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The New York Times
Art Review
Gustave Caillebotte:
The Reluctant Impressionist
By Holland Cotter
March 27, 2009
Click on the painting to view the slide show
Caillebotte: Oarsmen Rowing_ 1877
“Poodles in Impressionism”? Now there’s an exhibition
theme, and one that the stretched-thin Impressionism industry
may eventually have to resort to. When that time comes, all eyes
will turn to Gustave Caillebotte, who painted more than a few
pets of exceptional charm. You can see at least one of them,
plopped down by the Seine, in the show called “Gustave Caillebotte:
Impressionist Paintings From Paris to the Sea” at the Brooklyn
Museum.
Thirty-some years ago the museum had a big success with a Caillebotte retrospective, which more or less introduced American audiences to an artist who was an Impressionist by association rather than by style or temperament. His three best-known pictures, “The Floor Scrapers,” “Le Pont de l’Europe” and “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” all urban scenes from the mid to late 1870s, have more to do with academic realism than with the scintillations of Monet.
In them the details of a hard-nosed modern world are nailed down, hard. And the particulars are social as well as optical. The bolts on a new iron railway bridge, the exact cut of a chic bourgeois coat are all accounted for. The newly rich and the perpetually poor share public space, but without an exchange of word or glance. The city itself, with its bone-white light and streets as straight and sharp as blades, is a precision-tooled machine, stripped of romantic atmosphere.
Although there are studies for these three grand paintings, and superb variations of their subjects, the pictures themselves are absent from the Brooklyn show, which has traveled from museums in Denmark and Germany, and is a more modest enterprise than the 1977 survey.
Was it worth doing, and is it worth seeing? Yes. Much of Caillebotte’s output remains unfamiliar, so any exposure is valuable. Some of the pictures in the show are superb, others not, but he was a painter as interesting for his weaknesses as for his strengths. Most of the loans are from private collections rather than museums, which somehow suits the character of this very private artist, who, by the time of his death in 1894 at 45, had retreated from an art world with which he had once been intimately involved.
Caillebotte could afford to be private, because he was rich. He was born in 1848 to a haute bourgeois family in Paris, and he grew up during the years that the medieval city was being destroyed and a modern one — more sanitary, shopper friendly and police surveyable — was being built. Above all else he wanted to be modern, part of that new world.
Restlessly energetic, always seeking focus, he trained as an engineer, earned a law degree, and fought in the Franco-Prussian war. It was only in the early 1870s that he decided to become an artist. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, studied with academic gurus like Jean-Léon Gérôme, but soon left. Largely self-taught he moved back and forth between Paris and the family estate in the village of Yerres, painting what he found.
His famous floor scrapers — they reappear in an 1876 painting in the Brooklyn show — were workmen he hired to refurbish a Paris apartment as a studio. A pretty painting, from the previous year, of raindrops (or possibly insects) falling into a tree-shaded pool, was done at Yerres, as were pictures of oarsmen rowing on the nearby river.
Caillebotte depicted the figures very close up, as if he were in the boat with them. Odd angles, daringly modern, became a specialty. When he paints his mother and brother at lunch in their dusky apartment, he views them from the head of the table, where he presumably sat. In other cases he establishes an even more dominating stance by looking down from overhead. He seems to view the floor scrapers from atop a stepladder, the Yerres rowers from a standing position in the boat as they pull and sweat mere inches away.
He often saw Paris from a high balcony, though the most effective instrument of control in his urban compositions was his use of unswerving perspective. In “House Painters,” from 1877, the street zooms back in a line so ruthlessly defined and straight that it divides the scene into two separate planes of reality, one occupied by four workmen touching up a shop front, the other by a virtual ghost town in some other universe.
Caillebotte went about making such pictures in the orthodox academic way, which was also an engineer’s way, with the aid of preliminary drawings and oil sketches, a labor-intensive method that the artists who would come to be called Impressionists were leaving behind in favor of spontaneity. The Impressionists were a marginal phenomenon when Caillebotte became aware of them but a modern one, which is what he needed to know.
He visited the first Impressionist salon in 1874. When the second one took place two years later, the artists involved, including Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne and Degas, welcomed his participation.
He repaid their hospitality with patronage. He organized exhibitions for them, promoted their careers, paid their rent (Monet survived on his generosity for years) and bought their paintings, amazing things, out of the studio. He bequeathed his collection to the French government, with the stipulation that it be put on public view. Part of it became the foundation of what is now the Musée d’Orsay.
And, of course, he himself produced work, of a kind that managed to remain somewhat anomalous in any context. Possibly because he painted out of personal interest rather than professional necessity, he never felt compelled to develop a strict signature style, and moved back and forth between two kinds of realism, academic and Impressionist, old and new.
He seemed to be in a state of perpetual experimentation, with no absolute rules. He borrowed colors and moves from admired painters (Courbet, Pissarro, Monet) and tailored them to his peculiar perspectives. For a long time spontaneity was a little tricky for him, tending to translate into slap-dash haste. Instead of Monet’s deep-pile carpets of flickering strokes, he would end up with a patch of clots.
There is something candid and almost deliberate about his more maladroit episodes. It’s as if he wanted to perpetuate and re-emphasize his amateur status, and the permission it gave him to be unpredictable, imperfect, to go his own way.
You can see this variety playing out in a single painting, one that includes a pet portrait. The little dog himself is a flurry of dark stippling. Caillebotte depicts his owners, young sons of a yachting friend dressed in identical jackets and boating caps. They could be from one of the artist’s early realist paintings. The river behind them, with its shimmering reflection of boats and trees, is classic Impressionism: paint used as light.
Long before this picture was done, however, Caillebotte had backed off from the Impressionists as a group. He was distressed by the infighting; he had had a spat with Degas. He was becoming unproductive; in 1883 he painted only two pictures. He also wanted out of Paris, and spent much of his time at an estate he had bought in the village of Petit Gennevilliers a few miles away, where he developed enthusiasms that overshadowed those for art.
One was horticulture. He raised hot-house orchids and planted gardens. Suddenly he was painting dahlias and roses, up close, reproducing their bulk and texture with pigment. In some years more than half his paintings were of flowers. His great passion, though, was for sailing, and specifically for competitive yachting, the hot sport in France at the time. And, as was his way, he went all out in his pursuit and support of it.
He traveled every summer to the Normandy coast to race. He organized and financed regattas and rewrote rule books. He designed his own boats, ones of ultra-modern sleekness that earned him national fame. Several of his wood models for hulls are in the show, which, as its title implies, makes much of this aspect of his career, though viewed purely in terms of art, it’s hard to know why.
By this point painting seems to have become a secondary activity for Caillebotte, who in addition to everything else was running a large boatyard near his home and writing a book on his collection of postage stamps. His distracted attention had some welcome results. His painting really loosened up. For the first time it became truly Impressionistic.
Sometimes the effect is delightful, as in a painting, done from high on a coastal cliff, of the sea as a single wave of soft gray-blue with dotlike boats bobbing around. In other pictures, though, the same sort of casualness has a half-baked, even heavy-handed look, as if he had lost his touch or his ability to concentrate. The modernist impulse that Caillebotte had sought and fed off had become rote, a used-up style.
In the end his career as an artist — and the Brooklyn show — feels ragged and unresolved. Certainly it was short. He stopped painting in a focused way in his 30s. By the 1890s he had become a semi-recluse at Petit Gennevilliers. He died there. By that time steamships were rumbling up the Seine, shoving sailboats aside. Not long after his death his house and gardens were replaced by an auto shop, then an airplane factory.
But what’s wrong with uneven and unresolved? Caillebotte’s was never a clear-cut Impressionist story, or even a classic artist’s story. Creatively he was a mixed breed, a product of different pedigrees. He fits into no pantheon, matches no ready profile, art historical or otherwise. Or maybe just one, that of the brilliant enthusiast, the prodigious amateur, the obsessed imperfectionist. As such, he is the perfect subject for an imperfect show.
“Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings From Paris to the Sea” remains through July 5 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
“Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings From Paris to the Sea” remains through July 5 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.
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