Hommes partout

A sad reminder of that newer does not mean better.

In an 1976-77 Caillebotte retrospective curated by the late Kirk Varnedoe, the focus was on the dichotomy between private and public worlds, far (open) spaces and near (closed) spaces. Together with Peter Galassi, Varnedoe provided an in-depth analysis of Caillebotte’s perspective, his “cloaking of abnormal distortion in the sheep’s clothing of apparently objective realism.” Speculation about what a label in the current show calls “Caillebotte’s often suggestive work [which] makes room for a desiring gaze that is not necessarily male or heterosexual” is conspicuous by its absence in the earlier accounts. Varnedoe’s object-based approach was sensitive to Caillebotte’s admonishment in an 1881 letter to Pissarro: “A painter’s real argument is his paintings . . . . we must continue and continue only in an artistic sense, the only one that ultimately interests us.”

On the contrary, the organizers of “Painting Men” were not deterred by the lack of primary documents that might have revealed “what Caillebotte really thought about these issues.” Nor were they impressed by his contemporaries’ obliviousness to “male bias” when “they were quick to label other Impressionists . . . as ‘painters of women.’ ’’ The focal painting in the current show, the 1884 Man at His Bath, which the organizers deem Caillebotte’s “most transgressive work” because it “inverts” “normative gendered looking” and thus “clearly represents a problem for both the history of art and the history of sexuality,” went unnoticed when it was initially shown to the public in 1888. This does not prevent the Getty show from insisting on “the libidinal dynamics and the invitation to homoerotic viewing unleashed by the painting itself.”

What can we take away from such analysis? According to André Dombrowski and Jonathan D. Katz, who cowrote the catalogue’s final article, the real impact of Caillebotte’s work is this: in place of the usual kinds of queer readings that presume a figure’s deliberate hiding or self-effacement, accompanied perhaps, by the kind of unselfconscious psychic leakage that is pure gold to the academic, we have sought to proffer a different Caillebotte, one who self-consciously created something once unassimilable, although increasingly coming into clarity as we finally begin to abandon the rigidly binary opposition of homosexuality and heterosexuality in favor of a more nuanced and sensitive account of desire.

This vocabulary and critical apparatus are now old hat. It is almost forty years since Hilton Kramer, the founder of this publication, complained about “the dismal fate of art history when the study of art is no longer its primary concern.” Interpretation based on postmodern identity politics only makes sense when the painter’s focus is on the self rather than on aesthetics. Yet Dombrowski and Katz see art as “an irritant [that] transposes the irritation it engenders from the painting, a mere external object, into the self.” Unfortunately for “mere external objects,” this profoundly narcissistic tendency to see a work of art as a prompt or a prop for self-examination is still popular in some quarters.

Comfortably Numb

My contribution to David Carrier’s series “The End of Postmodernism” in the December/January opinions section of the Brooklyn Rail.

From Sfumato to Ganzfelds

The Honarkar Foundation just published a catalogue for their current exhibition LUMINARIES OF LIGHT: PIONEERS OF CALIFORNIA LIGHT AND SPACE MOVEMENT curated by Genevieve Williams. 

My essay “From Sfumato to Ganzfelds” argues that in order to remove the barriers between the art and its audiences, California Light and Space artists relied on the same four optical modes as the Renaissance painters. Sfumato, chiaroscuro, unione, and cangiantismo are all represented in the works of Peter Alexander, De Wain Valentine, James Turrell, Helen Pashgian, Doug Wheeler, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell. 

The catalogue is available for preorder on the Foundation website.

In search of the “problematic”

My latest article for Quillette is an update of sorts on Robert Hughes’ writings from three decades ago about the “therapeutic fallacy” and the “censorious right.” Now it is the censorious left that is swinging the bat.

A fix for loneliness

The latest issue of the Dallas-based humanities quarterly is dedicated to the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Atheneum—the 12-acre UT Dallas campus art district designed by iconic architecture firm Morphosis. I contributed an article “Why we Need the Athenaeum” in which I argue that the Athenaeum model of public spaces is exactly what our culture needs to restore waning real-life social connections.

LACMA’s Imagined “Imagined Fronts”

My take on LACMA’s rather disappointing exhibition that tried to make the Great War relevant to museum goers in 2024.

The Perfect Trifecta

My latest article for Quillette is about the perfect trifecta of performance art, sensationalist nudity, and media attention.