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GTAVE CAILLEBOTTE: A GAY MAN AT MAM'S CURRENT EXHIB
” I thk the bt answer I have seen to that qutn is om an say by Jim Van Bkirk, a queer wrer and public speaker, which he quot Emmanuel Cooper’s 1986 book, “Sexual Perspectiv: Homosexualy and Art the Last 100 Years the Wt”, where he stat:. “The knowledge that an artist was or was not homosexual is not tend to ‘expla’ their work nor is to suggt a particular ntext which to view . His unpublished 1990 say, “The Invisible Male, or Gtave Caillebotte Gets Sexy” asks the rear to follow art historian Jam Saslow’s advice to “tst your ey: the gay viewer is ually far more open to suggtns of gay emotn than the art ‘experts.
Due to the social stigma of the time, Caillebotte uld not have exprsed his possible queerns as we do now, and even wh that md he was still shunned by most fay members and never married, possibly bee he lived as a closeted gay man 19th century France. But, one n also cred the advance of morn art to a prumably gay man, Gtave Caillebotte, a lser-known imprsnist artist of the perd. Anyway, whether he was gay or not rts the eye of the beholr.
Although those aren’t necsarily ironclad ditors of gay proclivi, today we might say, “Do the math. ” Bis, given the social stigma of the tim, even if there were more palpable evince of his beg gay, would probably have been liberately stroyed. Commentg 25 years ago on a major travelg exhibn of Caillebotte’s work om the Mée d’Orsay Paris, I was stck by the lengths to which the thors of the talog says went to avoid noticg the obv: that many of his patgs nta homoerotic imagery that flew the face of social and artistic norms of 1870s and ’80s France.