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 beginning 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 order may be cited. But, one can also credit the advance of modern art to a presumably gay man, Gustave Caillebotte, a lesser-known impressionist artist of the period.
The MAM collection has one of his many paintings of canoeists on the River Yerres. Ours shows them at rest, gliding along with the languid current, perhaps after a vigorous sprint and, perhaps, on their way to share a meal with friends at a riverside café. In fact, Caillebotte himself appears among the reveling boatmen in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s famous 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 bohème’s Schaunard, generously spent his money on his struggling artist friends, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Renoir, among others, subsidizing their exhibitions, buying their art and, in the case of Monet, paying his rent. He tried to bequeath his collection of nearly 70 works to the French government but, although some were accepted, most were not. Luckily, many of those rejects would wind up in Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation.
Anyway, whether he was gay or not rests in the eye of the beholder. There are no extant love letters written to another man or revealing remarks by his contemporaries. What does exist are his paintings that almost exclusively depict male subjects: teasingly voyeuristic views of nude bathers, muscular rowers, brawny working-class types like the three shirtless parquet planers and portraits of handsome bourgeois flaneurs. Granted, he seems to have had a mistress for a time and even left her an annuity. Still, the artist never married, was generally shunned by his relatives and lived with his mother until he was 39 (he died at 45). Although those aren’t necessarily ironclad indicators of gay proclivities, today we might say, “Do the math.” Besides, given the social stigma of the times, even if there were more palpable evidence of his being gay, it would probably have been deliberately destroyed.
In the past, the absence of academic discussion of Caillebotte’s apparent preference may be just another case of daring not to speak the obvious. Today the subject is being explored by more open minds. In any case, were it not for Caillebotte, the movement may not have caught on in quite the same way. Those earliest impressionist exhibits may never have taken place, and, thanks to his own collecting, many works survive today that may have been lost (Monet destroyed 500 of his own paintings in a fit of depression—fortunately, Caillebotte had already purchased 14).
Food for thought when you see the show. And don’t forget to pay tribute to Caillebotte in the main gallery.
