Paris,
When 130 years have passed since the death of Gustave Caillebotte – whose life was brief, since he was born in revolutionary 1848 and did not reach half a century -, the Musée d’Orsay, together with the Getty Museum of Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago , has proposed to explore in an exhibition the relationship of his works (in a percentage close to 70%, male portraits) with a radical conception of artistic modernity, with the social advances in the making at the end of the 19th century and also with the perception of the roles assigned to that male gender at that time.
In 2021 and 2022, respectively, the Getty and Orsay acquired two important works by this French author: Young man at his fenêtre and Partie de bateauthis last composition, classified in the neighboring country as national treasure. Both can be considered fundamental in his career, as well as representative of the attention paid by Caillebotte to the figure of man in his canvases; We could say that on the masculine side of contemporaneity, in contrast to fellow impressionists, such as Manet, Degas or Renoir (the latter was their executor), for whom the modern aspect of life was largely embodied in female figures or in scenes in which that some and others come together.
The exhibition that we can tour in Paris until January, and that next year will travel to both Los Angeles and Chicago, is structured around these recent purchases and also based on the image Rue de Paris; rain tempson loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. Almost one hundred and a half pieces have been brought together, among which there are no shortage of Caillebotte’s most famous ones, but also rarely exhibited pastels and an extensive set of painted studies and preparatory drawings for well-known compositions, such as the one in which he represented in action to parquet planers or their Pont de l’Europearrival of the Geneva Petit Palais.
The exhibition is completed by photographs, some taken by Martial, the author’s brother, and unpublished archival documents that help us contextualize these creations and the career and personality of the Parisian, who in addition to being a painter was a collector, patron and exhibition organizer.
Faithful, for a good part of his career, to the realist postulates, Caillebotte only observed and portrayed contemporaries close to him: brothers, friends, passers-by who walked near his house in the French capital, employees of his family or individuals who accompanied him. sailing on the Seine or canoeing on the Yerres River. Those images were then audacious, and not only because of their themes devoid of epic, but also because of their framing that seemed to anticipate the photographic ones and because of their powerful chromatic and lighting contrasts. In any case, he incorporated into his scenes new individuals strictly characteristic of a, in turn, new time: urban workers or athletes without awareness of being so, and not always in action, but even in a position to take a bath.
In a changing panorama, in which the triumph of virility, in the expression of Alain Corbin, was gradually breaking down in France under the effects of the military humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, which ended with the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in 1871, demands for female emancipation also grew and a previously invisible subculture linked to homosexuality began to develop; These new currents would favor a slow redefinition of the masculine ideal, an ideal in transition with which the artist may have identified when representing his contemporaries again and again from an approach apparently close to admiration.
The political context of the affirmation of the Third Republic, which adopted the values of liberty, equality and fraternity, in that decade of 1870, also constituted fertile ground for the expression of Caillebotte’s taste for masculine sociability and collective enterprises (such as impressionist group or the Cercle de la voile de Paris), where the economic and class differences that sometimes distanced him from his friends were minimized: this author had the necessary economic resources to dedicate himself to painting and was an exception, in that sense, among those close to him, since he could afford to buy works from them to help them. The collection that he managed to accumulate in this way would be donated, upon his death, to the French State on the condition that it be exposed, in large part, to the public (it was difficult, because those responsible for cultural policy in France found it inadmissible, when At the end of the 19th century, Impressionist compositions, still reviled, were exhibited in museums).
These friends would frequently pose for him in his apartment on Boulevard Haussmann: most of them were, if not artists, civil servants or pensioners, and he used to capture them in contemplative attitudes, looking at the city from the balcony or sitting more or less comfortably on sofas and armchairs. Their gaze conveys either seriousness or a certain boredom, except when they gathered around a table to play a game of beziguea game that in these canvases is given a tension and seriousness similar to those of history paintings. Caillebotte is, in fact, one of the few male artists of his generation who is so interested in intimacy and the domestic world, the feminine sphere par excellence at that time and the main protagonist of the works of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt.
This exhibition aims to deepen this relative subversion, which is structured both chronologically and thematically and which, across ten rooms, explores his favorite subjects in the field of portraiture: family intimacy, the aforementioned urban workers, public space. and those who wander in it, men on the balconies, interiors, athletes, sailors, nudes in grooming scenes or images of their Parisian friends or their neighbors in Petit Gennevilliers.
Both works provide us, when examined together, a portrait of Caillebotte himself: the bourgeois, the impressionist painter, the collector and the amateur, the bachelor, the athlete…, although these multiple faces, deep down, do not cease to be feed your mystery. Women will also come out as we pass (reading, observing, gardening); He captured them, like his models, crudely and without flattery, far from any game of seduction.
“Caillebotte. Paint men”
MUSÉE D´ORSAY
Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
Paris
From October 8, 2024 to January 19, 2025
