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GUSTAVE Caillebotte (1848-1894) has long been regarded as the odd man out in the circle of the French Impressionists. A wealthy amateur and a friend and supporter of these artists, Caillebotte amassed a stunning collection of their works, which he bequeathed to the state at his death in 1894, and which subsequently became the foundation for the public collections of Impressionist art in France. It is principally for this role and for this gesture that Caillebotte was remembered and valued during much of the twentieth century, while his own art, with its seemingly retardataire narrative structures, careful drawing, and elaborately plotted perspectival spaces, was for a long time dismissed or ignored as an anomaly outside the modernist "mainstream" of the Impressionist style and ethos.
Today, however, as we look back upon a series of important exhibitions that showcased Caillebotte's work in the last years of the twentieth century, we find that it is his art, along with that of Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, that has begun to exert an unexpected fascination for postmodern audiences and for the postmodern sensibility.1 Specifically, as suggested by the authors in this book, Caillebotte's art may now be seen to shed revealing light on the formation of individual and class identities in Paris during a crucial era of transition and transformation, an era marked by the burgeoning of commodity capitalism and the instabilities of newly shifting gender roles and sexual identities in the modern world. The authors of the six essays collected here examine these questions of identity formation and probe issues of spectatorship and authorial intention in a wide range of major paintings by Caillebotte, paintings that permit us to look beneath the shifting surfaces of the urban experience in the world of late-nineteenth-century Paris.
The volume begins with Kirk Varnedoe's first published essay on Caillebotte, from 1974, "Caillebotte's Pont de l'Europe: A New Slant," the piece that introduced English-speaking audiences not only to the artist but also to many of the interpretive and historiographical issues with which those who are involved in Caillebotte studies are still grappling today. Focusing on The Pont de l'Europe (plate 1), a key early work that has since become a rich site for interpretative debate, Varnedoe pointed to the artist's autobiographical intentions in framing this image, his use of self-revelatory formal and spatial devices, "his acute sensitivity to the nuances of social class," and his self-conscious staging of confrontations between appearance and reality in this painting, whose "concentration on perceptual ambiguity and social and psychological tension," he maintained, placed it "outside the traditional definitions of both Realism and Impressionism." In the quarter century that has passed since the appearance of this foundational text, contributions by other scholars have significantly refined these early insights, both expanding upon and problematizing many of the issues that were first raised there.
In his essay, "Caillebotte as Professional Painter: From Studio to the Public Eye," Michael Marrinan has used new archival information about the Caillebotte family to present a more nuanced understanding than has previously been available to us of Caillebotte's social and economic position, both as an aspiring professional artist and as a member of the haute bourgeoisie in Paris during the early years of the Third Republic. Marrinan's essay focuses on the important series of interior genre scenes painted by Caillebotte between 1875 and 1876, among them The Floor- Scrapers and The Luncheon (plates 3 and 4). The tense and exaggerated perspective constructions with which Caillebotte imaged these scenes of his own studio and his family's dining room are interpreted by Marrinan as efforts on the artist's part at "visually taking possession" of these intimate and personally meaningful spaces.
They are also seen to express some of the social and psychological tensions-an ambivalence of class and familial attachment-that these spaces may have triggered for Caillebotte, as he worked, consciously or unconsciously, to negotiate his own multiple identities: simultaneously a laboring artist and a wealthy employer of artisanal labor, in The Floor-Scrapers; and both an objective observer and a subjectively involved participant in the psychologically fraught rituals of his family's dining table, in The Luncheon. Marrinan's discussion intricately weaves new documentary evidence with interpretative insights that help to uncover the fuller range of private meanings that these and other images held for Caillebotte, bringing to life, as never before, this key early period in the formation of the artist's personal and professional identities.
In this essay, Marrinan also focuses new attention on the pivotal importance of Caillebotte's experiences in Italy during these years, pointing specifically to the work of his Italian friend Giuseppe de Nittis and that of the Florentine Telemaco Signorini as unique models that may have helped Caillebotte to bridge the expressive gap between systems of perspectival and photographic vision at this important juncture in his development. Caillebotte's personal manipulation of traditional perspective, seen by Kirk Varnedoe as an important device that creates "perceptual ambiguity and social and psychological tension" in Caillebotte's work, is signi.- cantly developed in these terms in the later essays by Marrinan and also by Michael Fried, for whom perspective is an important key to understanding Caillebotte's selfconscious-and self-revelatory-juggling of appearance and reality.
As an extension of his own earlier work on Gustave Courbet and Manet,2 Michael Fried offers here a new vision of "Caillebotte's Impressionism," one that positions it in relation to the work of both of those earlier artists as well as to that of the Impressionists themselves. He argues, specifically, that Caillebotte's project involved an effort to recover a "realism of the body," the most forceful modern French expression of which was to be found in the art of Courbet, while at the same time remaining faithful to key premises of the "ocular realism" that Fried associates with the Impressionists. While stressing Caillebotte's fidelity to the optical assumptions of Impressionism, Fried also points to the artist's desire to expand its parameters in order to represent sensation, taking Impressionism in a direction that Fried (along with Varnedoe) sees in many ways as foreshadowing the cinematic.
Fried further argues that Caillebotte, also taking into account the interventions of Manet, practiced a "materialist" form of Impressionism, one that permitted him to act as both spectator and participant in his paintings, thus enabling him to reconcile his apparently contradictory desire to project himself into his pictures with the intention of painting what he sees from a presumably exterior vantage point. Further problematizing that dual role for the artist and significantly affecting the meanings of his images are the differences, observed by both Marrinan and Fried in close analyses of several of the paintings, between what we and the artist, as viewers of the painting, are able to see and what figures represented within the painting see from their altered positions and points of view. In one instance, these differences lead Fried to offer a political reading of The Pont de l'Europe (plate 1) that is substantially at variance with those now current. Unlike Julia Sagraves, for example, who, following Varnedoe, sees this as an image that addresses Caillebotte's own dual social identifications, both as worker (namely, painter) and as bon bourgeois, as well as one that presents a broader political plea for the reconciliation of the classes after the Paris Commune,3 Fried privileges the physical point of view assumed by the artist /spectator within the picture and maintains that the fiâneur's look is not directed at the absorbed worker, but rather in the same direction in which the worker is looking. As a result, Fried asserts, the fiâneur looks past the worker rather than at him, thus making of this an image that asserts class differences rather than minimizing them.
In my own essay, "Outing Impressionism: Homosexuality and Homosocial Bonding in the Work of Caillebotte and Bazille," I have newly and very differently interpreted Caillebotte's Pont de l'Europe paintings of the 1870s (plates 1 and 2) as images in which the artist presents the mores of haut bourgeois Parisian men who cruised the public spaces of Paris in search of sexual liaisons with working-class men and boys. These and a selected group of other paintings by Caillebotte are reexamined here from the perspective of nineteenth-century French debates on homosexuality and male prostitution, and both the creation and reception of these pictures are shown to have been mediated by the shifting conditions of homosociality in an era that saw the social formation of an increasingly binarized, homo/ hetero definition of sexual identity. Central to the larger discursive framework for this study is the work of the feminist literary historian Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.4
Specifically, I have used Sedgwick's concept of a homosocial spectrum that structures relationships between men under patriarchy and her analysis of the deployment of institutionalized homophobia in modern European culture to divide and regulate that homosocial spectrum as organizing constructs for my readings of a group of paintings not only by Caillebotte but also by Frédéric Bazille. Collectively these paintings date from the late 1860s through the early 1880s, a period during which, as Foucault has claimed and as these paintings help to confirm, a crisis of homo/heterosexual definition-what Sedgwick sees as a critical shift in the male homosocial spectrum-can be shown to have occurred in France.