Gustave Caillebotte, “Painting Men” / Liz Goldner
- Democracy Chain
- Mar 26
- 4 min read
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California
Continues through May 25, 2025
March 22, 2025
The central work of “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” is “Paris Street, Rainy Day” (1877). The immersive life-size painting features a well-dressed couple, walking confidently across a city plaza paved with shiny wet cobblestones while holding onto a large umbrella. They are surrounded by two-dozen other figures, mostly men, representing various social classes and professions. The painting is on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, which organized this show with the Getty Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Caillebotte, a scion of the 19th century French upper class, had an aspect similar in comportment and dress to the urbane man in “Paris Street.” He regularly depicted family members, close friends, sportsmen, soldiers, laborers, and even his butler in his narrative work.
Caillebotte’s plaza is situated near the Gare Saint-Lazare railway station, a crossroad for many important artists of that time. Claude Monet, Édouard Manet and other artists featured the station in several of their own works. Caillebotte also depicted the station in “The Pont de l’Europe” (1876) and “On the Pont de l’Europe” (1877). The former image highlights the expansive railings alongside the train station, a glamorously dressed couple strolling alongside it, with smoke from the trains billowing in the background. With its contrasting bright colors and dark shadows, it calls attention to the artist’s expertise with detail and composition. The latter painting focuses on the train station’s large iron superstructure, with two elegantly dressed men wearing frock coats and top hats commanding the scene. A third man, wearing the blue smock of the working class, leans over the railing.
Caillebotte reportedly led what is described as a “homosocial” life. Much of his professional time, directing and mounting Impressionist art shows, and leisure time, socializing in cafés, was spent with men, many of them artists. He was preoccupied with masculinity and virility, and he never married. This led to speculation that he might have been gay, but there is no solid evidence of this.
Many of the approximately 100 paintings and drawings in this show highlight men in groups and alone, with several works portraying working class men. In another of Caillebotte’s signature works, “Floor Scrapers” (1875), we gaze upon three laborers from the artist’s point of view. All are on their knees, seen from an imperious vantage point in a room that is to become the artist’s studio. Expertly rendered to convey the intense physicality of their work, the men are kneeling on the floor with their faces down and arms extended, revealing the muscularity of their exposed torsos that befits their status as supplicants. “House Painters” (1877) reverses the angle. Two house painters, one barely visible while the other is up on a ladder pondering the job, are observed by a third man at street level. The diagonal going from the foreground figure moves up through the ladder-bound painter to the top right of the image. The more concrete diagonal of the street facing buildings has an opposite dynamic, moving from the top right just to the left of the observer, with the urban lines converging into a vanishing point.
Other paintings display looser, more Impressionistic brushwork. Consistent with the show’s title, many situate men, casually dressed, in settings on or near a river. Examples include “Skiffs” (1877), “Skiff on the Yerres River” (about 1877), “Angling” (1878) and “Bathers” (1878), the latter highlighting two men wearing bathing suits. Every figure’s face is mostly hidden, either obscured by a broad-brimmed hat or facing away from us. Are these men hiding something? By contrast, “Boating Party” (c. 1877-88) features a formally dressed man wearing a top hat and bow tie rowing a boat while fully facing onlookers. His handsome face, crimson lips, and hair curling beneath his hat, as described in the wall label, present subtle intimations about his sexuality.
The most salacious painting here is “Man at His Bath” (1884), which emphasizes the buttocks, back and legs of a nearly naked man. The painting was sufficiently transgressive that it was banished to the back room of an 1888 exhibition. Nearby is “Nude on a Couch” (c. 1880) of a completely naked woman, lying face up on a couch. Caillebotte, who had a mistress until his untimely death at age 45, presumably from a stroke, never exhibited this work.
“The Bezique Game” (c. 1881) places six dark-suited men in a dark room, all concentrating intensely on a card game known as bezique (a forerunner of pinochle). The figures are portrayals of the artist's friends, including his brother Martial. As one of the show’s catalog essays explains, “Bezique” clearly contrasts with Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (1881). That colorful, sunlight-infused painting of a party on the Seine River embodies the quintessential Impressionist style, and lifestyle, during the Belle Époque. (Caillebotte, wearing a boating hat, is seated in Renoir’s painting at the lower right.) The variance in the two paintings’ styles reveals how Caillebotte’s work differs in paint handling, subject matter, and formality from that of most Impressionists.
Two self-portraits in this exhibition, “Self-Portrait at the Easel” (1879) and “Self-Portrait” (c. 1882), convey the intense, penetrating personality traits that Caillebotte was known for. With his tireless, high-minded work ethic, Caillebotte gifted us with an extraordinary body of work created during a too-short lifetime.
Liz Goldner is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.