Gustave Caillebotte (1848-94) was neglected long after Monet and Degas had become superstars. Once pegged as a collector and promoter of the Impressionist movement, Caillebotte's own art has gained admirers on both sides of the Atlantic. Organized with the Musée d'Orsay, "Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men" is now at the Getty Center (through May 25, 2025) and will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago
Caillebotte in America. In 1964 the Art Institute of Chicago acquired Caillebotte's masterpiece Paris Street, Rainy Day by gift, from the Charles and Mary Worcester collection. The following year the Milwaukee Journal gave the city's art museum a Caillebotte sporting picture, Skiffs. (Imagine a time when a newspaper could spring for an Impressionist painting.) Caillebottes were still popularly priced. In 1967 the Minneapolis Institute of Art scraped together $28,800 to buy Nude on a Couch, the artist's one female nude, nearly life size.
For decades after that Midwest breakthrough, Caillebotte was popular with U.S. museum curators who that been priced out of buying the better-known Impressionists. Meanwhile American museums organized traveling retrospectives of the artist in 1976 (Houston and Brooklyn) and 1995 (Chicago, LACMA, Paris).
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| Gustave Caillebotte, Man at His Bath, 1884. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
Caillebotte's prices kept rising. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts bought Man at His Bath—a famous but "difficult" painting to the art trade, for its male nudity—for a reported $17 million. To swing that the MFA had to sell 8 paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Gauguin, and others, drawing howls of protest.
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| Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at His Window, 1876. J. Paul Getty Museum |
In Los Angeles Norton Simon, Armand Hammer, and Jerry Perenchio bought Caillebotte paintings. Local interest culminated in the Getty Museum's auction purchase of Young Man at His Window in 2021, for a record $53 million.
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| Gustave Caillebotte, Boating Party, about 1877-78. Musée d'Orsay |
Two years later the Musee d'Orsay paid nearly as much ($47 million) for A Boating Party. Those twin big-money purchases motivated the current exhibition. Caillbotte is now street-banner popular, but that probably puts major Caillebotte paintings out of any museum's price range.
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| Installation view with Paris Street, Rainy Day |
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| Figure studies for Paris Street, Rainy Day |
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| Gustave Caillebotte, The Bezique Game, 1880. Louvre Abu Dhabi |
"Painting Men." Like his Impressionist peers, Caillebotte produced sparkling landscapes and some interesting still lifes. But his reputation rests almost entirely with a handful of pictures of men in the modern city and suburbs. That is the focus of the current show which, while technically not a full survey, assembles practically all the artist's greatest hits. Many of Caillebotte's best landscapes are here too, on the pretext that they have figures.
The Paris showing of "Painting Men"
sparked controversy over Caillebotte's sexuality. Some critics complained that the show leaned too heavily into the plausible, if unverifiable, hypothesis that Caillebotte was gay or bisexual. The artist was a wealthy bachelor who socialized with a league of unmarried gentlemen whose likenesses recur throughout "Painting Men." He lived with his mother, then his brother Martial, and finally a woman, Charlotte Berthier. Caillebotte did not marry or father children with Berthier, but her parents were scandalized by the relationship, and Caillebotte bequeathed her an annuity and real estate.
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| Gustave Caillebotte, Nude on a Couch, about 1880. Minneapolis Institute of Art |
It is legitimate for art historians to ask whether Caillebotte was gay or bi. The catch is, we don't know and may never know. The Getty gallery texts struck me as even-handed on that. If anything, they occasionally twist themselves into rhetorical knots of qualification ("a desiring gaze that is not necessarily male or heterosexual.") The show includes the Boston male nude and the Minneapolis female nude. Both seem more realist than erotic in intent. Caillebotte must have expected the Man at His Bath to make waves, and it did. When shown at Les XX, the Belgian avant-garde organization, it was consigned to a small side room. Caillebotte never showed the female nude at all.
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| Gallery text, "Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men" |
The exhibition subtitle appears to allude to the Weather Girls' gay-inclusive 1982 disco anthem, "It's Raining Men." It may be relevant in this age of self-censorship that the Art Institute of Chicago is adopting the title "Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World."
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Gustave Caillebotte, Floor Scrapers, 1875. Musée d'Orsay
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Perspective and Privilege. One of the most intriguing elements of Caillebotte's art is his use of unusual points of view. The Floor Scrapers places the artist's and viewer's eyes at standing height, looking down on the workers. Boulevard Seen from Above is a drone's eye view, made possible by the balconies of the new Paris. The House Painters are seen from the side, in a vertiginous exercise in perspective.
 | | Gustave Caillebotte, Boulevard Seen from Above, 1880. Private collection |
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The gallery texts frame this in socioeconomic terms. Caillebotte's father (whom he never painted) made the family's fortune. It's speculated that Caillebotte is literally looking down on the city from a vantage point of privilege.
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| Gustave Caillebotte, House Painters, 1877. Private collection |
Haussmann's Paris was rebuilt with balconies and panoramic windows that offered the bourgeoisie city views unavailable to the working class. Caillebotte was surely responding to these new ways of seeing the city, as well as to photography. It's believed that Caillebotte was among the first painters to make use of photography. "Painting Men" has a selection of family photos, many taken by brother Martial. They don't seem to directly relate to Caillebotte's paintings, however.
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| Gustave Caillebotte, Roses, Garden of Petit Gennevilliers, about 1886. Private collection |
Caillebotte's Women. A survey of Caillebotte's female subjects would be a small show. In fact, it's already here, incorporated in "Painting Men." On view are a few paintings of the women in the artist's life, his mother and his companion Charlotte Berthier. The latter, however, is only staffage in the late landscape titled Roses, Garden of Petit Gennevilliers.
Many of Caillebotte's man pictures are also woman pictures. This is true of Paris Street, Rainy Day and even of Young Man at his Window, where the subject's attention is directed to the tiny figure of a woman crossing the street.
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| Gustave Caillebotte, Bathers, 1878. Private collection |
Impressionism. Caillbotte's The Floor Scrapers was rejected by the Salon. Instead he showed it at the second Impressionist exhibition. Caillebotte became the Impressionists' sugar daddy, buying their art and organizing exhibitions. Meanwhile his own art shifted. Trained in the dark academic style of Léon Bonnat, Caillebotte adopted lighter colors and freer brush strokes. While early paintings such as Floor Scrapers and Paris Street are utterly distinctive, Caillebotte's more "Impressionist" efforts can get lost in the crowd of plein air also-rans. Late works are of most interesting when they incorporate Caillebotte trademarks such as bass-ackward perspectives.
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| Gustave Caillebotte, Father Magloire on the Chemin de Saint-Clair in Étretat, about 1884 |
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Gustave Caillebotte, The Dog Paul, about 1886. Private collection
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