris as a painter of a different kind of impressionism. He placed the male body at the center and reinterpreted it as homosexual. Whether he also actually realized his inclination remains speculation.
Is it possible? How could this have been overlooked for so long? Is the history of impressionism now in need of rewriting? The epochal exhibition in Orsay Museum about Gustave Caillebotte, warmly welcomed by the French press, raises many questions. This painter is no longer unknown. After his early death – he died in 1894 at the age of 45 – he was quickly forgotten and for a long time was considered more of a patron of the Impressionists than a great artist in his own right. And when his friends became famous, he didn’t seem to fit in with them.
He exhibited with them again and again since 1876. But his works lacked what made them so popular: the loose brushwork, the splendor of joie de vivre, in short, that inimitable lightness of being which even today guarantees the unmistakable success of every impressionist exhibition around the world.
But Caillebotte’s paintings do not have the shimmering quality of Pissarro’s spring landscapes. One looked in vain for voluptuous female nudes like those that Renoir painted so often. And Claude Monet’s sunlit cityscapes weren’t his thing either. Caillebotte was also a painter of modern urban life in Paris.
Nobody looked at the factual side, not even the technical one, like he did. The corner railway bridges of the European Quarter around the St. Lazare railway station. The road canyons of the new very straight avenues between the Opera and the church of Sant’Agostino. People moving in trendy neighborhoods. Construction workers and craftsmen. Couples, passers-by. But it didn’t have the transfiguring aura that Monet managed to give it.
Caillebotte never attracted attention with picture-book views of Paris. And he wasn’t even that interested in the magic of water lilies. He was interested in parquet sanders. Hardworking kids working hard in an empty room decorated in brown tones. The scant light falling from the window on the bare upper part of their bodies produces only the shine of a layer of sweat, while in other impressionists the shine flashes fluttering flags, colorful curtains and rustling female robes.
But the parquet sanders are now placed in the “Painting Men” exhibition in an incredibly captivating context. They are part of the painter’s lifelong fascination with what might be called the new masculinity of the 1880s. But they also testify to an early crisis of masculinity in a society in which the bourgeoisie had become the dominant figure. But this was the product of rigid social norms. Didn’t he look like a cardboard friend? Didn’t he always wear the same dark clothes, with the white shirt underneath and the inevitable black top hat on his head?
Strength in crisis
What kind of masculinity was so constrained in a vestimental corset? Where was the softness and also the wildness in this arrangement? Or even the real one? For the civilian uniform of the man of 1880 could not hide from a person of deeper insight such as the brooding Caillebotte the fact that the French bourgeoisie had recently suffered a crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. And he called into question precisely what has been considered male since time immemorial, namely his strength, his courage, his assertiveness, perhaps even his willingness to sacrifice, his camaraderie, his solidarity.
But that’s exactly what Caillebotte was looking for. This seems to have really bothered him. And as heir to a large fortune, as a materially independent young man who was able to dedicate himself to his passions without worries, he decided to measure the extent of the issue of contemporary masculinity in the twenty years of his life. Work. Of the 500 paintings he painted, 100 exclusively depict men of all classes, in all situations, even while going to the bathroom, drying themselves, naked. During his lifetime, something like this could only be shown at exhibitions, if at all, only in remote side cabinets. Museums have collected nothing of the sort. It is no coincidence that most of the images in this exhibition come from private collections.
The first male solidarity group that Caillebotte found were the Impressionists, to whose slow rise his career has been linked since 1876. We must also imagine it as a group of men, despite Berthe Morisot, despite Mary Cassatt, as a small and united community that had to make many sacrifices before succeeding. Caillebotte repeatedly acted as an arbiter of conflicts and as an organizer of his performances. He kept the group together, paid Monet’s rent when he was short of money, and collected everyone’s photos.
But from his point of view, other male societies also come into play: those of workers, soldiers, athletes. He didn’t just paint them over and over again. He also mingled with them, supported them financially, practiced rowing and sailing professionally, gave them an association structure and participated in competitions.
To be able to devote himself more freely to water sports, he even left Paris and spent the last years of his life in the countryside. The simple life attracted him, but so did the so-called simple men. He gave them his last paintings. It was an unemployed man named Pierre Rabot, who painted as a restless dreamer a year before his death, who found the body and informed friends and relatives of the painter’s death.
The assumption of a homosexual predisposition is obvious. But did homosexuality already exist around 1870, 1880, 1890? In any case, the word did not yet exist. In France, a man who desired other men was called an “invert.” Unlike Germany, sex with men was not punishable. But social ostracism is inevitable. Even the progressive writer Emile Zola, who in his novels drew attention to many socially disadvantaged people, categorically stated: “An invert is a destroyer of the family, of the nation, of humanity.”
Caillebotte grew up in this climate. And he felt so close to his family, especially his three brothers! He never married, but he had a lover. Whether this was a camouflage maneuver is disputed in Caillebotte research. The sources are silent about his lived sexuality. But his photos tell a lot. They speak above all of the charm exerted by the man of the people, who other homosexuals of his generation also found desirable.
This had practical reasons, not least. John Addington Symonds, a well-known English Greek scholar, to whom we owe the first descriptions of gay life in European metropolises, wrote around 1890 that soldiers, sailors and simple workers were much more open to the sexual advances of men than their bourgeoisie relatives.
We know from Symonds that he divided his erotic life between Swiss country boys and Italian gondoliers. We can’t say the same with certainty about Caillebotte. But it can be argued that Caillebotte repurposed the ideas of the heterosexual image as homosexual, or more precisely: feminized the male figures in them. Never before, for example, had a painter portrayed himself in a self-portrait at the easel with a man sitting calmly in the background, as modestly as a woman of the time.
Does the history of art need to be rewritten?
Or let’s take the dossier: As if they were by Degas, they come out of the hydromassage tub and dry their stretched out limbs, only they are not females, like their colleague, but males. If a woman enters the scene – in all probability Caillebotte’s companion, Charlotte Bertier – she indulges in reading “male” newspapers; His partner is lying comfortably on a sofa and is leafing through a book, which can be recognized by its yellow cover as a contemporary novel which, according to the cliché, is more likely to be written by women.
Well, there is no need to rewrite the history of impressionism after this retrospective. This artistic movement continues to accept women as equal colleagues, to pay homage to the representation of female nudes in different ways such as mothers, wives, members of high society in ball gowns, but also, more discreetly dressed, in garden, on the beach. , in their interiors.
But when it comes to modern life, Caillebotte represents a decisive expansion. For the first time, his attention focuses on a phenomenon that would become an important part of French culture in the decades following Caillebotte’s death, especially in literature: the man who feels attracted to men.
“Caillebotte. men paint”Paris, Orsay Museum. Until January 10, 2025.
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