Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings From Paris to the Sea

last updated 8 January 2015

Brooklyn Museum, New York

Through July 5

Gustave Caillebotte was “perhaps the least well-known of the impressionists,” said N.F. Karlins in Artnet.com. Yet this Parisian art collector and chronicler of street life “produced exhilarating paintings that plunge the eye into deep space as effectively as a zoom lens,” while exhibiting a sense of urban society and “class-consciousness” that other impressionists lacked. The fashionable Oarsman in a Top Hat (1878), you may notice, “has neatly folded his topcoat” in order to row across a shimmering stretch of water. Caillebotte’s House Painters (1877) is a “virtuoso performance” that encompasses all of Paris in a single scene. “The windows of the wine store, where the painters are on the job, hold reflections of the passers-by,” who are decidedly more upper-class. Besides a social conscience, the painting shows “his interest in reflected light, broken brushwork,” and other innovations that mark impressionism.

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But if Caillebotte was daring in his subject matter, he was hardly as adventurous in his approach, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Not for him the shimmering surfaces of Monet: Instead of painting in the open air, Caillebotte worked from preliminary drawings and sketches, “a labor-intensive method that the artists who would come to be called impressionists were leaving behind in favor of spontaneity.” His most daring legacy may be the strange angles from which he views his subjects. “Odd angles, daringly modern,” show dinner scenes from the head of a table or landscapes from on high. “The ultimate effect of his X-ray examinations,” though, is to remove some of the magic from Paris, making it seem no longer the City of Light but a “precision-tooled machine, stripped of romantic atmosphere.”