Counted among his contemporary Impressionists and personal friends like Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, who have enjoyed enormous popularity since the beginning of the 20th century, Gustave Caillebotte has seen relatively less appreciation. While several of his best-known pieces are likely familiar to broader audiences, Caillebotte has never achieved household status. Indeed, many museumgoers without degrees in art history might not even recognize the name.  

Several factors have conspired against the painter: Critics have frequently assailed his work as amateurish or unrefined; a substantial amount of his work remains in private collections, making him difficult to exhibit; and even among the forward-looking Impressionists, Caillebotte stood apart with his often iconoclastic subject matters. However, on the basis of this last point, an exciting new exhibition has emerged.

In collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay and the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty is now presenting “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.” Los Angeles is the second stop on the show’s tripartite circuit through these titans of the museum world, following a lively — and somewhat controversial — initial reception in Paris. 

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The assemblage of paintings in this exhibition gives attention to Caillebotte’s unusually frequent treatment of male subjects, even in stereotypically female loci. By highlighting Caillebotte’s divergent approach to gender roles in figure painting, this show illustrates the startling degree of innovation in his work. While figures like Édouard Manet or Edgar Degas contributed to the Impressionist movement through their portrayals of women, Caillebotte stands apart by turning to male subjects. 

“Caillebotte really finds novel, fertile terrain in modern masculinity. It’s kind of a relatively unmined zone for painting,” said Scott Allan, curator of paintings at the Getty Museum. “He makes a lot of, kind of iconographic innovations by focusing on male subjects. It’s a way of, in a pretty competitive avant-garde milieu, of differentiating himself on gender lines.”

Many of these pictures place the modern Parisian man in domestic environments — a role conventionally considered the women’s sphere if we follow the thought of misogynistic French thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One painting sets a young man at the piano; others capture dandily dressed men lounging on comfortable canapés. 

But Caillebotte’s representation of the male figure is often far from docile. Frequently, the artist sought to present French men with valor and strength — perhaps in response to the disastrous Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1871, which had detrimental effects on the perception of French masculinity. 

Virilité features prominently throughout his depiction of men in action. In the acclaimed 1875 piece “Floor Scrapers,” Caillebotte depicts three shirtless workers, methodically removing a layer of the wooden floor in a Parisian apartment. Arms outstretched, their muscular postures are emphasized by the lines etched across the flooring — and the dramatically angular perspective of the canvas. From a singular back window, light dances across the hardwood in a constellation of glints and reflections. 

Caillebotte plays with similar themes in his portraits of sportsmen, where he also seizes on the related virtue of fraternité. Boating apparently standing as a favorite subject for the painter, Caillebotte presents men rowing in skiffs or rigging sailboats. In these kinetic images, where the water seems to ripple across the densely oil-laden surface, little attention is given to the men’s identities themselves. In fact, their faces are frequently concealed by straw hats or sailor caps. This anonymity would seem to underscore the synchronicity of the sportsmen, in place of their individuality. 

Caillebotte’s most startling examination of the masculine figure exists in his male nudes. His 1884 painting “Man at His Bath” forces us into an intimate washroom, where we see the figure toweling off from behind. The exhibition’s staging only further dramatizes this intimacy, placing the piece with several other nudes in a narrow corridor of the galleries’ layout.  

This work’s unadorned, personal image of masculinity was strictly at odds with the conventions of the nude in European painting as a feminine genre. Caillebotte undermines these gender norms forcefully, providing a compelling image of a man in a private domestic space. 

“There are these, tit-for-tat gender script reversals that Caillebotte plays with, which for me, is one of the most interesting things about Caillebotte,” Allan said. “He’s interested in making these interventions and kind of defying normal expectations and conventions in certain subjects, and kind of unsettling the viewer, simply by presenting a male subject where we don’t necessarily expect one.”

Finally, Caillebotte portrays men in constant relation to urban environments, Paris in particular. Stepping into his artistic activity just after Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s renovation of the city, Caillebotte painted in the setting of a rapidly evolving metropolis. Masculinity was taking new shapes as Parisian men sought to occupy new roles in a new modernity. 

Perhaps Caillebotte’s most famous work, “Paris Street, Rainy Day,” illustrates this facet clearly. The monumental canvas, on loan from Chicago, gains new life in this show — and not just because of its fascinating color interplay with the bold maroon walls of the exhibition’s galleries. 

At center-right in Caillebotte’s strikingly asymmetrical composition of a Parisian intersection, the man with an elegant top hat and bushy mustache feels more personable. In the world of this exhibition, he receives increased character as a figure that the painter has carefully constructed. Just like many other figures in Caillebotte’s oeuvre, this anonymous bourgeois man gains new life in the context of this exhibition’s new focus.

“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” will be on view at the Getty Center until May 25. Admission to the museum is free, but a timed-entry reservation is required.