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.
