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PARTISAN REVIEW
sailing and the "new painting," Caillebotte befi-iended the Impressionists
in the 1870s, painted with them, and bought their work_
In
France, he
is still best known for bequeathing his large collection to the nation,
when he died in 1894, at the age of forty-six. (The gift was refused, then
grudgingly accepted, after three years of lobbying by the progressives;
now, of course it's all in the Musee d'Orsay.) Caillebotte, the painter,
was almost unknown to his compatriots, until the exhibition
commemorating the centennial of his death, at the Grand Palais this fall
- most of his work is in American museums or private collections - but
Parisians flocked to see what they had been missing. Generally, they were
rewarded. Caillebotte is often better than you'd expect. l3est known for
a few rather forlTlUlaic series, notable for their exaggerated "Japanese"
perspective -
contre jour
figures by a balcony, floor scrapers, and figures
crossing the Pont d 'Europe in the rain - the show revealed that he
painted some extraordinarily original, inventive pictures , as well, gener–
ous, economical compositions that sometimes seem to anticipate Matisse.
13ut Caillebotte appears to have thought of them solely as fragmentary
studies for larger works, and never pursued their implications. The cumu–
lative impression is of someone very serious, a little plodding, who
worked hard and had a wonderful time - a modest talent , but one
worth taking seriously.
"Modest" was a word conspicuously absent from the most aggres–
sively hyped show of the season in New York, the Cy Twombly retro–
spective at the Museum of Modern Art; the concurrent Willem de
Kooning retrospective at the Metropolitan (originally at the National
Gallery) ran a close second. The overlap prompted the kind of cross–
generational comparisons suggested by
Or(itill5
if
IlIIpressiollislII.
Twombly,
who seems to cherish at least the appearance of values dear to the
Abstract Expressionists, is, in fact, a coeval of the Pop artists and abstract
color painters who challenged these values; he's a quarter-century
younger than the ninety-year-old de Kooning. Like many of his more
visible contemporaries, he spent his early years as a painter in New York ,
and studied - like Noland, Frankenthaler, and his good friend
Rauschenberg, among others - at the legendary Bla ck Mountain
College. Yet because he moved to Italy in 1957, Twombly doesn ' t usu–
ally enter into the equation when American art of the sixties and seven–
ties is discussed. Not that his elegant, stylish "scribbled" paintings were
ignored or lacked admirers, here or abroad. It 's easy to see why.
Twombly has a ravishing touch , an unfailing eye for placement and a
tasty sense of
matiere.
His titles suggest serious aspirations, by invoking
mythology, the classical past, ancient history, literature, and the like,
