The largest display of French 19th-century artist Gustave Caillebotte’s (1848–1894) work on the West Coast of the USA in 30 years has just opened at The Getty in Los Angeles.
Caillebotte is best known for his paintings of Paris in the latter part of the 19th century. He was friends with Impressionist artists Monet, Renoir, Degas and Pissarro and, as a painter, took part in the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876. He came from a wealthy family, inheriting his father’s fortune in 1874. He earned a law degree in 1868 and a license to practice law in 1870, and he also was an engineer. Shortly after his education, he was drafted to fight in the Franco-Prussian war and served from July 1870 to March 1871 in the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine. After the war, he studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and it was at this time he befriended the artists outside the Academy.
Caillebotte’s sizeable allowance allowed him to paint without the pressure to sell his work. It also allowed him to help fund Impressionist exhibitions and support his fellow artists and friends by purchasing their works and, at least in the case of Monet, paying the rent for their studios. In 1876, at only 28 years old, he wrote a will in which he bequeathed this collection to the French government. The collection is now housed at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
His work differed from his fellow Impressionists in that he often chose urban subjects depicting male manual workers, such as in The Floor Scrapers and The House Painters, as well as painting rowers and men washing. It is these subjects that form the thesis for the current exhibition, which was previously shown at the Musée d’Orsay at the end of 2024. The angle is that Caillebotte depicted men in unconventional ways, hinting at his possible homosexuality. This theory has no concrete proof but has caused considerable controversy in the recent French press. Some critics from across the political spectrum argued that the exhibit places too much emphasis on a gendered interpretation of Caillebotte’s work and blames it on an American influence, deliberately omitting parts of Caillebotte’s work, such as his later flower paintings. The travelling exhibition, however, was jointly organized by a leading curator from each institution: Paul Perrin at the Musée d’Orsay, Scott Allan at the Getty, and Gloria Groom at the Art Institute of Chicago. The curators have repeatedly said no information exists about the artist’s sexual orientation, and no conclusive information was found on the topic.
It is the paintings themselves that possibly provide the answer. It is their stark honesty. The AIC curator, Gloria Groom, defends the exhibition’s gendered lens, arguing, “His subject matter is very radical during the time, because men were not supposed to stare at men, and he’s staring at men,” she said. “It’s the elephant in the room. It’s what makes him so different.”
The works are divided into ten thematic sections which include Gustave and his Brothers, Men on the Balcony, Caillebotte and the Army and Painting the Naked Body and features about 100 paintings and drawings. The Getty recently acquired Young Man at His Window which is prominently displayed. It depicts the artist’s younger brother René gazing out on the street from the family’s Paris mansion. It is a prime example of what critic Edmond Duranty characterized as “The New Painting”—a bold, realist art that portrayed modern individuals in their everyday environments.
What is apparent in the paintings is the isolation of each figure who occupies their own space with little interaction and is lost in their individual thoughts. Is this the key to Caillebotte’s thoughts, possibly feeling an outsider because of a repressed homosexuality or merely the dispassionate observations of an artist depicting a male-dominated society? He is clearly fascinated by structure, shapes, diagonal lines, repeating patterns, unusual perspectives, cropped images and tilted picture planes all painted with a muted palette.
In The Floor Scrapers, the lines stand out. The outstretched arms of the workers echo the lines of the floorboards, the light reflecting on the varnished surfaces and the men’s arms and backs, and the curls of the shavings echoing the ironwork on the balcony’s railings. A well-observed scene includes details like the tools casually placed on the floor and a bottle of wine in the corner, ready for their break.
Similarly, in Paris Street, Rainy Day 1877, the diagonals stand out. This is modern Paris, which was laid out by Baron Hausmann between 1853 and 1870, with its wide boulevards replacing the narrow medieval streets. At an impressive 7ft by 10ft, the viewer is confronted with life-sized figures in the foreground dressed in the latest fashions while navigating the rain-soaked streets. The cropping implies life beyond the canvas, but the people are anonymous, shapes within the structure of the painting.
The two closely observed paintings of men washing form the basis for the exhibition’s thesis. The male bathers form counterparts to Degas’ images of female bathers. The men are oblivious to being observed. It is a private moment and unsettling. The caption describes Man at His Bath 1884 as being ‘charged with homoerotic potential, unsettling some viewers’. It is a radical image at a time when toilette scenes almost always featured female bathers. Nevertheless, once again, it is the shapes that stand out – the vertical figure of the standing man against the vertical window, the curve of the bath against the curve of the man’s buttocks and the details of the wet footprints and discarded clothes.
One interesting omission from the show is the large painting Pont De L’Europe, although there are smaller sketches. The sketches omit the dog and have the man and woman walking side by side. This is relevant because much has been made of the gaze of the male, a flaneur. It has been suggested that he is gazing at the man on the bridge. In the large painting, he is not walking beside the woman but slightly ahead and turning to cross in front of her. The location near the Gare St Lazare was a known district for prostitution. Is the woman a street walker and the man accosting her?
Whichever is true, the street dog walking alone on the prowl may symbolize the man’s lustful intent.
Whether or not Caillebotte was gay is highly speculative, but it neither adds nor detracts from this superbly monumental exhibition and the witnessing of so many great paintings exhibited together.
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men 25 February to 25 May 2025 Getty Center, Los Angeles