GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE: THE 1970S AND THE 1870S
IN 1946, WHEN JOHN REWALD published the first edition of his indispensable chronicle, The History of Impressionism, he reproduced only two works by a seemingly minor master, the short-lived Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94). A tiny footnote to the Impressionist movement, Caillebotte, if known at all, was usually thought of as a wealthy Sunday painter who was generous and discerning enough to buy master pieces from his circle of artist acquaintances—Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne—and then bequeath them to the state, much to the consternation of academic authority in the 1890s. As for his paintings, the two reproduced in Rewald—an Argenteuil boating scene of the 1870s and a provincial village scene of the 1880s—were almost indistinguishable, at least in black-and-white photographs, from more famous interpretations of similar themes by Monet. They would never have suggested by themselves that their inventor had the slightest glimmer of originality.
Since the 1960s, all of this has been changing quickly. When seen in the original, Caillebotte’s paintings, almost invariably left unillustrated in the profusion of books on Impressionism, began to stop alert spectators in their tracks. For one, there was the question of their precocious dates. Was the imposingly large, 10-foot-wide Paris, a Rainy Day, acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964, really painted in 1877, seven years before Seurat began to work on Chicago’s more famous masterpiece of Parisian urban life, the Grande Jatte? Seurat’s anonymous figures, rigorously locked into parallel and perpendicular place under arched umbrellas, almost appear to be quotations from Caillebotte’s earlier painting. Was In a Café really dated 1880, one year before Manet began to think about the visual and psychological paradoxes of the Bar at the Folies-Bergère, in which a lone figure also stands before a bar-room mirror that, seemingly synonymous with the plane of the picture, reflects other figures on the spectator’s side of the painting?
But not only did Caillebotte begin to loom larger and larger as an underground source of ideas for his more famous contemporaries’ well-known masterpieces, he also imposed his personality by virtue of his sheer daring and eccentricity. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrated the 100th birthday of Impressionism in the winter of 1974–5 with a bread-and-circuses anthology of the time-honored masters, somebody involved had the good sense to include just one. Caillebotte, a Parisian street scene of 1880. Most knowledgeable spectators yawned a bit through the Met’s rehashing of familiar Impressionist paintings until, lo and behold, they reached the Caillebotte, a show stopping bird’s-eye view from an apartment window of the pedestrians and pavement below. It offered an apartment-dweller’s suicidal glimpse of the world that not only made Monet’s and Pissarro’s overhead views of Baron Haussmann’s new Paris traffic arteries look spatially and psychologically relaxed, but that also could demand comparison with names like de Chirico, Kertész, Antonioni. Who was this remarkable painter; where was more of his work?
The answer has finally come, in the form of a Caillebotte retrospective with a two-stop American itinerary, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Museum, which happily seems to be taking over the responsibility the Metropolitan Museum has been shirking for decades, of providing a temporary home in the New York area for those traveling exhibitions of old-master paintings which might not be box-office successes but which, unwanted by the Met, could find no other roof in New York. The exhibition, if anything, is even beyond expectations,releasing, in 77 paintings and 29 drawings, enough fresh oxygen to quicken the pulse of anyone concerned with art or art history. (The only sour note is the refusal of the Art Institute of Chicago to let Caillebotte’s masterpiece, Paris, A Rainy Day, travel on from Houston to Brooklyn, thereby removing with one stroke the key work of the exhibition.)
The show reveals one of the most fascinatingly original painters of the 19th century, as well as the material for a thorough overhauling of hand-me-down patterns of the highways and byways of modern painting. Like the rediscoveries, in the past decades, of Friedrich and Palmer, of the Pre-Raphaelites, Gérôme and the Symbolists, the rediscovery of Caillebotte should put the whole century into a new perspective, this time raising far-reaching issues about major versus minor developments in the 1870s and 1880s. It also brings into particular focus those nagging questions about the mysterious dialogue, in French Realist and early Impressionist painting, between the objective and the subjective, about the degree to which an odd, even bizarre personality can assert itself within a nominally impersonal style that seems to record, like a camera lens, the prosaic facts of indoor and outdoor Parisian life. We have already learned, of course, that Degas’ work, for all its seeming analogies to what might be seen through anybody’s tilted view-finder, is no less fraught with the tracks of personal perversity than the photos of Diane Arbus, revealing in his case especially sweet-and-sour, Fleurs du Mal mixtures of exquisitely patterned surfaces and voyeuristic misogyny.
But Caillebotte’s world, it turns out, is no less perverse and spellbinding than Degas’, either in psychological or esthetic terms. This may have a lot to do with the stale versus the fresh. We have long known Degas; whereas, for eyes glutted on infinite numbers of Impressionist paintings, Caillebotte is exhilaratingly unfamiliar. Yet there are other reasons, too, for the Eureka experience of Caillebotte, reasons that I feel derive from his particular affinities with the art of the last decade. When there is a revival of, or a sudden enthusiasm for, an artist of the past, there is usually a correspondence (as in the case of German Expressionism and El Greco, Abstract Expressionism and the late Monet and late Turner) between this historical choice and contemporary art and experience. Why did Caillebotte have to wait for virtually an entire century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, to elicit such excited responses?
It should be quickly said that, to think about these matters, we have as a guide not only the show itself, but a catalogue of such superlative quality that it should set new art historical standards of both scholarly fullness and interpretative precision and insight. The lion’s share of congratulations goes to Kirk Varnedoe, who was given the opportunity to expand his superb earlier studies of Caillebotte into a full-scale exhibition and catalogue, for which he enlisted the assistance of both French and American scholars—Marie Berhaut, Peter Galassi, Hilarie Faberman, Thomas P. Lee. The results are so rich that whether we look for the tiniest detail or the broadest speculation we can find it here. Thus, to understand the tools and techniques in Caillebotte’s startling painting of floor-scrapers of 1875, we are presented with the documentary evidence in photographs of Varnedoe’s interview with a certain Monsieur S. Dagnés in Paris, one of the few surviving practitioners of this endangered trade. To help us see what Caillebotte saw in the 1870s of the new Haussmannized Paris from either street-level at the Rue de Turin or from a deuxième-étage corner window at 77 rue de Miromesnil, Varnedoe provides us with photos taken, one hundred years later, from the very same spots. To resurrect the bourgeois reality of a luncheon in the Caillebotte family recorded in paint in 1876, he has tracked down the family crystal and arranged and photographed it in the very position of a century ago.
These staggering tours-de-force of art historical detective work are balanced by endlessly suggestive realignments of the evolution of modern painting. How, for example, does Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic structure, with the individual pitted emotionally and spatially against an infinite seascape or landscape, prefigure the urban alienation implied by the typical Caillebotte view of the city-dweller, back to his or her apartment, who faces the streets below, teeming with anonymous pedestrians? How do these collisions of near and far, the individual and the crowd, pinpoint on canvas the new sensibilities of modern urban life first experienced so intensely in Second Empire Paris, with its vast population expansion and new, axial traffic arteries? What are the 20th-century consequences of this, from overhead photos by Rodchenko to Giacometti city squares? How do Caillebotte’s city views relate to those by other Impressionists or other late 19th-century painters as relatively marginal (but perhaps only for the time being) as Tissot, de Nittis, Béraud, or as central as Munch (who seems to have used Caillebotte’s vertiginous balcony views for a Paris painting of 1891)? If one can move so swiftly, without intermediary, from Caillebotte’s seemingly objective city spaces to Munch’s overtly subjective ones, from the diagrammatic distortions of perspective discussed in French treatises on photography to the projection of the psychic spaces of near-hysteria, shouldn’t one reconsider other patterns of 19th-century painting that may bypass Impressionism and lead us with surprising directness from the world of Realism, attained with theoretically impersonal, scientific means, to a whole new realm of personal anxiety or fantasy, whether in the work of Munch or Van Gogh, Klinger or de Chirico? These are the kinds of questions that keep turning up, explicitly and implicitly, in both the masterful essays and individual catalogue entries by Varnedoe and his colleagues, and they are questions that should make us all think and see differently.
With so bountiful an exhibition and catalogue, what can be added? Mainly, I think, a few comments about those affinities between Caillebotte and the art of the last decade which have brought him into optimum visibility in the 1970s. For one, his art touches on most of the puzzles released from the Pandora’s Box of photography, whose achievements and esthetic dilemmas have, from the late 1960s on, suddenly preoccupied almost all those interested in high pictorial art. In Caillebotte, as in photographers as diverse as Atget, Cartier-Bresson and Friedlander, there is the constant shifting of balance between what is nominally an objective fact, recorded with documentary fullness, and what is the most rarefied and personal selection of data that instantly defines the esthetic and psychological contours of the artist. When a dog wanders, unaccompanied, into center stage on the pedestrian side of the Pont de l’Europe, rear legs and tail to the viewer, is it for Caillebotte a simple record of urban fact? Or is its strange presence, prepared for in a drawing that catches three possible snapshot views of a dog, a calculated motif that further isolates and depersonalizes the Parisians who stand or stroll, chat or stare, singly or in pairs? Are we not closer to de Chirico’s urban fantasy spaces with their disparate objects than we ever suspected?
And is the glimpse to the right of the vast stretch of railroad underpass at the Gare St. Lazare (which Monet would estheticize and etherealize in the following year, 1877) merely what the view-finder would inevitably capture, or does it willfully introduce an extra spatial and psychological dimension to this urban nexus in which new transportation networks carry us both into and away from the city? If this is the case, is the solitary gazer, legs crossed, at the edge of the bridge simply idling or is he watching trains unseen by us as the stimulus for some private, escapist fantasy? (Mme. Bovary? de Chirico railroad stations?) So it goes. Again and again, Caillebotte, like a great photographer of the Parisian scene, gives us a hundred clues which seem at once artless and artful. His rendering of prosaic facts seems both scientifically predetermined, in the rigorously ordered perspective webs, cool grisaille tonality, and academically precise modeling, and oddly personal, in the breathtakingly swift spatial plunges and the obsessive fascination with the interplay between the extremes of aleatory structure and an elementary repetitive pattern, between the casual movement of people and dogs and the regimented rhythms of 19th-century technology.
Elsewhere, the surreptitious drama of his pictorial prose style is worthy of a master movie director. In Interior, Woman at Window of 1880, the spectator first observes a bourgeois couple, bored with each other. The husband is buried in his newspaper; the wife, her back to us, stares idly out the window at a building on which we see the fragmented letters of a hotel sign (Canterbury?). But this human and spatial disjunction, common enough in Manet or Degas, is given an odd twist, for across the street, telescoped at the window en face, one can just barely discern another tiny figure who seems to be returning the woman’s gaze. Or is he? Is it perhaps just the coincidence of two urban dwellers simultaneously looking across the street from the same window level, but not seeing each other, or is there a more complex narrative web that unites them in fact or in potential fantasy?
Indeed, Caillebotte’s poker-faced voyeurism is one of the most startling and engrossing aspects of his work, and one that seems curiously in tune with the sensibility of our own time, when a movie still or photograph is meant to provide an instant network of psychological and narrative clues frozen by an impersonal lens. Similarly, another interior of the same year (Interior, Woman Seated) weaves a spatial and psychological web between husband and wife reading a newspaper in tandem. Oblivious of each other, but sharing the same activity, they are simultaneously separated and rejoined by a jolting spatial leap between them that provides a dizzying diminution in scale, a perspectival collision of near and far within the claustrophobic confines of a drawing room reverberating with unspecified psychological content, potentially either grave or trivial, either Ibsen or Feydeau. But these subtle snapshots of domestic drama or non-drama somehow seem even more compatible with the movies than with later 19th-century naturalist theater, for Caillebotte’s use of the distortions accessible to photography produces the kind of sinister expectations we know from the age of Hitchcock and Welles. It is almost as if we had had to wait a century to perceive properly the mysteries of the humdrum recorded by Caillebotte.
It is, of course, true, as Robert Herbert has been disclosing in important new interpretations of Impressionism, that masters like Manet and Degas often convey implicit narrative situations of a peculiarly urban character long invisible to eyes considering their paintings exclusively from the point of view of belle peinture or the shallows of formalist evolution. But the sharp-focus clarity and palpable modeling of Caillebotte’s art make these urban dramas far more immediate and enigmatic than in Manet and Degas, at least in the 1870s. Later, after 1880, Caillebotte often loses this potency, for his efforts to achieve a more homogeneous (i.e. Monet-like) paint surface tend to muffle his astonishing grasp of both animate and inanimate facts, and lower the precarious intensity of his earlier equilibrium between the esthetic and the documentary.
In many ways, Caillebotte’s art suddenly clicks into place in the 1970s not only because of its affinities to photography, but also because it evokes much recent painting and sculpture, both figurative and abstract. The figure paintings of Alex Katz, for instance, come constantly to mind in this context. His abrupt but sleek clashes of near and far, of large and small; his brusque croppings of heads and limbs; his emphasis on the prosaic truths of gesture, physiognomy, stance; his ricocheting lines of vision both to and from the figures inside and the spectators outside the painting—such a view of the facts of modern communal life seems to resurrect Caillebotte’s discovery of the prose-poetry to be found in the ephemeral closeness and farness, joinings and separations of figures in a commonplace world, whether city or country.
Caillebotte’s treatment of the male and female nude looks no less fresh to eyes used to the unmitigated realism of many 1970s efforts to recreate the facts of undressed people. In what may well be the two most naked nudes of the 19th century, Caillebotte again offers a voyeur’s vision that, because of its clear-eyed documentation of all the sunlit facts (whether the floral patterns on the sofa, or the water stains on the bathroom floor), is even more disarming than Degas’ slightly sugarcoated keyhole views of bathing women or prostitutes.
Caillebotte’s female nude is seen in utmost privacy (so she thinks), daydreaming on an overstuffed sofa and probably fondling her own nipple. The male nude is also seen at a most intimate, seldom-recorded moment, drying his back and, unsuspected by him, exposing to the spectator his bare buttocks and a slight glimpse of scrotum seen from the rear. Off-center, languidly or swiftly transitory, these two nudes are among Caillebotte’s most passionate documents of human fact, as well as further testimony to the disturbing psychological undercurrents that murmur throughout his work. That these baldly naked figures seem at once as palpably real as blue movies and as artfully contrived in their postures as a Degas is a measure of the characteristic Caillebotte mix between truth and art, extended here to a domain that suddenly touches the concerns of a Philip Pearlstein.
(A scholarly note here about these remarkable nudes. The female figure, I think, may be partly inspired by the scandalous nude in Henri Gervex’s Rolla [Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts], which, rejected by the Salon of 1878, offered a literary reference—Alfred de Musset—to justify the presence of a naked woman, corset and dress cast aside, casually reclining upon an unmade bed. As for the male figure, it may also be an intensely realist interpretation of an artier work of art, this time from the repertory of Japanese prints which Caillebotte so admired, namely, the common image of a Japanese wrestler seen from behind, back covered and buttocks exposed, as in the work of Toyokuni Ill.)
Caillebotte’s art seems equally in tune with some of the structural innovations of recent non-figurative painting and sculpture. His embracing, in the 1870s, of the new experience of modern Paris (from which even the slightest hint of the city’s historical past has been excluded) involves fresh ways of seeing that are surprisingly close to our own decade. For one, he seems to have polarized more than any of his Impressionist contemporaries the extremities of the random and the ordered, usually juxtaposing these contrary modes in the same work. Parisians in city and country come and go in open spaces, but within their leisurely movements are grids of arithmetic, technological regularity. Crisscrossing or parallel patterns of steel girders move with an A-A-A-A beat along the railing of a bridge. Checkerboards of square pavement stones map out the repetitive grid systems we see in Warhol or early Stella, Ryman or Andre. Clean stripes, as in Daniel Buren, suddenly impose a cheerful, primary esthetic order upon urban flux and scatter.
Even in an early landscape of 1875, the raindrops that fall on the shimmering water of the Yerres River evoke not the late Monet or his heirs in the 1950s, but rather the rockbottom geometry of circles, arcs, and planes in a Sol LeWitt. And in the organic world of still life as well as landscape, this insistence on the new elementary patterns of the Machine Age is felt. In one painting of a butcher’s display, the vibrantly textured rabbits, gamebirds, and chickens are strung up in the repetitive, simple-minded rhythms of a child’s building blocks. And in a crazily tilted overhead view of a proto-Fauchon display of the most succulently painted luxury fruits, these grade-A edibles are not arranged in the cornucopian tumble of earlier still-life traditions, but rather in stark, rectangular grids. A sumptuous rendering of the colors and textures of figs, pears, and apples worthy of Bonnard is challenged, in the same picture, by the primitive, impersonal order of a grocer’s esthetic.
Perhaps even more than Degas, Caillebotte seems to have discovered that art needn’t be seen from the museum spectator’s traditional view of it, up against the wall, but that the eye could find more truth and excitement by looking up or down. No angles of 19th-century vision that still profess a realist esthetic are steeper or more aerial than Caillebotte’s, and no artist seems to have shifted his gaze so drastically from wall to floor. Here, too, we sense a connection with the last decade. The Floor-Scrapers of 1875 jumps swiftly to the world of, say, Sylvia Mangold, who can also make from the indoor, realist fact of a floor a quasi-abstract painting of schematic, repetitive wooden pattern, occasionally alleviated by the seemingly random presence of a scattered object or two. Indeed, so used are we in the 1970s to looking for art under our feet instead of on the wall that we could almost imagine some of Caillebotte’s bird’s-eye views of pavement stones or waxed floorboards as appropriate settings, whether gallery or street, for a show of Andre or Long, Serra or Shapiro, LeVa or Bochner. How, we keep asking, did this master find in the modern city of Paris, a century ago, a new way of seeing people and things that can speak so many truths to us today?
Robert Rosenblum is Professor of Fine Arts at New York University.
The Gustave Caillebotte exhibition, which originated at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through April 24th. A symposium, “Modern Art and the Modern City: From Caillebotte and the Impressionists to the Present Day,” will be held March 27th at 2:00 p.m. at the museum.
