The men of Gustave Caillebotte’s Impressionist paintings

Whether the French impressionist Gustav Kilibut was not known, although he was often noticed that he never married. (The artist died, in 45 years, in 1894 of what was believed to be a stroke.) However, Caillebotte was homogeneous. Evidence of the importance of this on strong social reactions with other men, not women, all over his work.

Workers who scatter wooden floors in a room will become the artist studio. A man tends to show a café table, other men across the tape reflected in the mirror behind him. Men roam the boats on the river, read books or newspapers, or play the piano, and work in an office or just sit in a comfortable chair missing in thought. Men play paper at home. Men who look at the city from the balconies or stare with them through the cross -steel symptoms of the bridge. Men who dried themselves dried after the bathroom.

Focusing on men’s daily life is very unusual, given the importance of women as a subject in dozens of paintings in that period by MANET, Degas, Morisot, Monet, Renoir and Cassatt and more of his impressive friends and colleagues in Paris. Female activity, as artists alike, males and females see it, is the main axis of the works of these artists. But in the art of caillebotte, it rains men.

In the J The artist was routinely placed as “forgotten” or “unknown” impressionism, and his name is hardly familiar like many others, although there is no lack of his scientific interest and museum of his art since the 1970s. It is far from overlooking it. However, it is strange that its distinguished topic in the emerging masculinity in a modern context has not been noticed in museum exhibitions before now.

“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” determines this.

With almost more than 60 paintings, almost many graphics and studies, the display converts attention away from the stylistic analysis of the formal structures of impressionist food and work methods, as Caillebotte was not always brilliant, into identity issues that were explored in the subject. Forget a fractured brush document. In the slogan of the Revolutionary Republic of the French Republic Liberté, égalité, brothersAnd that surpassed open modernity, the Brotherhood is examined in the ideas of freedom and social equality.

The younger Caillebotte brother, René, was a model for the “young man in his window”, a wonderful painting obtained by Getty in 2021, and one to organize this offer. Getty Scott Allan coordinated with Paul Perrin, the group director at Paris Musée d’Orasay, where the exhibition was seen last fall, and Gloria Groom, Secretary of the Technical Institute in Chicago, where he concludes his international tour that begins in June.

Rene, who appears from the back, is an invisible face, unknown in the “young man in his window”, a vertical plate of approximately 4 feet. He wears elegant clothes, carrying a wide position, and pushing hands in pockets, looking at an intelligent intersection of the upper floor of his new wealthy family home in the eighth accuracy in Paris. Some vehicles pass. Near the center, the elegant young infantry is about to reach the sidewalk is a possible adapter to respect it.

The luxurious and red girl is similar to the coded in the lower right corner of the image, a high -end launch platform, which pushed the man to handrails along a long French window. The diameters opposing the room and the right window are met at a pointed angle where René stands, which places it in the midst of an increasing area. It seems as if he was plowing forward at the front of the ship. The smart formation emphasizes its dynamic position as the leader of the modern city, as it spreads below.

The best Caillebotte boards take advantage of this smart synthetic drama, which indicates extreme awareness of the performance of the viewer who stands in front of the fabric. The “terrestrial stations”, which is a personal favorite, assumes an intimate point of view to look towards the strong work of workers, which leads to a generally inclined floor. It seems as if workers without a shirt may soon stumble in the scenes space.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Floor Cackers”, 1875, oil on fabric.

(Musée d’Orasay / PatricE Schmidt)

“Paris Street, rainy day”, is the most famous (and larger) painting in Kayelbut (and the largest), is a splendor of the urban energy of males. The vertical Lampost is infected with almost two halves. In the right half that was closely being held, a man with the confidence of a woman is led by the arm, while in the left half, most men are bustle in the space that was opened in a large intersection caused by exciting buildings.

On one side, the front end of the vehicle miraculously disappears – impossible – behind two infantry. The visual trick may have been created by using the artist to help a common visual show called the Lucida camera. If so, the painted visual surprise, which the painter definitely knows, is another indication of our situation as keen monitors.

Urban pressure in “Paris Street, rain day” becomes the theatrical theatrical to look at art. The game continues in “Party Party”, which puts us inside a backward boat near a top stream from the top, which will attract his boat out of the place where we stand. Our vision grows, while the cavity is preparing to reduce.

In rarely, a “man in his bathroom” was rarely seen, the outstanding is a culturally specific tension around the male nudity. We find ourselves unexpectedly in the presence of an ordinary man after he just came out of the peculiarity of the bathtub and activates himself. It is almost the size of life. Caillebotte abandoned the usual classic motifs of the Greek and Roman heroes, which usually broadcast naked males in history and sober legend. To what extent we should examine – males or females – buttocks painted with love?

At the Getty Museum, he asks “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” French impressionist photos of modern masculinity.

(Rebecca Vera Martinez)

Sometimes the composition escapes from Caillebotte, although the best intentions. Another painting accomplishes a rapid cultural reflection by the status of Charlotte Parthee, his female companion for a long time (who chose not to marry), at the strong introduction to reading a newspaper, while a man in the background extends on a sofa who reads a book. It is a pointed swap of the usual reading materials shown in the traditional western pictures of women and men.

The training depicts a list of alerting the text related to the world of public action, and relaxing with a text related to the inner interior life. Unlike a beautiful woman, the man on the sofa is drawn embarrassingly, and the shift in size is wrong. It is immersed by large pillows of flowers, as it looks like a child or doll. Coarish hinders the scene.

In fact, each of the seven objective sections are installed in the width by one powerful plate. The rest is a subsidiary company – useful in getting rid of the topics of the period of masculinity based on the family, work, friendships, sports and the like, but also evidence of the reason why Caillebotte is not classified as the highest level of impressionist painters. In general, with most of the cute, unhelpful or inherited paintings, it is not good – perhaps not surprising to a dangerous profession that has not lasts more than a decade.

This fact was unambiguous since 1976, when the Houston Museum of Fine Arts sparked the general revival of his work with the first exhibition with a complete retro -effect of the artist in the United States (The Getty’s is the fourth.) Here it was a new impressionist face of the favorite modern artistic movement in America, but just a number of first -class pictures. He made about 500 paintings during his life, so the percentage is bad.

Houston’s show history reveals. It coincides with flowers of the history of feminist art in the 1970s. Among the many benefits of feminist scholarships and its focus on the complex nature of identity was the subsequent study of the homosexual experience. For men, socialization must deal with the same sex with traditional persecution against homosexuality-the term classification that was invented when Caillebotte was 20 years old and joint use by the time he died. In modern life, men can approach other men – not very close.

Think again about “the young man in his window.” Despite all we know, the Caillebotte brother can look at who is riding in the distant cart that passes in a distance, or get out of the cart that was pulled by the limit below its window. Maybe he is a man. The prominent position of a single young woman in the center may intend to provide a protective shield, and provides another mysterious possibility. Men paint in the late nineteenth century means that caution should be taken. Today, when marginalized identity issues are under the tremendous political attack, the Getty show opens confusing questions.