{"id":4933,"date":"2025-05-22T16:57:23","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T23:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juliafriedman.org\/?p=4933"},"modified":"2025-05-26T11:24:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T18:24:09","slug":"hommes-partout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juliafriedman.org\/?p=4933","title":{"rendered":"Hommes partout"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A sad reminder of that newer does not mean better, as illustrated by the Getty Center exhibition \u201cGustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The organizers of \u201cPainting Men\u201d which aims to address the shortcomings of Caillebotte scholarship\u2019s \u201cblinkered view\u201d concerning his purported \u201cmale bias\u201d and alleged \u201cquestioning of masculine identity that seems freshly relevant today\u201d\u00a0were not deterred by the lack of primary documents that might have revealed \u201cwhat Caillebotte really thought about these issues.\u201d Nor were they impressed by his contemporaries\u2019 obliviousness to \u201cmale bias\u201d when \u201cthey were quick to label other Impressionists . . . as \u2018painters of women.\u2019 \u2019\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The focal painting in the current show, the 1884 Man at His Bath<\/em>, which the organizers deem Caillebotte\u2019s \u201cmost transgressive work\u201d because it \u201cinverts\u201d \u201cnormative gendered looking\u201d and thus \u201cclearly represents a problem for both the history of art and the history of sexuality,\u201d went unnoticed when it was initially shown to the public in 1888. This does not prevent the Getty show from insisting on \u201cthe libidinal dynamics and the invitation to homoerotic viewing unleashed by the painting itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What can we take away from such analysis? According to Andr\u00e9 Dombrowski and Jonathan D. Katz, who cowrote the catalogue\u2019s final article, the real impact of Caillebotte\u2019s work is this: in place of the usual kinds of queer readings that presume a figure\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This vocabulary and critical apparatus are now old hat. It is almost forty years since Hilton Kramer, the founder of this publication, complained about \u201cthe dismal fate of art history when the study of art is no longer its primary concern.\u201d Interpretation based on postmodern identity politics only makes sense when the painter\u2019s focus is on the self rather than on aesthetics. Yet Dombrowski and Katz see art as \u201can irritant [that] transposes the irritation it engenders from the painting, a mere external object, into the self.\u201d Unfortunately for \u201cmere external objects,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A sad reminder of that newer does not mean better, as illustrated by the Getty Center exhibition \u201cGustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.\u201d The organizers of \u201cPainting Men\u201d which aims to address the shortcomings of Caillebotte scholarship\u2019s \u201cblinkered view\u201d concerning his purported \u201cmale bias\u201d and alleged \u201cquestioning of masculine identity that seems freshly relevant today\u201d\u00a0were not deterred […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[945,1],"tags":[225,1225,1159,1224,989],"class_list":["post-4933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-history","category-uncategorized","tag-art-history","tag-exhibition-review","tag-getty-center","tag-gustave-caillebotte","tag-museums"],"yoast_head":"\nHommes partout - Julia Friedman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/juliafriedman.org\/?p=4933\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hommes partout - 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