#PaintingOfTheWeekNo2

Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers, 1875

I have always loved this painting and a nice copy of it hangs above my desk at work. Caillebotte is less well-known than many of the other impressionsts/realists of the late 19^th century but he is personally one of my favourites.  It is strange really how an artist who exhibited at a good number of the famous ‘impressionist’ exhibitions has fallen slightly out of public awareness – even more so when one learns that his own art collection eventually (after much drama) formed a key part of the Musée d’Orsay’s own.  

This particular painting is fascinating in a number of ways – the perspective, the lighting, the repeated motif of the curl are but three things to look at. Plus it is one of the first representations of an urban working class.  Paintings are open to interpretation and one argument states that a Parisian working man scraping down wooden floors would never be topless and that Caillebotte is alluding to his own sexual preferences by painting them as such. On the other hand, anyone who has been in Paris in the summer knows how hot it can be and perhaps they had just taken their shirts off.  You decide. Mind you, almost nothing an artist does is an accident.  Certainly when he submitted this to the 1875 Salon it was rejected for its ‘vulgarity’.  A year later, Caillebotte placed it in the more welcoming arms of the 1876 exhibition of those we now call the impressionists.  

Caillebotte was lucky – his father, who died the previous year (1874), was wealthy and left Caillebotte very well off. The family home in which this painting is thought to have been set was clearly very comfortable.  Being well off allowed for a freedom of subject choice and workmen were as good a subject as the more traditional history or genre paintings. Caillebotte’s younger brother, who lived in the family home too, could also follow his interests and one of those was photography. One can sense the influence that this relatively new invention is having on an artist like Gustave Caillebotte.  He was fascinated by it and sought both to incorporate and respond to this new medium.  

I love the painting personally for a few reasons: it feels like a genuine snapshot of ordinary workers, I find the craft of the workers and the craft of the artist equally impressive, and – frankly – because it reminds me of my own living room floor which I really must re-wax one of these days!

#PaintingOfTheWeekNo1

The Orchestra at the Opera, c.1870, Degas, Edgar, Musee d'Orsay, Paris, Bridgeman Images

This is a painting that contains many elements that I love.  Music, ballet, opera, real-life characters, mid-19^th century France, theatre and, of course, art.  I was reminded of this painting recently when involved in the edit of our next film – DEGAS: PASSION FOR PERFECTION.  Degas has always been the impressionist that intrigued me the most. Somehow he is the most mysterious and a passing awareness of him would suggest he's a man that likes ballerinas or racehorses but, as ever, there is so much more to any artist than the subject matter they may choose. Actually a large proportion of his work is portraiture. This painting is in some ways no exception. The bassoonist at the art of the work is Désiré Dihau and indeed the majority of the musicians are actual friends and musicians. The configuration of the instrumentation makes little sense but the feeling of energy and confined space overrides that. You can sense the energy going into the music and what great fun it must have been to be in the audience.  Degas has brought the orchestra almost to the level of the stage. He hasn’t portrayed them as they would normally be – almost hidden below stage. He’s not interested in reality he’s interested in what his painting suggests.

The ballerinas behind are almost an afterthought but they are especially significant as they were the first picture of ballerinas that Degas did. Nowadays if he is known for anything it is that very subject matter and many paintings, pastels and indeed sculptures he did of ballerinas – not least behind stage in rehearsal rooms overseen by tutors and mothers. I admire this painting for all the tricks Degas is using : look at those lines that force your eye from one character to the next. The line of the harp takes you down the shoulder of the bassoonist then up we go along the bassoon along the bassists’ shoulder to his instrument and its neck takes us to the headless ballerinas. A little head on the left stops us drifting out of frame and instead that head’s eyes bounce us back along the stage and round we go again.  The multicoloured tutus clash and contrast with the black of the orchestra and the brown furnishing of the opera itself. Degas was in his mid thirties when he made this work and was a single, dedicated, complex man with an absolute passion. For him the painting was unfinished but the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian was what prevented him from finishing it. I don’t see what he needed to change – it’s fabulous, brash, noisy and fun just the way it is.