Hommes partout
A sad reminder of that newer does not mean better, as illustrated by the Getty Center exhibition “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.”
The organizers of “Painting Men” which aims to address the shortcomings of Caillebotte scholarship’s “blinkered view” concerning his purported “male bias” and alleged “questioning of masculine identity that seems freshly relevant today” 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.
