{"id":246175,"date":"2025-07-07T20:42:18","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T20:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/246175\/"},"modified":"2025-07-07T20:42:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T20:42:18","slug":"gustave-caillebotte-blockbuster-that-sparked-controversy-in-france-opens-in-chicago-with-one-key-difference-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/246175\/","title":{"rendered":"Gustave Caillebotte blockbuster that sparked controversy in France opens in Chicago\u2014with one key difference – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the new, career-defining survey of Gustave Caillebotte<\/a> opened in late June at its final stop, the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), the checklist was very similar to previous versions at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay in Paris and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Its chronological layout will also be familiar to any return visitors. But the show is dramatically different in at least one respect: its title.<\/p>\n

The Midwestern institution has changed the exhibition title from Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men<\/a> (in French, Caillebotte: Peindre Les Hommes<\/a>) to the more gender-neutral\u2014or neutered\u2014Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World<\/a> (until 5 October). Could it be that the Chicago museum is toning things down because so many French art critics flipped out over the male focus?<\/p>\n

AIC curator Gloria Groom explains the change was made before the show even opened in Paris, after an internal focus group revealed that the \u201cPainting Men\u201d title sounded too narrow. \u201cOut of the titles we could come up with, [\u2018Painting His World\u2019] seemed to be the one that was most attractive,\u201d says Groom, who co-curated the show with Paul Perrin of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay and Scott Allan of the Getty. (She says it was also a good fit for the AIC\u2019s beloved 1877 Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day<\/a>, showing a heterosexual couple strolling arm-in-arm.)<\/p>\n

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Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection.<\/p>\n

Either way, the exhibition is likely to land differently in Chicago than it has in Paris and Los Angeles, where responses say more about that city\u2019s art critics than the show itself. In Paris, several prominent newspaper columnists panned the show for being a reductive, American-tainted and wholly unjustified exercise in queering the artist. In Los Angeles, many critics appreciated the curators\u2019 subtle exploration of the artistic themes of virility, fraternity and homosociality, bordering on or possibly obscuring homosexuality. You would think they were seeing two completely different shows.<\/p>\n

The curators all said in phone interviews they were surprised by the vehemence of the Paris reviews, especially considering they never made the case that Caillebotte had sexual relationships with men. Rather, they made it clear that he lived with a female partner, Charlotte Berthier, and left her a sizable annuity on his death.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we started out, we thought we might be criticised for dancing around the question of the artist\u2019s sexuality\u2014for not going there forcefully enough,\u201d says Allan. Instead, they saw the opposite response play out on French soil. \u201cIt was a little surprising to see that kind of reaction\u2014I thought this is 2024 or 2025, not 1990.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Gustave Caillebotte, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1879. Private collection, France. Photo \u00a9 Caroline Coyner Photography.<\/p>\n

The curators chose their focus because of Caillebotte\u2019s own preference for men as subjects and recent scholarship on the issue. Unlike his Impressionist counterparts who depicted women in all stages of petticoat-covered dress and undress, Caillebotte tended to paint groups of men engaged in the activities he enjoyed, including rowing, sailboat racing, military drills, card-playing and urban spectatorship. It is not just a matter of quantity, but quality, adds Perrin: \u201cThe most ambitious work of other Impressionist is usually women; Caillebotte\u2019s most ambitious work was men.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Groom points out, Caillebotte\u2019s wealth allowed him the privilege of bucking the trend and choosing male subjects, without regard for what would sell. Born in Paris in 1848 to a family in the textile business, he began his professional life by studying law, before switching tracks to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. \u201cHe\u2019s from a family of three brothers, he goes to an all-boys school, goes to law school with all men, art school with men and joins the Impressionists who with two exceptions are all male,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

One of his early paintings, which made its debut at the second Impressionist-organised Salon des Ind\u00e9pendants, has been a lightning rod for debate: Les Raboteurs de Parquet, or The Floor Sanders (1875). Painted from an elevated perspective, it features three shirtless, muscled men who are bending over Caillebotte\u2019s studio floor and working up a sweat. Their bare backs gleam like the varnish on the floor itself. The painting is sensual and, in its depiction of working-class men, political, inviting interpretation about capitalism, labour and leisure\u2014and male sexuality.<\/p>\n

An \u2018invitation to homoerotic viewing\u2019\"\"<\/p>\n

Gustave Caillebotte, Man Drying His Leg, around 1884. Private collection. Photo by Lea Gryze, Berlin. \u00a9 Private collection, Berlin, 2024.<\/p>\n

Another painting that has attracted intense attention is Man at his Bath (1884), which spotlights, unlike Degas or Renoir\u2019s dreamy female bathers, a realistically rendered man who has just emerged from a bath. He is shown drying himself off with a towel that reveals more than it conceals. He is painted from behind, his buttocks visible. In their catalogue essay, the University of Pennsylvania scholars Andr\u00e9 Dombrowski and Jonathan Katz describe the \u201clibidinal dynamics\u201d and \u201cinvitation to homoerotic viewing unleashed by the painting itself\u201d, analysing what they call \u201chis paintings\u2019 sexuality\u201d.<\/p>\n

Harry Bellet called<\/a> this notion \u201ccomplete nonsense\u201d in Le Monde: \u201cThe sexuality of the painting, one would think they were talking about Jeff Koons!\u201d As for Les Raboteurs, he described the elevated perspective as extreme realism and the painting itself as \u201calmost classical\u201d. Philippe Lan\u00e7on in Lib\u00e9ration bemoaned \u201cthe battleship of gender studies\u201d crossing the Atlantic from America, while Eric Bi\u00e9try-Rivierre at Le Figaro argued that the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay was operating \u201cunder the influence\u201d of its American museum partners.<\/p>\n

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Gustave Caillebotte, Balcony, around 1880. Private collection. Photo courtesy of the private collection\/Bridgeman Images<\/p>\n

Note that all of these French critics are men\u2014\u201cand all over the age of 50\u201d, adds Perrin. He sounded amused by the way they blame his American co-curators, when in fact he originated the show\u2019s masculine emphasis and helped historicise it as a response to the vulnerability felt widely in France in the wake of the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war.<\/p>\n

The response in the States ranged from explicitly queer readings of Caillebotte\u2019s work in LGBTQ+ publications to more complicated reviews by critics such as Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times and James Meyer at Artforum, both of whom discussed the ambiguity of the paintings.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will never know what Caillebotte felt for his oarsman, or if his feelings were returned,\u201d Meyer wrote, responding to what he called \u201cthe pearl-clutching reviewer\u201d at\u00a0Le Figaro. \u201cIt may be that his paintings are precisely structured to frustrate such speculation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so we are compelled to look at them,\u201d Meyer continued. \u201cAt a time when rigid definitions of gender and sexuality have been destabilised, and allegations of a \u2018crisis of masculinity\u2019 fuel the propaganda campaigns of right-wing politicians and authoritarian regimes, the art of this once devalued painter feels astonishingly relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n