Exceptional loans, a remarkable exhibition and a persistent discomfort: the exhibition “Caillebotte. Men painting”, organized on the occasion of 130my anniversary of the death of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) and, especially, of its entry into the collections of the Orsay Museum, thanks to the patronage of the LVMH group, The boat partyone of the painter’s most famous paintings, suffers from a biased vision.
The United States acquired works by Caillebotte when we didn’t want them, she demonstrated before anyone else his importance in premodern art when we still took him for a friendly dilettante, and the current exhibition will then travel to the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and then to the Institute of Chicago Art. It was also in the United States where, in two exhibitions in Washington and Fort Worth in 2014 and 2015, the first questions related to the painter’s supposed sexuality were posed to the general public. It is not surprising, therefore, that it has been conceived, even in its Parisian version, through the prism of gender studies, which, although they often offer new perspectives, like sociology, ethnology or psychoanalysis, are only one of the tools of art history. Scientific advisor to the Musée d’Orsay, the art historian Stéphane Guégan, in a very detailed monograph dedicated to Caillebotte (Gustave Caillebotte. End Painter, Hazan, 2021), clearly stated the problem: “There are cases in which the interpretation of forms, intoxicated with itself, no longer has limits”writes. We will see that, in the present exhibition, they often intersect.
This led, in particular, to give up presenting a retrospective: the last one – which was also the first, proof of the disinterest shown in it by French curators and art historians – organized in Paris in 1994, was not. However, they have not been useless. In fact, this deprives us of entire sections of the work, especially his incredibly daring still lifes or the astonishing series of flowers made at the end of his life, but whose pistils were undoubtedly not suggestive enough or, on the contrary, contradicted the demonstration desired by the commissioners…
A famous sailor
The exhibition tries to reconcile chronology and thematic route, at least acrobatic. However, it is light and airy, a small feat when it comes to organizing the approximately 140 works and objects in the exhibition: 65 paintings, about thirty preparatory drawings; hanging them near the paintings they helped create is one of the pleasures of the presentation – photographs, period costumes – which we could have done without – and documents that you have to take the time to consult, if only to remember that, together With his brother Martial, Gustave Caillebotte was one of the great postage stamp collectors of his time, but also a famous sailor and accomplished shipbuilder.
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