Gustave Caillebotte, Interior, Woman at the Window, 1880, oil on canvas, Private Collection. © Comité Caillebotte, Paris

 

To a greater extent than almost any of his contemporaries, Gustave Caillebotte had the gift of stillness. This might seem an odd claim to make about an impressionist, one member of that band of modernists who specialized in fracture, exuberance, and spontaneity. Yet, repeatedly in “The Painter’s Eye,” one senses how Caillebotte approached the act of making a picture with deliberation and even caution. Zola famously characterized Caillebotte’s work as “antiartistic” and “middle class in its exactitude.” Indeed, the painter enters into his role as observer and transcriber with such fastidiousness that some have seen this as an unwillingness to sustain a certain point of view and judged it the mark of an amateur or imitator. Yet for all his undeniable “exactitude,” Caillebotte presents an idiosyncratic body of work, one that absorbed the influences of his peers while searching out new forms of expression to depict modern life.

Caillebotte (1848–1894) is often described as overshadowed by his legacy to the French state, his gift after his death of some sixty paintings by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Manet, Cézanne, Sisley, and Pissarro, among others. These were the first works by Impressionists to enter a French museum, what is now Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. Caillebotte was a wealthy man—his father made a fortune supplying the French army with bedding—and he had eccentric pursuits: he and his brother Martial assembled a stamp collection now at the British Museum and, as a yacht designer, the painter changed the face of the sport in France. For decades, he was the “lost Impressionist” until a spate of scholarship in the mid-twentieth century by John Rewald, Daniel Wildenstein, and, most important, Kirk Varnedoe introduced Caillebotte to new audiences, in particular, American museum-goers and their insatiable appetite for all things Impressionist.

Like the artists themselves, Impressionism resists hard boundaries and predictability. Consider The Floor Scrapers, Caillebotte’s debut at the 1876 Second Impressionist exhibition, a subversive work that doesn’t rely on broken brushwork or a plein air setting. At the same time, it is notable for its atmospherics—sharp, contrasting light, extreme cropping, and an intimate perspective—and its rejection of traditional subject matter—contemporary critics decried its bare-chested workmen as vulgar. Yet this deceptively simple scene distills a host of sensations—the sounds of metal against wood, snatches of conversation among the workers, the smell of sweat and wood shavings, and the tangy reek from the workers’ open wine bottle—from just a momentary gaze.

One of the unavoidable consequences of being rediscovered is that Caillebotte has begun to receive full-dress treatment from academics and curators who have made much of works like Interior, a Woman Reading and Interior, Woman at the Window and its companion piece, Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (all 1880). The artist’s experiments with extreme cropping and off-kilter scale make his mundane views of interiors slightly unnerving, as does his tendency to show figures from the back. Scholars see this as evidence of his modernist preoccupation with identity, alienation among the leisure class, and the questioning of social expectations. Without doubt, Caillebotte worked in the idiom of, to borrow a phrase, a painter of modern life. In “All the Discomforts of Home: Caillebotte and Nineteenth-Century Bourgeois Interiors,” catalogue essayist Elizabeth Benjamin examines how “Caillebotte interrogated the social anxieties of his milieu” through his use of decorations and furniture. Although her prose threatens periodically to succumb to academic jargon, Benjamin persuasively argues that Caillebotte approached his art not as an expiation of bourgeois guilt but as a quietly purposeful examination of the changing boundaries of the public and the private, particularly, in relation to identity.

Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877) never grows stale no matter how many times one sees it on mouse pads or umbrellas. Brilliantly conceived and suavely painted though it may be, this flâneur’s eye view of Parisians caught in a rain shower showcases the characterless uniformity of Haussmann’s city, one reconceived by the state rather than by haphazard humanity. Two works that repay longer consideration, The House Painters (1877) and On the Pont de l’Europe (1876–77), also show snapshot views of street scenes, the former in warm tones and the latter in cooler tonalities. The house painters in their smocks and the façade on which they work are detailed, while the steeply receding street at the left is vague and uninflected. The latter painting’s composition is dominated by three figures with hidden faces and the iron girders of the new bridge over the Gare Saint-Lazare rail yards, a place, the catalogue informs us, that served as a notorious setting for male prostitution. Certainly, concealing the identities of the figures in the painting plays nicely into this scenario but, as we have seen, Caillebotte frequently painted people from the back. Rather, the strength in this painting comes from its elemental forms, its punctuations of color (the yellow glove, the plume of smoke from the train), and the eloquent record of a fleeting moment of intimacy among strangers. The obvious juxtaposition in these two paintings is labor versus leisure, a connection exploited by Caillebotte in the service of finding greater truths such as the contexts of human flourishing, how technology shapes an environment, and simply how people live.

 

Gustave Caillebotte, Calf's Head and Ox Tongue, c. 1882, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Major Acquisitions Centennial Endowment. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago

 

The exhibition’s most remarkable section displays ten still lifes mostly of foodstuffs in what has to be an unprecedented assembly. Although the painter must have enjoyed practically all of these delicacies at his own table, he sought out the markets and butchers near his home in the Ninth Arrondissement for a different kind of experience. Some of these works depict foods dressed with great artistry and prepared for immediate consumption by discerning diners, such as Langouste à la Parisienne (1880–82), Pastry Cakes (1881), and the well-known Fruits Displayed on a Stand (c.1881–82) in which each item lies individually cocooned in white tissue. But Caillebotte also recorded the less-than-appetizing side of the food industry. Like Zola in his 1873 Le Ventre de Paris, Caillebotte takes us on a tour of the grotesque stage between farm and fork. There are several poignant paintings of game, such as the grave Game Birds and Lemons (1883). The slack, elongated bodies of these creatures, clearly full of life only hours before, is ineffably sad. But horrific is the only way to describe Calf’s Head and Ox Tongue (c.1882) with, in the curators’ words, “[its] coloristic vividness and [the] clammy texture of dead flesh.” Only ten years later, the Belgian symbolist James Ensor would paint a similarly discomfiting and voyeuristic still life, Still Life with Skate. Caillebotte as an advance scout for Symbolism or even Expressionism is hardly what one would expect of a bourgeois Impressionist.

The exhibition’s final section gathers works focusing on Caillebotte’s love of boating and his views of the area around his country estate at Petit Gennevilliers on the banks of the Seine. In contrast to the urban works, these paintings, many from the last years of his life, are executed with more impressionistic brushwork, conveying the sensory impact of glittering water, flowers and foliage, and sunlight and shadow. His four views of the Gennevilliers Plain (1884) represent a Monet-like exercise in seasonal progression that attests to the Caillebotte’s skills as a colorist as well as his awareness of the abstract compositions presented by field, horizon, and sky. Linen Out to Dry, Petit Gennevilliers (1888) is a splendid evocation of plein air freshness and simplicity. The Yerres, Rain Effect (1875) is a remarkably self-assured effort in which raindrops strike the surface of the river against a bank of Corot-inflected trees. Freed from the busyness and clamor of urban life, Caillebotte appears to have found in these rural scenes a degree of contentment and new outlets for his meditations on modern life.

There will no doubt continue to be more explications of Caillebotte and his work, “interrogations” of his influences and environment, and, ultimately, a complete dismantling of his mystique. There is much to be learned and it will be valuable to our understanding of the artist and his time, but of the stillness and wonder of Caillebotte’s paintings, one hopes these will remain undisturbed.

 

"Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye" is on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC through October 4, 2015. It will then move to the Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth, Texas from November 8, 2015 to Feburary 14, 2016.

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