Gustave Caillebotte stands apart among the Impressionists. His
paintings depict working-class men in an urban context in full
transformation. Paris was turning into a modern city through Baron
Haussmann's renovation. Caillebotte also used very innovative
perspectives. What strikes most when viewing the Brooklyn exhibition (Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea )
- and any catalog of his oeuvre, for that matter - is that the
paintings are rather personal, autobiographical. You feel as if you
were spying on a very private man, whose short life (he died suddenly
at 45 from a stroke) remains a mystery.
Even before visiting the exhibition, when reading its review by Holland Cotter (The Reluctant Impressionist) in the New York Times, you start feeling that mystery:
An artist who was an Impressionist by association rather than by style or temperament.
He himself produced work, of a kind that managed to remain somewhat anomalous in any context.
He
never felt compelled to develop a strict signature style, and moved
back and forth between two kinds of realism, academic and
Impressionist, old and new.
He seemed to be in a state of perpetual experimentation, with no absolute rules.
In
the end his career as an artist — and the Brooklyn show — feels ragged
and unresolved. Certainly it was short. He stopped painting in a
focused way in his 30s. By the 1890s he had become a semi-recluse at
Petit Gennevilliers. He died there.
But
what’s wrong with uneven and unresolved? Caillebotte’s was never a
clear-cut Impressionist story, or even a classic artist’s story.
Creatively he was a mixed breed, a product of different pedigrees. He
fits into no pantheon, matches no ready profile, art historical or
otherwise.
His pictures are full of male bodies, often with a concealed face, sometimes juxtaposing bourgeois with workers. The Floor Scrapers (Les raboteurs de parquet) show men at work, shirtless, unveiling their muscular bodies. His rowmen also produce erotic feelings. In the Self-Portrait at the Easel (Autoportrait au chevalet),
the artist is painting in his studio, while in the background a man,
the bottom half of his face concealed by the painter's arm, reads on a
coach. Overall, a diffuse melancholy flows from the paintings... And a
definitive homoeroticism.
I have not read any detailed biography
of Caillebotte (is there any?), but in the short and sparse
biographical notes spreaded in the catalogue of the exhibition nothing
points to homosexuality. A few things, though, sharpen one's curiosity.
He never married, although "in the eighteen-eighties he seems to have
enjoyed a liaison with the younger Charlotte Berthier." And, "It was
also in the Cul-Blanc that he sailed in a race in 1885 with
another yachtsman, Eugène Lamy, who from then on was to be very close
to him. (...) It is apparently also Lamy with whom Caillebotte has
shown himself in a tête-à-tête - his last self portrait before his
death a few months later - in the remarkable and ambitiously scaled
picture, The Banks of the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers, Winter
from 1893.(...) The close relationship between Caillebotte and Lamy is
also underscored by the fact that on Caillebotte's death Lamy was the
owner of some of his major works." I am not suggesting that there was
anything more than friendship between Caillebotte and Lamy, who was
married and had two young sons who appear, from their back, in The Bank of the River Seine at Petit Gennevilliers (La berge au Petit Gennevilliers et la Seine).
A
quick Google search with the words: "Caillebotte and homosexuality"
brought back an essay written in 1998 by Jim Van Buskirk, Program
Manager, at the James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center of San
Francisco Public Library: Queer Impressions of Gustave Caillebotte.
Van Buskirk reviews Caillebotte's major paintings and provides
convincing hints to their homoeroticism. It's a valuable starting
point...
***
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a pioneer of Gay Studies, who contributed to
the birth of Queer Studies, died last Sunday at the age of 58 from
breast cancer. Her most famous book is Epistemology of the Closet (1990). In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), a chapter is dedicated to Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend,
drawing "attention to the homoerotic element in the obsessive
relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, rivals for
the love of Lizzie Hexam but emotionally most fully engaged when facing
off against each other," writes William Grimes in his obituary in the New York Times.
2009.04.19
