Gustave Caillebotte “Le déjeuner” (The Luncheon),1876, oil on canvas, 52 x 75 cm. Private Collection

“History will remember them as roommates” is a gay proverb, one that provides comic relief when historians refuse to investigate a hidden, historical relationship between men and men and women and women. When it comes to the curators of “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” which was a sensation at the Musée d’Orsay when it opened last year, followed by an equally provocative run at the Getty Museum (as well as the ensuing press), they ask it as a rhetorical question. But the question, when it’s known there’s nothing known on Caillebotte’s sexuality, is conjecture into the void. A leading question prompts a curated response, and the controversy arrives June 29 at the Art Institute of Chicago—this time, under the less-pointed exhibition title, “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World.”

Out magazine deduces homoeroticism; French critics decry what they read as American gender studies’ bias; curators defend Caillebotte’s Impressionism gaze as an innovatively modern reaction to nineteenth-century masculinity (and not sexuality); the exhibition monograph oscillates between psychoanalytic gender studies and saying assumptions can’t be made (while making assumptions). Maximilíano Durón, writing for Artnet, stated Musée d’Orsay’s iteration was “one of the best exhibitions” he had seen in recent memory. But then Artnet’s Devorah Lauter acknowledged the exhibition “ultimately stumbles in its efforts.” The coverage is either praising or denigrating; the curators either agreeing or disagreeing or a mix of the two.

My question, perhaps rhetorical as well, is: Is painting men… sometimes, just painting men?

When studying LGBTQ+ history, it’s imperative that historians use what the Victorian scholar Simon Joyce calls the “self-consciously anachronistic” method. And the curators do—albeit halfway.

The exhibition catalogue includes ephemeral identity plays in its oscillating excavation of queer life. Writers in the catalogue stated the exhibition investigates “the libidinal dynamics and the invitation to homoerotic viewing” of Caillebotte, yet continually retract, saying they can’t say for sure he was gay. At first, this fits with some historians’ desire to “stay consistent with concepts and identity labels” available at the time of investigation to, Joyce suggests, “understand the past on its own terms.” On deeper viewing, the exhibition’s repeated suggestions eventually concluded his non-heterosexuality as fact.

Issues remain; the curators’ double negative doesn’t exculpate—what could “not heterosexual” mean?

Gustave Caillebotte “Man at His Bath,” 1884, oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, MA

While investigating “Man at His Bath” (1884) André Dombrowski and Jonathan D. Katz wrote, in the exhibition monograph, “The buttocks offer the greatest play of light and shadow within the scene, further spectacularizing it. Like other works,” they write, it “seems to revolve around eroticizing and de-heroizing men, inverting normative gender looking.” To them, it evidently ameliorated “the history of sexuality.”

It “seems.”

Caillebotte was a bachelor. Although he bequeathed his estate to a woman (often employed as evidence for his heterosexuality) and the French state, he remained absent in heteronormativity. He flouted a generational, familial structure for his life. This rabbit hole of suggestion is furthered in Michael Marrinan’s “Father and Sons,” included in the exhibition monograph. The essay reflects on Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams,” recounting Caillebotte’s brotherly love, matriarchal disdain, and ensuing enmeshment in homosociality and sexuality. These “oedipal conflicts” between father and son, of course, take source in Freud’s writing: “the sexual wishes of the child… awaken at a very early age, and the earliest affection of the girl-child is lavished on the father, while the earliest infantile desires of the boy are directed upon the mother.”

Marrinan frames an inversion in Caillebotte’s relationship with his mother, describing his painting, “Luncheon” (1876), as observed from “a psychic distance in the house she possesses and controls” and calls it an “emotionally inert portrait of his mother.” This sleuthing sneakily implies gender inversion as the root of Caillebotte’s brotherly and male focus, despite the catalogue’s repeated reminders that nineteenth-century discourse often relied on the “mediocre” designation of homosexuality as a mistake of nature—“a female soul in a male body and vice versa,” according to Dombrowksi.

Gustave Caillebotte. “Boating Party,” about 1877–78. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Purchased thanks to the exclusive patronage of LVMH, 2022. Photo courtesy of GrandPalaisRmn (Musée d’Orsay) / Sophie Crépy

My concern is the implication. It’s recanted, resubmitted and recanted testimony. The inversion theory of homosexuality was “mediocre,” but the exhibition catalogue contributors (edited by the curators) seem to be saying that gender-inversion applied in Caillebotte’s dueling male and female familial relationships. Marrinan’s Madonna-imago idealization reference to Caillebotte’s relationship to his mother is from Peter Blos’ “Son and Father: Before and Beyond the Oedipus Complex” (1985) and proves shaky in the context of the full exhibition monograph.

Blos repeatedly excoriated Freudian terminology surrounding homosexuality and gender as pejorative, dismissing terms such as “positive-gender” and “negative-gender” in relation to childhood development (father-son, mother-daughter and vice-versa relationships). When reflecting, as Marrinan did, on the Oedipal complex in young men, Blos states: “It is no surprise to witness that the father complex brings homosexual trends to the fore as an unavoidable complement to an abandoned father idealization and vigilant resistant to maternal dependency*.” The asterisk footnotes at the bottom of the page, stating it is not valid evidence for male homosexuality.

If you got lost in subtext, quotations and the cacophony of abstract and paradoxical statements—so did I. “Painting Men” is getting lost in the testimonial semantics, as with these forays into the Oedipal complex. It’s a convoluted hypothesis with a predetermined conclusion.

Gustave Caillebotte. “Balcony,” about 1880. Private collection. Photo courtesy of the private collection/Bridgeman Images

But I will say that the exhibition does do something important with absence. Scarcity is typical in queer histories—an unknown and unplaceable history. How do we explain such “intransigent desires,” as author Heather Love states in “Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History” (2007). The schooling of absence and erasure tells us how.

I don’t think we can assume “Man at His Bath” was after the innuendo of the phrase, “titular act,” as Dombrowski writes. We can make jokes at the gay bar about history always remembering us as roommates, and even eroticize ourselves at “Painting Men.”

But positing into the void isn’t generative for ameliorating the erasure of queer artists in the nineteenth-century canon. It becomes a superfluous fantasy. Instead of scratching at this void, curators and press should critique it, and say…

Well, maybe men just paint men sometimes.

“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” opens at the Art Institute of Chicago on June 29.