At the Orsay Museum, the painter Gustave Caillebotte touches the male – Libération

The Parisian museum is devoting an exhibition to the late 19th century painter’s view of the male figure and invites us to rediscover these masterpieces through the prism of gender studies, which is too reductive.

The Caillebotte man is nonchalant, straight in his boots. Often he has one hand in his pocket. He’s a calm bachelor, his suit floating in the air. But what air? City dweller above all, and rarefied. Carrying the gaze more than the sound, as if the city, as if life, even full, was empty. Go see him in Orsay, in silence and with all distinction. Reality is there, in all its firmness, in all its absence. Women too, but not too much. These are the women next door. Neither the intelligent chic of Manet, nor the thick sensuality of Renoir, nor the relentless voyeurism of Degas: of the distant, cooled Maupassant, without vulgarity. The character with a mustache and a top hat in the foreground of Paris, rainy weather (1877) could be Georges Duroy, known as “Bel-Ami”, the writer’s careerist antihero. A woman is on his arm. Around, elegant loners, whether alone or in pairs, meticulously arranged in the field, like in the cinema. Black dominates. They are waiting: engine! The cry will not come.

There were quite a few cries during the war of 1870 and the siege of Paris, two events in which young Caillebotte was an actor and witness. At the entrance to the Orsay exhibition, next to a famous self-portrait captured