A well-upholstered fauteuil of a book that readers can settle into. . . . Caillebotte is fascinating precisely because his style seemed, to his contemporaries, to be not style at all. It was 'photographic'
not a term of praise in the 1870s, but a fundamental one for art a century on.
Bookforum Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye is the richly ... Read moreillustrated and impressively researched catalogue of an exhibition shown at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX. Curators Mary Morton and George Shackelford establish once and for all the pivotal significance of Caillebotte's often overlooked or downplayed paintings. The exhibition focused on the work Caillebotte showed with the Impressionists, dating from 1875 to the early 1880s. The catalogue demonstrates that although he was a friend of all the Impressionists, Caillebotte was closest to Edgar Degas in style and focus. Essays by the curators and other art historians spell out the rich intellectual, literary, cultural, and artistic contexts in which Caillebotte oriented himself in late-19th-century France. Caillebotte, readers learn, was a keen observer of urban and suburban modernity. He rendered on canvas the psychological complexity of a French middle-class man's experience of the new spaces and perspectives modern life afforded. Recommended.
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