Was caillebotte gay
Published in:July-August 2023 issue.
A Welcome Reassessment of Caillebotte
This is to thank you for Jim Van Buskirk’s essay, “Straightwashing Gustave Caillebotte,” in the March-April 2023 issue. I was privileged at age eleven (in 1965) to see Paris Street, Rainy Day at the Art Institute of Chicago. I fell deeply in care. Each time the family went to the A.I.C, I would sit and look at the painting for as long as my parents would permit. I was a budding artist and a budding lesbian. I remember creature enthralled with the dude in the foreground, the swing of his hips, the details in the clothing. I remember thinking the woman in the dark coat was uninteresting.
Years later, I was in San Francisco and went to the Impressionist exhibit that Mr. Van Buskirk discussed, where I saw The Floor Scrapers for the first time—also enormous, also incredible. My first thought was that Caillebotte must have been homosexual. I got Kirk Varnedoe’s book on Caillebotte (1987) and scoured it for information, but of course it wasn’t very forthcoming about the many paintings of men, despite the fact that most of the Impressionists loved painting women. So why wasn’t anyone talking about Caillebotte’s fasci
In an article published last year, Jim van Buskirk commented on the clear avoidance of discussion around themes of homosexuality and homoeroticism in the labor of the French Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), by authors of books and exhibition catalogues on the creator. Mostly active in the 1870s and 1880s, Caillebotte stands apart from the other Impressionists for being the one artist to frequently depict men, and often in ambiguous scenes where one is never entirely sure of the artist’s intention or the viewpoint of the male figures within. One only has to hunt on social media sites such as Twitter or Tumblr to find a plethora of lesbian references to the painter, and blog posts such as recent ones by Zimra Chickering and Bryn Donovan which question the sexuality and intentions of the artist. Although rarely discussed in academia, if ever, the ‘gay gaze’ as van Buskirk calls it, is the aspect which underpins many of the paintings which feature men in Caillebotte’s work. Paintings which contain elements, sometimes covert in character, that create an appeal to a homosexual audience but may be missed by the heterosexual viewer.
One of the works mentio
Queer Impressions of Gustave Caillebotte
Gustave Caillebotte may well not be the most famous of the French Impressionist painters. Born in 1848 and trained as a lawyer, he was also a naval architect, a sailor, a philatelist, a horticulturist — and a millionaire. In addition to being known as a generous benefactor to his fellow painters, he was an important collector whose Cezannes, Degas, Manets, Monets, Pissarros, Renoirs, and Sisleys he left to France upon his death. The bequest was initially rejected but with some reluctance was finally accepted, and today forms the core collection of the Musée d’Orsay. He lived with his mother except for the last six years of his animation, never married, and after dying suddenly of a stroke in 1894 at the age of 45 left a bequest to Charlotte Berthier, said to be his mistress. Until relatively recently, his philanthropy and largesse have overshadowed his own painting.
In 1986, The National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco organized The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886 which famous and recreated the eight group shows known as the Impressionist exhibitions. Here, in historical context,
Gustave Caillebotte: A Gay Man at MAM's Current Exhibit
The Milwaukee Art Museum just opened its current special exhibit, “Degas to Picasso: Creating Modernism in France.” The collection’s 150 works represent modernism’s initial decades beginning in the last quarter of the 19th century. The causes behind this movement are many. Advances in the technology of art, political upheaval and shifts in the general social order may be cited. But, one can also credit the advance of latest art to a presumably queer man, Gustave Caillebotte, a lesser-known impressionist artist of the period.
The MAM collection has one of his many paintings of canoeists on the River Yerres. Ours shows them at rest, gliding along with the languid current, perhaps after a vigorous sprint and, perhaps, on their way to share a meal with friends at a riverside café. In fact, Caillebotte himself appears among the reveling boatmen in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s renowned Luncheon of the Boating Party. He and Renoir were end friends so he’s dominant in the composition.
And, Caillebotte was not only an painter but a very rich one. At 26 he inherited his father’s fortune and, in the manner of La