“Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist”
at the Art Institute of Chicago.
February 18–May 28, 1995
Anyone who knows anything about modernist painting can tell you
about Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894), affluent friend, sometime
painting companion, and patron of many of the most adventurous artists
of his day. He is best known as a collector, one with an exacting
eye, whose Cézannes, Degas, Manets, Monets, Pissarros, Renoirs, and
Sisleys, bequeathed to an ungrateful nation who accepted them with
great reluctance, today rank among the greatest treasures of the
Musée D’Orsay. What is less known is that he was a tireless promoter
of the work of his painter friends, helping to organize the now
celebrated group exhibitions of the young artists known as the
Impressionists during the first decade of
their loose association. He
paid for frames, loaned works from his own collection when artists
refused to contribute, courted publicity, and generally played a
crucial role in bringing the art of the “New Painters” to the attention
of a public slow to pay sufficient homage.
Caillebotte the painter is less known. He participated in many
Impressionist exhibitions, but as someone who came late to painting,
he remains a peripheral figure. His reputation rests largely on a
handful of severe, elegantly constructed pictures, some of the best
and most ambitious of them in American musuems: the Art Institute of
Chicago’s Paris Street: Rainy Day (1877), with its shining, wet
cobblestones and solemn dance of umbrellas; the Minneapolis Institute
of Arts’ touching Nude