Caillebotte: “Painting Men” at the Getty

From February 25 to May 25, 2025, the Getty Center presents the exhibition “Caillebotte: Painting Men”

Image: Gustave Caillebotte, “Les Raboteurs de parquet”, 1875. Musée d’Orsay, Paris

According to the Getty, “French painter Gustave Caillebotte’s interest in male subjects sharply distinguishes him from his Impressionist peers. Overwhelmingly, he observed and depicted the men in his life—including his brothers, bachelor friends, fellow sportsmen, and the workers and bourgeois of his neighborhood—and did so in bracingly original paintings that often subverted artistic and gender norms. His distinctive vision of modern masculinity is considered here for the first time in a major international loan exhibition.”

Before its run at the Getty, the exhibition was on view at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, from October 08th, 2024 to January 19th, 2025. In the exhibition website, the Orsay explained that “in a desire to produce a new, authentic form of art, Caillebotte took his subjects from his surroundings (Haussmann’s Paris, the country houses around the capital), his male acquaintances (his brothers, the workers employed by his family, his boating friends), and ultimately from his own life. In response to the realist movement, he introduced new figures into his paintings: an urban worker, a man on a balcony, a sportsman, and even an intimate portrait of a male nude at his ‘toilette’. In an era when virility and republican fraternity prevailed, but traditional masculinity was also in crisis for the first time, these new, powerful images challenged the established order, both social and sexual. Beyond his own identity – that of a young rich Parisian bachelor – Caillebotte also brought profound questions into the male condition at the heart of Impressionism and Modernism.”