`Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist” is a dream exhibition for organizers and viewers alike.
It presents 117 paintings and drawings associated with the world’s most popular art movement, which is great for keeping museum turnstiles clicking; at the same time, the artist’s output is so unfamiliar that many of the works exhilarate a contemporary audience with their freshness.
The Art Institute of Chicago helped begin the Caillebotte rediscovery in 1964 by purchasing “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” the acknowledged masterpiece among his 500 paintings. So it was appropriate the institute should also collaborate with museums in France to mount the exhibition that last year observed the centennial of the artist’s death.
As seen on two floors of the Grand Palais in Paris, the show revealed a highly individual painter whose best works were done early and, in consequence, were gathered in the first few galleries. A break halfway through the show marked the beginning of paintings that adopted ever more of the conventional look of Impressionism as they became increasingly less personal.
All the pieces exhibited in Paris plus three more are at the Institute, but here the installation, which is more thematic than strictly chronological, spreads out the best works, almost convincing us Caillebotte’s achievement was more consistent than it really is.
The difficulty in assessing him once and for all comes from Caillebotte’s lifelong allegiance to Impressionism, which was strong in every respect except one: His finest paintings are not Impressionist.
He supported the movement with time and money, personally holding it together in times of stress. But only by defining Impressionism according to criteria other than the usual ones of high color and broken strokes do his early paintings appear the least bit Impressionist.
In truth, fascination with Caillebotte has continued largely because he doesn’t fit the categories historians created to describe the art of his period. The artist’s crisp, tightly painted works in muted colors are neither academic nor Impressionist, though they clearly are modern, in some ways more modern than the paintings by contemporaries Caillebotte admired and collected.
Scholars have so long assigned value to painting on the basis of formal considerations that we sometimes overlook how in the 19th Century modernity also was determined by subject matter. And there Caillebotte makes a strong and immediate claim on our attention.
His first major canvas depicts floor scrapers at work, as unusual a subject for its time as photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s street-paving machine and laborers, decades later. In both cases, the artist belonged to a class above his proletarian subject and apparently was drawn to it as much for its formal possibilities as for the statement it made about his own progressive leanings.
The parallel with Stieglitz is relevant on another count, as he championed the artistic use of photography, a medium that in the year of Caillebotte’s birth-1848-was in some quarters still considered a threat to painting.
We now know that Caillebotte achieved the exaggerated perspectives of his early paintings by using optical devices that may have included cameras. Certainly, his brother Martial was taken with the camera, and though his resulting pictures bore little resemblance to Caillebotte’s paintings, inclusion of some of the photographs in the exhibition in Paris subtly emphasized that involvement with the camera was another sign of modernity. It would remain so until near the end of the century, when Toulouse-Lautrec matter-of-factly designed a poster for a photographic studio.
Caillebotte’s most radical canvases, where his point of view was almost straight down from windows of an upper-floor apartment, have no equivalent in painting of the 19th Century, and not until the 1920s did photographers such as Andre Kertesz and Alexander Rodchenko adopt identical bird’s-eye perspectives.
With Caillebotte, however, it is crucial that all his finest pictures were of subjects found only in the city, as the Paris of Baron Georges Haussmann, whose boulevards replaced narrow streets and shattered the intimacy of centuries-old neighborhoods, was the ultimate modern creation that, in turn, gave rise to the most modern psychological state: alienation.
Caillebotte probably did not intend the immobility and quiet of his figures to depict the condition of urban separateness. But it’s no stretch for a viewer to perceive that today, especially as the paintings often present us with backs of solitary figures or broad, irreducible distances between groups of figures. Most of Caillebotte’s best paintings have people lost in thought or to each other, and so, over time, they have become more lost to us.
Activities seen in the works of many artists-reading, writing, playing the piano, sewing-appear in Caillebotte’s paintings as withdrawal. The atmosphere is, again, silent but implies (by being opposite) the roar of the city outside.
His figures in interiors either contemplate the roar or cut themselves off from it, and Caillebotte appears to have been the first painter to document this need on the part of modern men and women.
When his subject is a domestic rift, the paintings suggest it without any theatricality. Other artists of the period, both in England and France, create drama where Caillebotte has fact. And that, too, appears strikingly modern. The state depicted implies no anecdote or place in a narrative. It simply is.
Such presence without explanation contributes to one of the most extraordinary paintings of the century, a female nude that makes more celebrated ones by Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet appear almost too easy.
Caillebotte’s “Nude on a Couch” (1882) is at once open and ambiguous. The figure lies on an overstuffed divan, with one arm crooked over her face, in apparent exhaustion. But the forefinger of her other hand appears to tease a nipple, and the spread of her legs shows us luxuriant pubic hair.
Nothing specific “happens” in the picture. The artist gives no clues as to past or future. Yet the model’s revealed body is so plainly there that it unsettles viewers purely by its realism, pointing up just how much modern detachment 19th Century paintings of nudes promise but how much staginess and old-fashioned storytelling actually remains.
Caillebotte completed one other nude, two years later, of a man drying himself after a bath. Here the artist distanced spectators by reverting to a rear view, an evasive treatment compared to that given the female. Still, the subject was unusual for the time. Only one other 19th Century painting of a male nude presented casually-also by Caillebotte but unfinished-has ever come to light.
Many of his later works are garden or boating pictures, painted after he withdrew from Paris to a large country estate. They are invariably beautiful and little more. The color and broken brushwork of Impressionism creeps in until, in a few cases, Caillebotte scarcely looks like himself.
More than a century later, we still don’t know how or why that happened, though it is possible the rich artist was overly content. Modern Paris challenged Caillebotte in ways he could not predict. Life in the garden at Yerres lulled him, and perhaps under the misconception of being daring, he went over to the style of his colleagues.
As a group, Caillebotte’s still lifes are the most interesting of his later pictures; some are wonderfully direct. But no matter how much he brightens the displays of meats and fish and fowl, making them almost clinically analytical, they represent a different, smaller sort of ambition from his early paintings.
To return from them to the room that holds the finest urban pictures is to enter a different realm entirely. Here the institute experiments with new lighting that seems to bleach and flatten some pictures while differentiating between shades of the same color in others. Yet even without such treatment, the brilliance of Caillebotte’s enterprise asserts itself, slowly but surely.
A corridor of studies for “Rainy Day” permits comparison through a “window” that opens directly on the painting, and this bit of stagecraft, simplified from Paris, is justified, as is a study room with reproductions of Impressionist paintings keyed to their sites on a wall map of the city.
It’s a smaller, simpler show than last year’s retrospective for Odilon Redon, and the didactic material-from wall labels to catalog-is also more modest. But the finest of the pieces do not require many words. Everything is already in these brilliant, beautiful, unforgettable paintings.
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Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and La Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Musee d’Orsay, Paris, “Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist” will continue through May 28 in Regenstein Hall of the institute, Michigan Avenue at Adams Street. Thereafter, the show will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition catalog is available from the Museum Shop for $60 hardcover, $39.95 paperbound.
