GLR March-April 2023

Since the artist is dead, no amount of documentation will ever recapture a complete reckoning of his view of the world, or un derstanding of him as an individual. We can compile in denser and finer-grained detail analytic accounts of the things he shared with others, from the available conventions of perspec tive to the character of his arrondissement; but the very things that we sense are crucial to the impact of the most personal pic tures—the motivations for the choice and framing of the sub ject, the decisions as to what to put in and what to leave out, and so on—are the contingent elements of his private individuality on which we can only speculate without hope of confirmation. Repeated references to Caillebotte’s distinctiveness—often framed in terms of “modernity”—seemed to dance around what

artists to search out from secrecy, prejudice, distortion and myth the homosexual presence and its wide significance in identifying homosexual expression. In this essay, I am asking you to follow this procedure when looking at art, specifically that of Gustave Caillebotte—or, in other words, to follow the advice of art historian James Saslow to “trust your eyes: the gay viewer is usually far more open to suggestions of gay emotion than the art ‘experts.’” In Caillebotte’s first major painting, The Floor-Scrapers , men are depicted laboring in a bourgeois apartment. Kneeling, their arms extended before them, their torsos bare, the men are depicted in remarkably submissive poses. Such a presentation

was really going on in these paintings. The suggestion was never expressly put forth that there was any form of homoeroticism in ev idence. Although I have read nothing in his biography to affirm that Caillebotte was in fact homosexual, it seems to me absurdly

flew in the face of traditional concepts of manhood and its artistic representation, and the canvas was rejected by the jury of the 1875 Paris Salon. Caillebotte’s motivation in refusing to observe the conventions of the time for the depiction of male work

References to his distinctive ness or “modernity” seem to dance around what’s really going on in these paintings.

ers—which would have permitted their depiction as ancient, Arabic, or other “exotic” types—is left unexplored in the cat alog essays. In other paintings involving workmen, the object of a worker’s gaze is worth examining. Thus, for example, the ob ject of a passerby’s gaze in House-Painters is peculiarly am biguous: is he surveying the paint or the painter? The immediacy of Caillebotte’s gaze can be felt in a painting titled Oarsmen , where the viewer is actually in the boat that’s being rowed by men with exposed arms. In Périssoires , the viewer feels that he’s

myopic not to pose this question once you see his paintings. Art historian Emmanuel Cooper provided the justification for looking at paintings in this way, stating in The Sexual Per spective (1994): The knowledge that an artist was or was not homosexual is not intended to “explain” their work nor is it to suggest a particu lar context in which to view it. It is, rather, the start of a process to look again and recover what has traditionally been omitted from the history of art using this to inform the present. What we can do most profitably is re-examine the work and lives of

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