P. Galifi, C. Ghez, Decostructing Gustave Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe (1876), in Gustave Caillebotte : impressionist in modern Paris, catalogo della mostra, Ishibashi, Fondazione Museo dell'Arte Bridgestone, 10 Ottobre-29 dicembre 2013, Tokyo 2013, pp. 230-241. (original) (raw)
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During Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852 to 1870), Georges Haussmann renovated medieval Paris into a modern metropolis. This urban renewal, Haussmannization, impacted not only city infrastructure, but also the fine arts. Painters of the Impressionist movement (1870s and 1880s), embraced the art critic Charles Baudelaire’s idea of modernité by walking through the city to observe their ordinary surroundings, painting with loose brushstrokes to convey fleeting moments, and sometimes working en plein air to experiment with the effects of natural light throughout the day. The Salon rejected this new style of painting that did not conform to its standards, so the artists responded by establishing their own group Exhibitions. This group could not have flourished without its own member Gustave Caillebotte. His financial status enabled him to easily fund many of the Impressionist Exhibitions and to collect his friends’ paintings, both of which helped to stir a curiosity about the new art movement. This paper reveals how Caillebotte participated in, yet also set himself apart from the Impressionist movement. While Caillebotte included his own works in the Impressionist Exhibitions, his style does not completely align with typical Impressionist approaches: he celebrates Haussmannian architecture, which the older members avoided, because he was too young to know medieval Paris; he paints with calculated brushstrokes, a result of his Academic training at the École des Beaux-Arts; and he utilizes photography, a recent technological development, to capture exact details for his preparatory drawings. I propose a new way of looking at Caillebotte’s street scenes and suggest the recognition of sub-scenes within these works. Caillebotte uses a subtle compositional prop to vertically divide his paintings in half, a device that, in conjunction with the flaneur’s gaze, allows him to accommodate separate yet simultaneous depictions of the built environment and the motion of everyday human activity.
Gustave Caillebotte and visual representation
This dissertation examines compositional space in Caillebotte's painting and, through it, his ways of producing visual experience for the viewer. The four chapters evaluate the artist's methods of composition through the use of perspective, photography, light and colour and depiction of the figures. This project will explore the development of his pictorial space the viewer? While, it is true that the artist's choice of space and angle offers a different experience to the spectator, did he also intend to experiment a new approach to art? This chapter will especially focus on the artist ways of organizing his urban space during the 1870s. In his street paintings, the artist privileged the structure of space and the sensation that it creates on the viewer's perception of reality. The modernity of the new city became a primary motif in Impressionist painting especially between the 1870s and 1880s. In what sense did the artist's manipulation of space allow him to interact with the viewer? In his attempt to represent his own perception of space, was the artist aiming at challenging the established rules of perspective? Caillebotte mainly focused on a one-point perspective as one may see in The Pont de l'Europe or a two-points perspectives as it is the case in Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (fig.1). This emphasizes even more the impression of distance created by the perspective. 2 Rue de Paris; temps de pluie is held at the Art Institute of Chicago and Pont de l'Europe (fig.2) at the Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva. The artist presented his two works at the occasion of the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877. 3 The street depicted in Rue de Paris; temps de pluie is rue de Turin. This street on the foreground of the picture originates from the place de l'Europe and continues on the background at the intersection of the rue de Moscow situated on the left. 4 Pont de l'Europe shows a modern vision of Paris that is emphasized by the metallic structure of the bridge. Rue de Vienne is visible on the left side of the picture. On the background, one can distinguish the first architectures of the rue de Saint-Petersburg today known as Leningrad. The modernity of the Europe district is reinforced by the X patterns of the bridge metallic structure which show a glimpse of the rue de Londres on the right. Down below are the railway developments of the Gare Saint-Lazare. 5 What makes Caillebotte's depiction of space unordinary and almost imaginative are the exaggerated and stretched perspectives. Indeed, it looks as if the artist attempted to extend and lengthen space. It is the elasticity of Caillebotte's perspective that one need to explore in relation to Renaissance perspective. One 2 Lois Fichner-Rathus, Foundation of Art and design: an enhanced media edition, Wadsworth cengage learning, surveillance in the city. As Maxime Camp wrote in Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions, et sa vie dans la moitié du XIX e siècle:
Reading betweent the Images Painting Clues and Architecture
2016
The medium of painting is used as a tool to reflect on the potentiality of the image as signifier of architectural themes. A number of thinkers, from Benjamin to Foucault, have used the work of art as starting point for a broader reflection. In my work, this reflection unfolds through two elements: first, the objects that appear in a painting and, second, the composition and framing of the objects in the painting itself. Both are looked at as signifiers of architectural themes. The deep connection between these two elements, that is, the objects and the way they are arranged in the space of the painting, stems clearly through the positioning of the painting within a broader set of historical conditions.