Gustave Caillebotte's View of Paris: A Marxist Approach

Abstract

Art has always been important for the evolution of society and effects each of the individuals within. From the earliest known civilizations and societies, art emerged as a way of explaining and understanding the inexplicable happenings of the world. The impressionists captured the contemporary feel of life in an unprecedented way. The lightness and "impression" of reality in their works was a way of depicting the world and society around them and track its evolution through tangible means. The famous theorist Karl Marx (1848) said, "All that is solid melts into air," as a way of explaining modernism. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the work of the French Impressionist patron and artist Gustave Caillebotte through his work on the modernization of Paris (Richard, 1995, pp 209-210).

Introduction

French impressionism brought about a grand revolution in Western bourgeois. More than one hundred years worth of Marxist perspectives and century's worth of middle class dominance has hidden the fundamentally avant-garde nature of it. The sociologist Karl Marx spent a great deal of time spinning poetic theories about the revolutionary effect of middle class capitalism, the commune being entirely fascinated by the bourgeoisie (Christiansen, 1994, pp 80-85). During the 14th to 17th century, the middle class rose up to change the entire order of the social, political and economical society to replace it with different hierarchies of republican and capitalist regimes (Albert, 2007, pp 120-129). In the same way, the Impressionist movement greatly changed the tradition, perception and subject matter of French art, from history, mythology and religion to paintings by the middle class and for the middle class (Klingender, 1945, pp 60-66).

Gustave Caillebotte as an "Impressionist"

Gustave Caillebotte born in 1848 was one of the most bourgeois Impressionists. Born into an upper crust family, he had inherited his father's great wealth made from manufacturing furniture for the French military force and renting out his factory after Napoleon III rebuilt the central Paris, as the location had become profitable with the modernization. Due to this, Caillebotte can be considered both a member and major patron of the Impressionists (Varnadoe, 1988, pp 472-473). During his stint in the “École des Beaux-Arts,” he met Claude Monet and Pierre Renoir. He helped them out greatly by buying their paintings when they were not “fashionable” names, supported their living frequently, planned and executed exhibitions for them, for example the famous showing in Paris in 1877 in which his own painting, “Paris Street, Rainy Day” was featured, and above all, donated his personal collection to the French government which helped greatly in immortalizing the Impressionist's work, as his collected works make up a major part of the Impressionist collection found in Musée d'Orsay in Paris (Varnedoe, 2000, pp 50-55).

Moreover, he was a dedicated as well as talented artist, who is known to have painted some of the most original works of the movement, like “Paris Street, Le Pont de L'Europe, Boulevard Seen from Above and Young Man at his ...