Was caillebotte gay
Queer Impressions of Gustave Caillebotte
Gustave Caillebotte may skillfully 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 recognized, and today forms the core collection of the Musée d’Orsay. He lived with his mother except for the last six years of his life, 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 Nice Arts Museums of San Francisco organized The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886 which celebrated and recreated the eight organization shows known as the Impressionist exhibitions. Here, in historical context,
Gustave Caillebotte: A Same-sex attracted 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 inception 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 request may be cited. But, one can also credit the advance of contemporary art to a presumably gay gentleman, Gustave Caillebotte, a lesser-known impressionist painter of the period.
The MAM collection has one of his many paintings of canoeists on the River Yerres. Ours shows them at recover , gliding along with the languid current, perhaps after a vigorous sprint and, perhaps, on their way to participate a meal with friends at a riverside café. In fact, Caillebotte himself appears among the reveling boatmen in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s legendary Luncheon of the Boating Party. He and Renoir were close friends so he’s dominant in the composition.
And, Caillebotte was not only an artist but a very rich one. At 26 he inherited his father’s fortune and, in the manner of La Published in:July-August 2023 issue. This is to express gratitude 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 spot Paris Street, Rainy Day at the Art Institute of Chicago. I fell deeply in treasure. 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 let. I was a budding artist and a budding female homosexual. I remember existence enthralled with the man 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 huge, also incredible. My first thought was that Caillebotte must own been gay. I got Kirk Varnedoe’s book on Caillebotte (1987) and scoured it for facts, 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 apparent avoidance of discussion around themes of homosexuality and homoeroticism in the work of the French Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), by authors of books and exhibition catalogues on the artist. 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 search on social media sites such as Twitter or Tumblr to find a plethora of homosexual 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 highlight men in Caillebotte’s work. Paintings which contain elements, sometimes covert in nature, that create an appeal to a homosexual audience but may be missed by the heterosexual viewer. One of the works mentio
A Welcome Reassessment of Caillebotte