Review:  The Kimbell captures ‘Painter’s Eye,’ but it can’t elevate Caillebotte

I’ve tried with Gustave Caillebotte. Really, I have.

Surely any artist who could produce as sensational a painting as “Paris Street; Rainy Day” is major. The monumental canvas riveted other artists, critics and casual visitors at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 — defenders and detractors alike. The artist-run show had stiff competition from Cezanne, Degas, Monet, Morisot, Renoir and the rest. But Caillebotte had labored hard as its primary organizer, and he wanted his work to stand out.

It did. And it does at the Kimbell Art Museum too, where “Paris Street; Rainy Day” is the smashing centerpiece of “Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye.”

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And yet, except for a small number of notable exceptions, the remainder of the exhibition is largely tepid. Urban views, bland portraits, muddled interiors, awkward nudes, goofy still lifes — Caillebotte painted with sustained dedication for less than a decade, and much of his output was run-of-the-mill.

Jointly organized with curator Mary Morton at the National Gallery of Art, where it was seen last summer, Kimbell curator George Shackelford brings together more than 50 paintings dating from 1875 to the mid-1880s. (Caillebotte died of a stroke in 1894 at 45.) He’s positioned as the “forgotten Impressionist,” which the show means to rectify. That’s pretty much the way he’s always been presented.

Like clockwork, a museum assembles a survey about every 20 years that makes the pitch for putting Caillebotte somewhere in the top tier of the Impressionist-era pantheon. In 1976, it was Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, with a show that traveled to Brooklyn. In 1995, the retrospective jointly organized by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago — which owns “Paris Street; Rainy Day” — came to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This show is the third. I’ve seen all three, and I always come away with the same question.

Not, “Why isn’t Caillebotte an Impressionist household name?”

Instead, “How can an artist who painted a couple of truly brilliant knockouts also have painted such a boatload of mediocrity?”

Without “Rainy Day,” “The Floor Scrapers,” “On the Pont de l’Europe” and perhaps a couple more, we wouldn’t pay the slightest attention to the rest. (More than 500 paintings are known.) Caillebotte would settle into the ranks of Adolphe-Félix Cals or Ludovic Piette, long-forgotten minor painters who also showed at the Third Impressionist Exhibition.

Most of his best work was done before the artist turned 30. Caillebotte was born in 1848, son of a wealthy textile and real estate magnate and his third wife. He first studied law, worked as an engineer, served briefly during the Franco-Prussian War and finally passed the entry exams for painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

One of his art school teachers was Jean-Léon Gérôme, the conservative academic painter who would later cause his legacy a lot of grief. Caillebotte used a significant portion of his inherited wealth to support the struggling Impressionist avant-garde — especially Monet — and he bought a lot of their paintings. When word came that he bequeathed his exceptional collection of more than 70 paintings to France, Gérôme tried to scuttle the deal.

Mostly, Gérôme failed. France eventually accepted most of them. Those that were rejected were bought by Albert C. Barnes for his Pennsylvania school.

The Kimbell show’s first work is “The Floor Scrapers,” an audacious personal favorite for the remarkable execution of its unusual subject. Three shirtless workers are shown in an elegant, gilt-edged room refinishing the floor. They scrape old layers of varnish and wood with awls, planes and other tools.

Caillebotte replaced the heroic Greek and Roman male nudes of academic history painting with three robust youth, roughly his own age, from the urban working class. He shows them laboriously peeling away the very ground on which tradition stands. Caillebotte identifies with them.

The steep angle of vision, looking down at the workers, makes the floor seem to tip up at the back. The composition heightens a sense of precarious instability, as if everything might tumble into a viewer’s lap.

In one of its small but marvelous details, single brushstrokes of flicked paint here and there do double-duty to designate curls of scraped wood or peeled varnish. Caillebotte is picking up on the inventive genius of Edouard Manet. He makes paint describe an object while also remaining itself.

Although light floods the scene through an ornate French window at the rear, the painting is essentially without color. Instead, it’s a catalog of neutral hues — gray, brown, beige, white, etc. “On the Pont de l’Europe,” painted the next year, is an almost monochrome gray-blue — a chilly color for a wintry trio of bourgeois gentlemen looking across the pier of a modern steel bridge to the train station below.

A few blocks from that station — the Gare Saint-Lazare — Caillebotte found the location for his singular masterpiece. The Parisian street where the rainy day is shown is actually a starburst intersection where four avenues converge. Pedestrians rush by in the silvery rain and soft light.

Baron Haussmann’s massive, disruptive overhaul of Paris, a cramped medieval town, into a network of broad boulevards had been underway for 20 years. Caillebotte, whose family fortune partly came from real estate development, shows one result. More than two-dozen stalwart pedestrians are out and about, their umbrellas raised in a nod to the parasols of fashionable Japanese art.

In essence, the 10-foot-wide painting is a symphony of seeing and being seen in the newly emerging modern world. Looking up, down, across and to the side, no one makes eye contact with anyone else, near or far. Experience is atomized.

Caillebotte hangs the scattered evanescence on a sturdy pictorial scaffold, starting with the bright green lamppost that bisects the painting. Preparatory sketches for the complex design were probably made with the help of a common optical viewing aid called a camera lucida, a small prism on a rod that can be attached to a portable table. (The Art Institute website has an excellent explainer on the painting’s construction.) The scene is reflected through the prism onto the paper, creating a kind of virtual realism.

Caillebotte played with it, animating space while maintaining precise visual order. In one remarkable detail, a carriage at the center left magically disappears behind a pair of walking men.

It takes a few moments to realize that the horse and front end of the carriage have simply vanished into thin air — poof, gone! Look closely, and one of the men has turned his head; he is staring out of the picture straight at you, gawking at the miraculous disappearance. The painting’s only moment of eye contact is between the artist and the viewer, seeing and being seen, united by the canvas surface.

Would that there were more paintings of this marvelous caliber in the show.

The handsome catalog and some wall texts suggest that Caillebotte let his art lag because he was rich, so didn’t need to sell. I’m skeptical. Commerce certainly didn’t drive Degas, Monet, Cezanne and the rest of his pals. Why would it be essential for Caillebotte?

Instead, I think the early burst of take-charge involvement with the Impressionist exhibitions, acquiring a great avant-garde art collection and tackling ambitious works like “The Floor Scrapers” and “Paris Street; Rainy Day” may have been prompted by the sudden death of his younger brother, René.

Caillebotte, fearing fate was fickle and time could be short, wanted to make his mark. He had the funds to do it. Once it was done, that was that.

Twitter: @KnightLAT

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‘Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye’

Where: Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth

When: Through Feb 14

Info: (817) 332-8451, www.kimbellart.org