The Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt will dedicate a comprehensive exhibition featuring numerous paintings and drawings to the French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. Caillebotte’s oeuvre provides new, fundamental, and complementary ways to approach Impressionist painting: his radical, highly modern, and photographic-seeming depictions very convincingly reconstruct the close connection between photography and painting in the development of a new way of seeing. Many of Caillebotte’s works anticipate a photographic perspective—especially in the particular angle of view and the way the images are cropped, but also in their approach to themes like movement and abstraction—that does not emerge in the medium of photography until later. For this reason the exhibition will also incorporate outstanding examples of photography from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in so doing will provide a clear demonstration of Caillebotte’s role as trailblazer.
