GLR March-April 2023

on the river, part of an all-male outing of muscular rowers, seen from behind, in one-man rowboats. Bathers , depicting men in bathing costumes cavorting comfortably as a boat drifts by in the distance, adds to this sense of homosocial activity. In Boat ing Party (Oarsman in a Top Hat) , according to Anne Distel in the 1986 catalog: “Caillebotte is even closer to his model ... as though only the rower’s feet prevented him from moving closer still.” The fact that the viewer’s gaze is directed at the Oarsman’s crotch goes unmentioned. In discussing The Pont de L’Europe , Julia Sagraves writes that “the flâneur [loiterer] is apparently distracted by the fash ionably dressed woman he has just passed, who, in turn, seems to glance suggestively toward him. Importantly, competing with this implied sexual exchange in The Pont de L’Eu rope however, is a social one: the flâneur appears equally if not more, distracted by the figure of the worker in whose di rection he seems to stare.” Why is the male-female exchange assumed to be “sexual” and the male-male interaction “so cial”? From my perspective on the bridge, it is obviously just the opposite. In the examination of The Pont de L’Europe (Variant) , a class analysis is finally put forth. “Their faces hidden from view, these men appear to be anonymous figures, ‘everymen’ of late nineteenth century Paris. Their contrasting attire, however, is evidence of their class difference.” The top hats and frock coats of the two gentlemen are markedly different from the attire of the third figure. He wears the blue smock of the working class, though “his conspicuously fashionable bowler suggests his up

ward mobility.” In 1914, E. M. Forster finished a draft of Mau rice that concluded with Maurice, a member of the middle class, overcoming social and above all sexual barriers to live happily ever after (we presume) with Alec, the gamekeeper. I see a sim ilar dynamic here: this looks to me like a scene of men crossing class boundaries to cruise one another. Let’s go back inside, where, the catalog essay by Gloria Groom tells us: “These interiors reveal a different gendering of spaces, where the man is absorbed into the domestic sphere and where the woman is not a mere decorative motif.” In the con text of conventional representations of gender-conforming men and women, a painting like Portrait of a Man “is a decidedly uncommanding, decorative, ‘feminized’ and thus complicated portrait.” In Self-Portrait at the Easel , we see a man in his stu dio painting what’s billed as a “self-portrait”; and yet he is not alone in an isolated retreat, as we soon discover another man lounging on a sofa behind the artist. For this is, in the words of Anne Distel, “a room in which a friend could feel at ease”—or a lover, I feel compelled to add. Finally, Caillebotte’s most overt break with contemporary iconography was his depiction of male nudes in such paintings as Man at His Bath . In the words of Gloria Groom: Caillebotte’s challenge to the male gaze is all the more flagrant in the large picture of the standing male nude drying his back. In these paintings, he focused on what is either a dressing room or bathroom, both of which were traditionally reserved for feminine activities of washing, dressing, and putting on make up. But these nude men are not just toweling off after a bath. They have taken a bath that Caillebotte has witnessed, or staged, to look as if he had done so, and are now being ob served by the male onlooker. If the female body was the terri tory of modernity as a sign of male sexuality, what is one to make of his naked males which break iconographically and ideologically from the norms of nineteenth century art and lit erature. Who were these men? Were they friends of the artists or part of his household staff? Who, indeed? But either way, whether friends or staff, the na ture of the relationship between artist and model seems to go beyond the customary level of familiarity. My aim here is not one of adjudication. Far be it from me to determine whether or not Gustave Caillebotte was gay (what ever that means for his era), but I do wonder why art historians are failing to ask questions which could illuminate aspects of his work that distinguish it from that of his contemporaries. In deed, the issue is repeatedly circumvented: “Caillebotte adhered to the patrician attributes of a code of family honor, and the cult of male friendship. ... Caillebotte’s images suggest that he was uncomfortable with his class as his social identity.” Perhaps that’s because another kind of identity was getting in the way. His work is seen to offer “no relaxation of defenses even within one’s private space,” but the possible reason for this unease, this “pervasive melancholy,” is never explored. The proliferation of queer studies in recent years has made us all hyper-aware of homoerotic subtexts and queer possibili ties. Thus the treatment of Caillebotte’s work to date seems odd, to say the least. My hope is that future investigations of his œuvre will include a recognition of the “gay gaze” that under lies and explains so much of his work.

Gustave Caillebotte. Man at His Bath , 1884. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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