Gustave Caillebotte has never enjoyed the same kind of recognition among the Impressionists as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Camille Pissarro, and even now his name probably still generates question marks.
It didn’t help that he was unfairly knocked as a rich dilettante by some critics during his lifetime, and his important bequest of a superlative Impressionist collection that would later form the core of what is now Paris’ Musée d’Orsay overshadowed his artistic achievements.
But make no mistake. He is one of the great Impressionists. Making that incontrovertibly clear is a stunning themed retrospective that opened Sunday and runs through Oct. 5 at the Art Institute of Chicago. It contains nearly 100 paintings and drawings as well as 40 archival photographs and materials from more than three dozen public and private lenders.
The summer blockbuster can be seen as a kind of sequel to a touring retrospective that was shown at the Art Institute in 1995, an influential, groundbreaking show that played a key role in energizing an international Caillebotte revival that continues to gain momentum.
But it is important to be clear. This is not one of those art-historical endeavors to upgrade a secondary artist to the primary position he or she “should have had.” No, Caillebotte (1848-94) was seen as an equal by his peers and was included in five of the eight Impressionist exhibitions in the 1870s and ’80s. He even organized some of them.
This exhibition was called “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” when it was presented previously at the Musée d’Orsay and Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the show’s two other co-organizers. But in Chicago, it is subtitled “Painting His World,” which has a kind of double meaning.
Gloria Groom, the Art Institute’s chair and curator, painting and sculpture of Europe, believes it is a little more expansive, in part because while men pervade the show, they do not monopolize it.
In general, women dominated the Impressionist works that include people — ballet dancers, barmaids, millinery shopkeepers, doting mothers, etc. But Caillebotte put his focus on men, primarily those from his mostly upper-crust inner circle, including 17 whose bios are outlined in fascinating fashion in the catalog.
Indeed, the artist put more emphasis on men, or what the catalog calls the “ ‘masculine’ side of modernity,” than virtually any other French painter of his time. One hundred of his paintings depict exclusively men compared to 17 that show men and women and only 32 with just women.
This is the first major show to explore this central facet of Caillebotte’s art, including portraits of men in the Caillebotte brothers’ well-appointed Parisian apartment, like “The Bezique Game” (circa 1880), which portrays two men playing cards as three others look on and a fourth seems oddly oblivious. Other sections are devoted to the artist’s depictions of his fellow boaters on the Seine River or men at work as in his famous composition, “Floor Scrapers” (1875).
Of particular note are Caillebotte’s two frank male nudes, including “Man at His Bath” (1884) in which the subject is seen from behind drying himself, his bare buttocks front and center. While male nudes were common for history painting or mythological subjects, they are highly unusual in scenes of life from this time.
In an early 21st-century era obsessed with identity, this attention to men, including nude men, raises all kinds of questions about gender and sexuality, including the inevitable one: Was Caillebotte gay? (The bachelor had a longtime companion, Charlotte Berthier, but their exact relationship is unclear.)
Indeed, the show has nonetheless generated controversy along these lines, especially with some Parisian critics deriding an Americanized obsession with such issues. The headline in Le Monde couldn’t be clearer: “A biased look at Gustave Caillebotte, at the Musée d’Orsay.”
But all this seems like critical overreach. While certainly focusing on notions of masculinity, the exhibition admirably walks a fine line for the most part. That said, there is a catalog section that confronts these issues head-on, “Caillebotte, Painting Naked Men,” written by a pair of faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania.
While pointing out that these paintings clearly upset norms in Caillebotte’s time, they argue that it is important to see these works via their historical context and not through the lens of today’s views of gender and sexuality.
“This essay is therefore not about Caillebotte’s sexuality,” the two essayists write, “about which we know little definitively (his heterosexuality is as much speculation as his potential homoerotic inclinations).”
But as important as what the paintings depict is how the subject matter is depicted, and it is easy sometimes to wish that more attention had been paid to that aspect of Caillebotte’s work. One such quality is the complex depth he achieves in works like “In a Café (1880), which shows a derby-hatted barfly (his friend Albert Courtier) against a mirror that reflects a banquette and a window opening onto a distant street, a composition that presages in notable ways Edouard Manet’s famed “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882).
And it’s impossible not to be bowled over by Caillebotte’s revels in patterns and textures. Nowhere is this more evident than in “Portrait of Mr. G” (1881) in which Richard Gallo is shown on a sofa with bold green-and-orange patterned stripes and a wonderfully clashing pillow on one end with a dazzling explosion of tufted nubs and colors.
Many of Caillebotte’s best-known masterpieces are here, including, of course, “Paris Street, Rainy Day” (1877), a 7-by-9-foot depiction of a moment in central Paris right after the rain has stopped and the sun is trying to break through. It is one of the most beloved works in the Art Institute’s collection.
At the same time, more than 20 of the works have not been shown in the United States before this show’s tour, including “The Bank of Petit Gennevilliers and the Seine” (1890), one of the show’s high points with its virtuosic impasto brushwork and adorable depiction of a bow-legged dog looking right at the viewer.
The exhibition concludes with a mural-size enlargement of an 1892 photograph of Caillebotte taken by his brother, Martial. It shows him enjoying a shared regard with his dog, Bergère, on the Place du Carrousel with the Louvre in the background — a forward-looking Impressionist at the heart of his beloved Paris.