 Art Review

‘Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye’

Review
Still relatively unknown, Gustave Caillebotte, a patron of
many leading Impressionists, was a skilled painter himself.

‘Paris Street, Rainy Day’ (1877), by Gustave Caillebotte.

PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER GALLAGHER / ART INST
By Karen Wilkin
Aug. 3, 2015 5:38 pm ET

Washington

Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye

National Gallery of Art

Through Oct. 4
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) is the “unknown Impressionist.” If Paul Cézanne,
Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Pierre Auguste-Renoir are synonymous with the
movement, Caillebotte remains unfamiliar. Yet Caillebotte’s masterpiece, “Paris Street,
Rainy Day” (1877), with its chic Parisians under their arching umbrellas, carefully
disposed against a vast expanse of shiny, wet cobblestones, narrow streets zooming
into infinity behind them, is admired by countless art lovers, even by many who don’t
know the artist’s name. And, it turns out, Caillebotte played a vital role in the early
history of Impressionism, in many different ways.

Yet this obscurity isn’t surprising. For a remarkably long time, Caillebotte, a wealthy
man who had no need to work (or sell his paintings), was discussed primarily as a
patron of his adventurous friends, the Impressionists—someone who bought their
pictures, paid their bills, lent them money, and was occasionally stimulated by their
example to try his own hand, as an amateur. His controversial (at the time) donation of
his collection to the French state, after his death, eclipsed his achievements as a
painter.

It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the dealer Georges Wildenstein began
presenting Caillebotte’s canvases as worth considation, and not until 1976 that a
monographic museum show, organized by Kirk Varnedoe, claimed the painter for
serious scrutiny. As a result, Caillebotte had an important place in a 1986 exhibition
celebrating the centennial of the last Impressionist exhibition organized by the artists
themselves. Other significant exhibits followed, most notably, in 1994, a full-scale
retrospective, seen at the Grand Palais, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Royal Academy, London.

Now at Washington’s National Gallery, “Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye”

presents the artist at his strongest and most original. Organized by Mary Morton, curator
and head of the department of French paintings at the National Gallery, and George
T.M. Shackelford, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas where
the show opens on Nov. 8), the exhibition presents about 50 canvases—including “Paris
Street, Rainy Day.” That’s less than half the number included in the 1994 Chicago
retrospective, which was almost dauntingly complete, but the works in Washington were
clearly all chosen for excellence and for their relevance to the show’s thesis: that
Caillebotte was a quintessential painter of Parisian modernité of his time, a witness to
modern life as lived by the upper middle class.
‘The Floor Scrapers’ (1875) by Gustave Caillebotte.
PHOTO: RMN (MUSÈE D

The exhibition gives us Caillebotte at his best, pitting his sense of dramatic structure
against his observations of his family and friends, and the places they inhabited and
frequented: bourgeois interiors; the boulevards and apartment buildings recently
constructed under the direction of Napoleon III’s prefect, Baron Haussmann; a massive
bridge over the rail lines approaching the Gare Saint-Lazare; family country houses and
their environs. The exhibition provokes intense nostalgia for a time and place we’ve only
read about, bringing the first volumes of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” to
vivid life.

Considerably younger than the better known Impressionists, Caillebotte obtained a law
degree and then studied painting with some of the leading conservative artists of the
day. His first submission to the official Salon, “The Floor Scrapers” (1875), was not
accepted because of its “vulgar” subject matter—workmen, stripped to the waist—not to
mention its tipped perspective and the exaggerated length of the kneeling workmen’s
bare arms, extended toward us as they pull their tools along the floor. (The picture
apparently shows preparations for Caillebotte’s new studio in the family home.) The
official art world may have rejected “The Floor Scrapers,” but it interested a group of
young progressive, anti-establishment painters. They persuaded its author to join them
and, in 1876, Caillebotte participated, along with Degas, Monet, Renoir and Alfred
Sisley, among others, in the second Impressionist exhibition.
Over the next six years, Caillebotte was intimately connected to the Impressionist circle.
Although he never fully replaced clear, Degas-inspired outlines and eloquent shapes
with loose paint handling or abandoned deep space for an all-over fabric of broken
strokes in his paintings, he took part in their exhibitions, organized and financed the
shows, and bought his colleagues’ work.

The Washington installation evokes a gallery in the 1877 Impressionist exhibition, which
Caillebotte organized, selected and arranged. As in the original show, “Paris Street,
Rainy Day” is flanked by two related street scenes, one of house painters on ladders,
working on a shop front, and “The Pont de l’Europe” (1876), with its vast bridge girders,
strolling Parisians, and a purposeful dog. All three paintings are remarkable for plunging
perspectives and a sense of immediacy, characteristics that have led to comparisons
with photography—yet another aspect of modernité.

The portraits of family and friends, almost all male, and the occasional self-portrait, play
penetrating likenesses against sometimes preposterous furniture, often to fine effect,
and sometimes with surprises. A group of well-dressed men playing bezique turns out to
have provoked Cézanne’s celebrated card players a decade later. Caillebotte’s only
nudes, both large, one male, one female, are as far from classical prototypes as you
can get, especially the male, seen from the back, toweling off after a bath. Images of
food stuffs, family country houses, and boating scenes—Caillebotte was an
accomplished sailor who increasingly devoted himself to boats, rather than painting,
before his early death—round out the portrait of this sharp-eyed observer’s world. Even
a wall of four apparently straightforward views of fields at different seasons prove to
document the most up-to-date “industrialized” agriculture of the time. Modernité, indeed.
And there’s an excellent catalog.

Ms. Wilkin is an independent curator and critic.