Catching Us Looking

For a central figure of Impressionism, it is surprising how often Gustave Caillebotte seems to be disappearing offstage. Even in self-portraits he can be hard to catch hold of. In a chilly mealtime painting from 1876, shortly after his father had died, he lavishes attention on the table settings, envelops his mother and brother in shadow, and, at the bottom frame, shows no one at what could be his own place, only the top half of an empty plate. In one of his last works, from 1893, he depicts himself skippering a sailboat of his own design in a large regatta and obscures his own face, directing attention instead to the geometric, zigzagged reflections in the water. Seeing what at first seems the familiar beauty of Caillebotte’s boating scenes, his Paris interiors, the expansive outdoor bridges and gardens, a contemporary viewer may not quite notice the strange relationships between his figures and his spaces. The dramatic patterns—jags of river water, diagonal wet Paris cobblestones, the scored floor planks of spacious apartments, the Xs of steel bridges—may take precedence over the people, who are often seen from the back, placed closer or farther than you would expect, and even bisected at the edge of the frame.

And yet his elusive figures exist in their own complex spatial and social arrangements. “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World,” at the Art Institute of Chicago, includes nine paintings and drawings of house painters perched on ladders; eight others are of men standing on balconies or steel bridges with Paris above and below; some fifteen are of rowers and bathers among skiffs, sailboats, and water. These last show men, often paddling across blue–green–whitish gray striations, by themselves but not quite detached, as other men in boats float nearby, amid oscillating reflections of crafts and water.

Caillebotte made symmetry out of singularity, using mirrors, rivers, the spine of a person’s back, rain on cobblestones, the crease of a newspaper, bridges, ladders, or the seam of a couch to double and fold, though not to hold still. On my second or third visit to the show, I stood in front of his most famous painting, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877), which shows a black-clad couple walking under a black umbrella in the gray rainy streets of Paris, with more than a dozen other figures, under umbrellas of their own, receding along the diagonals of cobblestone streets to the very edges of a Parisian architectural stage-set, and I heard two young men who work for the Art Institute talking about the painting’s pulse, how the diagonals of the space and the arrangement of the diminishing figures at once draw your eye in and push it back. Caillebotte’s paintings strain, as Kirk Varnedoe wrote nearly fifty years ago, reaching “an almost unbearable stretch between near and far.”¹

The Art Institute’s beautiful, appropriately symmetrical show—curated and installed for this Chicago iteration by Gloria Groom, the museum’s chair of painting and sculpture of Europe, with exhibition design by Samantha Grassi—has a circular layout that itself pulses between interior and exterior. As the viewer moves through Caillebotte’s life in painting, more constrained domestic spaces open out into panoramas of the city and the countryside, which then close in again. At the midpoint of the exhibition, long, rectangular cut-out windows give onto Grant Park, that most Parisian part of Chicago, with its consciously Beaux-Arts vistas. We then turn away from these windows to see, hung low against a white wall, one of our city’s best-loved paintings, the immense Paris Street; Rainy Day.

After this spectacular moment the show turns inward. About two thirds of the way through, in a room of interiors showing women and men standing at windows or in front of the mirror of a café, the museumgoer perceives, off to the left, through a sequence of openings, an 1884 painting called Man at His Bath. A man, alone and naked, stands with his back to the viewer. His face is completely turned away, and the towel across his back serves to draw attention to his body, and in particular to his ass, which is centrally placed and painted with a brightness of hue and a definiteness of contour that indicate acute attention.

Man at His Bath is one of three nude pictures in a small hexagonal room built within a larger enclosure. Nearby, in Nude on a Couch (circa 1880), Caillebotte shows a slender woman reclining on a vast couch, her right leg bent up and her left arm angled across her face, with a privacy entirely the opposite of the blazing stare the courtesan in Manet’s Olympia gives her viewer. Caillebotte’s nude woman lays her right hand across her left breast in a gesture many commentators have said feels self-contained rather than seductive. The other nude, Man Drying His Leg (1884), has an expressive, gentle quality; there is tenderness in its repeated brushstrokes and delicate observation in the quiet hum of oranges, purples, blues, and whites.

These are very interior paintings, set in closed rooms inside closed houses, but the exhibition’s architecture lets the light in through wide-cut openings. In the eye-catching Man at His Bath, the man’s body has the bright radiance of those men on the river with their skiffs, so that the exhibitiongoer, entering a darkened room inside a room, strangely experiences an adjustment of the eyes as if stepping outside on a bright day. Dislocation and presence alternate in close proximity. It is a feeling that Caillebotte’s paintings persistently generate—a sense of being at once here and not here.

Caillebotte’s nudes of men are central to how the exhibition presents his understanding of a viewer’s shifting relationship to the space of painting. None of the other Impressionists was as interested as Caillebotte in the classical “laws of perspective” and their lines of sight, which he often used to subvert our spatial expectations. He did something similar with our expectations about lines of desire. Confronted with his canvases, a viewer’s eyes and body alike feel strained and pulled in more than one direction, caught “between near and far.” It could be said about many of his paintings what the art historians André Dombrowski and Jonathan D. Katz, in the catalog for this exhibition, write about Man at His Bath—that it “at once makes us look and catches us in the act of looking.”

Each of the disparate group of painters now collectively referred to as the Impressionists had his or her own freedoms and constraints. Caillebotte, born to great wealth in 1848, was the richest. Raised in Paris and the country, he admired his father, who made his fortune manufacturing pallets for soldiers and supported his son’s painterly ambitions by suggesting he make a commodious studio in their Parisian home. As it did for all the Impressionists, the Franco–Prussian war of 1870–1871 had a determining effect on Caillebotte. Having initially avoided the army by purchasing a replacement, he ended up serving in Paris during an intense period of the siege. His military papers are displayed in Chicago in front of an early painting from around 1870 of soldiers in the woods, which shows, tiny and easy to miss but nevertheless shocking, a soldier crouched down, bare-assed, taking a crap.

Caillebotte painted soldiers repeatedly, and also other working men and laborers. He never married and left little information about his romantic life, and we have no documentation of sexual encounters. He was close to his brother, Martial Caillebotte, and after the deaths of their parents the two shared a bachelor apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann for eight years. A serious pianist, Martial Caillebotte later became a dedicated amateur photographer (a number of his photographs are included in the show). Another brother, René, died of unclear causes at twenty-five; Gustave Caillebotte immediately made his own will, and a shadow of mortality hung over the family. Seven years later, in 1883, Caillebotte made a second will, leaving a substantial life-annuity to his companion, a woman called Charlotte Berthier, but we know little about what their relationship entailed—only that his family did not approve of her presence (they seem to have carefully excised her from a photograph), that he painted her and her dog in gardens, and that she lived with him at his last country house in Petit Gennevilliers.

After Caillebotte died, at forty-five, in 1894, for a long while his gifts as a painter were overlooked in favor of his curation, his collecting, and his perceptive and financially generous support of his fellow painters. (For example, he paid for Claude Monet’s studio in a crucial period.) Certain of the big Impressionist exhibitions might not have happened without Caillebotte; for the one in 1877 he found the space, called all the major participants to a meeting at his family dining table, chose many of the pictures, and even hung them himself. His collection of Impressionist works was so comprehensive and comprehending that, when he bequeathed it to the French state, it forced a crucial reckoning with Impressionism on the part of the country’s museum system. These paintings are at the heart of what would later become the Musée d’Orsay.

Caillebotte’s close friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who was an executor, persuaded the French museums to take two works by Caillebotte, but otherwise Caillebotte’s own paintings stayed among his family and friends. A large portion are still in private collections, one reason it took seventy years for them to reemerge from the shadows. Starting in 1976 a series of exhibitions, primarily outside France, took up the formal and socioeconomic qualities of his pictures: their experiments with space and architecture; their depictions of wealthy, urban Paris; their interest in gardens; the quite brilliant ways that he not only cropped his paintings like photographs but anticipated the later work of André Kertész and Brassaï in overhead “shots” of Paris and studies of iron grillwork, bridges, and lampposts. Thirty years ago, in 1995, Chicago was a host, and Gloria Groom a curator, of one such landmark exhibition. Writers for that catalog observed the challenging abruptness with which Caillebotte transitions from interior to exterior spaces, how he lays the diagonals of balconies sharply across canvases and divides the picture plane strangely between the black-figured interiors and the world outside, with its impressionistic bounty of brushstrokes and light.

But the show currently in Chicago is the first, to my knowledge, to announce an explicit focus on Caillebotte’s attention to the figure. Given that the figure is pretty central to painting, it seems worth wondering what has made people look elsewhere for a hundred and thirty years.

It does seem possible that, consciously or not, curators averted their eyes from the obvious facts that Caillebotte painted men much more often than he did women, had a more direct feeling for the proportions and presences of men than of women, celebrated and eroticized the beauty of the naked male body (both more strikingly and more intimately than his contemporaries Bazille and Cézanne did with their occasional male bathers), painted women as independent presences going about their lives for their own reasons, attended to men’s clothed bodies as they bent, stood, rowed, and labored in a way that consistently emphasized the male posterior, and did much of his finest work when he painted men together—in skiffs, on balconies, on bridges, playing cards. Whether these modes are homosocial or homosexual or bisexual, queer or masculinist or inverted, Maupassantian or Proustian or none of these things, they are not how other Impressionists approached the figure.

“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” appeared in two previous venues under a different title, “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.” When the show debuted at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the title and focus occasioned a minor storm of controversy. Although the French curators had been centrally involved in choosing the theme of the exhibition, French journalists found the title reductive and suggested that American gender theory, as the journalist Philippe Lançon put it in Libération, had “crossed the Atlantic and landed.” Tendentious reviews appeared in the major papers, Le Monde and the Figaro. Speculation carried over to the showing at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where social media posts around the opening titrated the gayness of each picture. According to an interview with Groom in the Chicago Tribune, the powers that be in Chicago had, even before all this, held a focus group and decided to change the title to “Painting His World,” a “banal and anodyne” phrase, as Arthur Lubow pointed out in The New York Times.

Private collection/photograph by Lea Gryze

Gustave Caillebotte: Man Drying His Leg, circa 1884

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Gustave Caillebotte: Nude on a Couch, circa 1880

I wish the title had not been changed, or at least that the exhibition’s focus on the figure had been retained in its name, but the catalog is still called Painting Men and it still includes Dombrowski and Katz’s essay “Caillebotte, Painting Naked Men.” Dombrowski and Katz step aside from our contemporary ideas of identity—was-he-gay-or-wasn’t-he?—to give a lucid account of Caillebotte’s historical moment, when an earlier conception of sexuality as separate individual acts of desire was giving way to a nascent idea of overarching orientation. But neither conception of sexuality, they argue, quite captures the experience of looking at Caillebotte. Instead, they suggest, Man at His Bath and Man Drying His Leg place every viewer—including the presumptive male viewer of Caillebotte’s time—in a position of intimacy relative to a naked man that may well stir up the possibility, awareness, and discomfort of desire.  

In his lifetime Caillebotte did not find a venue in Paris to exhibit Man at His Bath. At last, in 1888, he planned to show it with an annual group salon known for its willingness to include radical pictures, Les XX in Belgium, but after it arrived they hung it in a small side room. The major Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel later refused to show the work, and Caillebotte withdrew from exhibiting altogether. In Chicago this history has been built into the architecture of the show. Around the small hexagon containing the three nude paintings—the two of naked men at their baths and the one of a woman lying down alone—there is a wider enclosure where portraits of Caillebotte’s male friends and familiars line the outer wall. The strange effect is that the men in this outward circle face empty walls, behind which is an interior inhabited by nude figures that the clothed portraits cannot see.

The spectator in Chicago, having completed this double loop of portraits familiar and sequestered, returns to two 1880 paintings she has no choice but to see twice: Interior, Woman at the Window, and Interior, Woman Reading. The women in these pictures—some think they could both be Charlotte Berthier—are self-possessed, commanding presences, with smaller figures of men nearby. (The model for both men was Caillebotte’s close friend and frequent subject Richard Gallo.) Caillebotte does not rapturize about women’s soft curves, or narrate their thinking. They wear black, face away from the painter; the visible eye of one is not a transparent object of beauty but dark paint directed with her own intentions; she reads a newspaper, which was then primarily a masculine activity, while the other woman looks out a window to study Paris with more black-backed authority than the man who reads in an armchair cut off by the canvas edge. In Interior, Woman Reading, the man is tiny, the size of the woman’s hands, and he reads something small, possibly a feminine novel, in the fold of an enormous couch.

Contemporary critics were particularly harsh about Caillebotte’s Interior, Woman Reading. “One draws away from her in fright!” wrote one. “The poor woman has given birth to a monster and is obliged to keep it near her…. The effect produced is unimaginable.” It’s interesting that Caillebotte’s contemporaries were particularly disturbed by his vertiginous perspectives—“insane,” “bizarre and incomprehensible,” they wrote—and that their criticisms ran together anxieties about the geometry of space and the pressure of physical encounters. This was felt as a matter of near and far: the figures around Caillebotte’s 1876 family dinner table, one said, “are so far away that they are no longer intelligible,” while another wrote that the famous floor-scrapers “threatened to slide out onto the unwitting spectator.” Caillebotte planned these effects carefully. His first preparatory drawings were often architectural; he put in the figures after he had worked out the mathematics of the space.

For the Caillebotte retrospective in 1976, curated by Varnedoe and originating in Houston, the art historian Peter Galassi reconstructed the perspectival shifts involved in making an unusual self-portrait, the Pont de L’Europe (1876), which in Chicago hangs in a room full of blue bridges. It shows the figure of the painter, in a gentleman’s top hat, who has paused mid-stride on his way across the bridge of the title to turn his head and gaze fiercely to his left. My close-up photographs show the angled line of shadow cast by his top hat coming to a sharp point beneath his visible right eye, underscoring his pronounced attention. Yet just what he might be looking at has occasioned much debate. His sightline leads ambiguously toward the side of the long steel trellis of the bridge, near but not at the place where a working man in turn gazes off into the distance. A woman with a parasol walks behind the artist-figure; near her, we see the back of a second working figure passing by; in the far distance, a small soldier and horsecarts hold together leftward vanishing points; and, front and center, a lovely large dog walks away from us, head angled to the artist, tail toward the gazing working man.

In eight pages of minute geometrical analysis, Galassi documents the delicate adjustments Caillebotte made in a series of studies to the trestles and steel girders, to the diagonals of pavement and buildings, to the placement of figures, in order to produce a picture with “two equally valid centers of vision,” one at the painter-figure’s head, the other at the head of the worker who looks off the bridge.² In the Pont, writes Galassi, “the viewer is by implication looking in two directions at once.” In other words, the painting’s drama and architecture come from deliberately holding two unreconciled views simultaneously. What’s more, the painter inside the painting is having a related experience, looking at space itself with a dramatic intensity, the kind we usually reserve for seeing a doppelganger or a long-ago lover.

This look, in fact, is somehow what holds the painting together. In an earlier study, the painter-figure is shown walking alongside the woman with the parasol, a conventional Parisian couple out for a stroll, and his bent head suggests he is looking at her. The architecture of the space is still dramatic, but the tense choreography of gazes among the figures has fallen away. In the finished painting everyone, even the dog, hovers at the edges of one another’s vision, neither quite looking at one another nor quite with one another. Most of the architectural drawings are not included in the current exhibition (it is rich in figural ones), but with both in mind the onlooker can feel how space is being at once created and received by various looking eyes. 

Caillebotte, like the other Impressionists, felt that it was an urgent problem to work out a new relationship between figure and ground. But while Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot and Auguste Renoir used the speed and improvisation of their brushstrokes to blend figures with a palpable atmosphere, letting you prolong one of those rapt, transcendent, fleeting moments of being at one with the world, Caillebotte wanted to define the figure rather than dissolve it into space. He makes you oscillate among viewpoints, catch things in your peripheral vision. According to Jean Renoir (the filmmaker and son of the painter), Caillebotte said he hoped only to have his paintings “displayed in the antechamber where the Renoirs and Cézannes are hung.” But movements are defined and redefined in their antechambers and at their edges, and Caillebotte knew how powerful shifts of perspective and pattern could be.

Three years ago, in a wonderful show in Paris called “Le décor impressionniste,” Caillebotte’s radiant triptych Skiffs, Bathers, and Angling—which he showed at the Impressionist exhibition in the watershed year of 1879—came as a revelation to me. Because so many Caillebottes are dispersed in private collections, I feared I might never see it assembled again. But the three paintings have been brought back together in Chicago.

Interested in his close friend Monet’s series paintings that showed a motif shifting with time and light, Caillebotte had another idea of variation: multiplying figures that look at the same scene from different perspectives, with ranging focus and desire. In Bathers, the central panel, as if to demonstrate, three men take different points of view: one prepares to dive by looking into the water and presents his back, bent at the rear; another climbs out of the water and looks toward the diver; the third is just a head, submerged in the water, also staring. Flanking this scene in the canvas to our right, Angling, a man and a girl, each with a fishing line out, study water for signs of movement; in Skiffs, to our left, men paddle, their backs to us, tranquil as they approach the roseate light that recurs in a similar place in each of the three canvases.

If these paintings had hung in the French museums for decades, they would have rewarded the close study over generations that neighboring works by Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Monet, and Renoir have received. There would have been theories about how they influenced the other painters who saw them in 1879, and correspondences would be drawn with the works of Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper. The oblique gazes across their panels might have been of interest to Proust, or to Barthes. All this could have happened in another universe, where Caillebotte had left the three paintings to the French state, but they stayed within his private circle and they have remained at the periphery of the history of painting upon which they reflect so deeply.

It might seem faintly absurd to stake a claim for a painter on the grounds that they reveal something to us about the act of looking. What else does painting do? But the force of Caillebotte’s unsettling vision becomes apparent when we are surrounded by his changing points of view and qualities of attention. Among his gathered works, we hover between looking with and looking at: there is a figure whose eyes and body prepare for immersion, another whose fortunes hang on a turn of cards, one who gazes across railroad tracks, one who watches a man’s body bent, and others who emerge, as we do in front of his paintings, from the water, or the shadow, into the startling world.