March 22, 2025

Gustave Caillebotte,

"Painting Men"

Davey Whitcraft,

"To Those Who Create the Future"

Lisa Yuskavage

Gustave Caillebotte, "Painting Men"

by Liz Goldner

Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California

Continues through May 25, 2025

The central work of “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” is “Paris Street, Rainy Day” (1877). The immersive life-size painting features a well-dressed couple, walking confidently across a city plaza paved with shiny wet cobblestones while holding onto a large umbrella. They are surrounded by two-dozen other figures, mostly men, representing various social classes and professions. The painting is on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, which organized this show with the Getty Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Paris Street, Rainy Day,” 1877, oil on canvas, 83 9/16 x 108 3/4”. 

All images courtesy of the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Caillebotte, a scion of the 19th century French upper class, had an aspect similar in comportment and dress to the urbane man in “Paris Street.” He regularly depicted family members, close friends, sportsmen, soldiers, laborers, and even his butler in his narrative work.

Caillebotte’s plaza is situated near the Gare Saint-Lazare railway station, a crossroad for many important artists of that time. Claude Monet, Édouard Manet and other artists featured the station in several of their own works. Caillebotte also depicted the station in “The Pont de l’Europe” (1876) and “On the Pont de l’Europe” (1877). The former image highlights the expansive railings alongside the train station, a glamorously dressed couple strolling alongside it, with smoke from the trains billowing in the background. With its contrasting bright colors and dark shadows, it calls attention to the artist’s expertise with detail and composition. The latter painting focuses on the train station’s large iron superstructure, with two elegantly dressed men wearing frock coats and top hats commanding the scene. A third man, wearing the blue smock of the working class, leans over the railing.

Gustave Caillebotte, “The Pont de l”Europe,” 1876, oil on canvas, 41 5/8 x 51 1/2”.

Caillebotte reportedly led what is described as a “homosocial” life. Much of his professional time, directing and mounting Impressionist art shows, and leisure time, socializing in cafés, was spent with men, many of them artists. He was preoccupied with masculinity and virility, and he never married. This led to speculation that he might have been gay, but there is no solid evidence of this.

Many of the approximately 100 paintings and drawings in this show highlight men in groups and alone, with several works portraying working class men. In another of Caillebotte’s signature works, “Floor Scrapers” (1875), we gaze upon three laborers from the artist’s point of view. All are on their knees, seen from an imperious vantage point in a room that is to become the artist’s studio. Expertly rendered to convey the intense physicality of their work, the men are kneeling on the floor with their faces down and arms extended, revealing the muscularity of their exposed torsos that befits their status as supplicants. “House Painters” (1877) reverses the angle. Two house painters, one barely visible while the other is up on a ladder pondering the job, are observed by a third man at street level. The diagonal going from the foreground figure moves up through the ladder-bound painter to the top right of the image. The more concrete diagonal of the street facing buildings has an opposite dynamic, moving from the top right just to the left of the observer, with the urban lines converging into a vanishing point.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Floor Scrapers,” 1875, oil on canvas, 40 3/16 x 57 1/16”.

Other paintings display looser, more Impressionistic brushwork. Consistent with the show’s title, many situate men, casually dressed, in settings on or near a river. Examples include “Skiffs” (1877), “Skiff on the Yerres River” (about 1877), “Angling” (1878) and “Bathers” (1878), the latter highlighting two men wearing bathing suits. Every figure’s face is mostly hidden, either obscured by a broad-brimmed hat or facing away from us. Are these men hiding something? By contrast, “Boating Party” (c. 1877-88) features a formally dressed man wearing a top hat and bow tie rowing a boat while fully facing onlookers. His handsome face, crimson lips, and hair curling beneath his hat, as described in the wall label, present subtle intimations about his sexuality.

The most salacious painting here is “Man at His Bath” (1884), which emphasizes the buttocks, back and legs of a nearly naked man. The painting was sufficiently transgressive that it was banished to the back room of an 1888 exhibition. Nearby is “Nude on a Couch” (c. 1880) of a completely naked woman, lying face up on a couch. Caillebotte, who had a mistress until his untimely death at age 45, presumably from a stroke, never exhibited this work.

Gustave Caillebotte, “House Painters,” 1877, oil on canvas, 35 1/16 x 45 11/16”.

“The Bezique Game” (c. 1881) places six dark-suited men in a dark room, all concentrating intensely on a card game known as bezique (a forerunner of pinochle). The figures are portrayals of the artist's friends, including his brother Martial. As one of the show’s catalog essays explains, “Bezique” clearly contrasts with Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (1881). That colorful, sunlight-infused painting of a party on the Seine River embodies the quintessential Impressionist style, and lifestyle, during the Belle Époque. (Caillebotte, wearing a boating hat, is seated in Renoir’s painting at the lower right.) The variance in the two paintings’ styles reveals how Caillebotte’s work differs in paint handling, subject matter, and formality from that of most Impressionists.

Two self-portraits in this exhibition, “Self-Portrait at the Easel” (1879) and “Self-Portrait” (c. 1882), convey the intense, penetrating personality traits that Caillebotte was known for. With his tireless, high-minded work ethic, Caillebotte gifted us with an extraordinary body of work created during a too-short lifetime.

Gustave Caillebotte, “The Bazique Game,” c. 1881, oil on canvas, 49 5/16 x 65 3/16”.

Liz Goldner is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009. 

Liz Goldner’s Website.

Themes+Projects, San Francisco, California

Continues through March 29, 2025

The admiration for paintings so ultra-realistic that they simulate photographs is given a witty reversal in Davey Whitcraft’s conceptual abstractions comprising “To Those Who Create the Future.” Whitcraft’s striking images — to all appearances tours de force of immaculately blended oil paint — turn out to be unframed, Dibond-mounted, square-format photos the size of medium canvases (from 36 x 36” to 60 x 60”). In a kind of sociopolitical camouflage, they mimic the look of ‘flat’ 1960s abstraction. Could they mark a return to art for art’s sake, a time when representation and message art were considered irrelevant and retrograde? Dressed up in such aesthetic disguise, Whitcraft gives us subject matter of disquieting contemporary import: lithium mines in the Atacama Desert along the coast of Chile; the landlocked and toxic Salton Sea in the Coachella Valley; and the oil fields of the scorching Mojave Desert. Of particular interest to Whitcraft is the Atacama lithium deposit, nationalized by Chile in order to protect it from experienced Russian and American strip-mining companies.

The geopolitical importance of petroleum energy and big data cannot be overstated, but the artist, who considers the geopolitical, economic, and environmental aspects of the coming lithium rush, prefers not to polemicize. Whitcraft wants viewers to find their way into these issues “at their own pace, in their own way,” rather than add to the overheated culture of complaint in which we all swim these days.

Davey Whitcraft, “Altiplánico,” 2025,

color photograph on Dibond panel, 60 x 60”.

Davey Whitcraft, “Valle de la Luna,” 2025,

color photograph on Dibond panel, 48 x 48”.

All images courtesy of Themes + Projects, San Francisco.

The paintings’ — oops, photographs’ titles denote their sources; these are, after all, landscapes, if of an unconventional nature. The colors of land and sky are combined and blended, eliminating all references to natural objects but for a hard demarcation line at the center to bottom center of the image, where dissimilar colors abut. Whitaker, who has folded his photos in the past, now employs more advanced processes and software, as well as drones. The illusion of topography results from the color mists that are grounded by faux origami pleats.

“Piedras Rojas” (Red Stones) is a rotary scan of desert oranges and purples. “Altiplánico” (High Plateau), its colors given a chiaroscuro shading, is as metallic as Fernand Léger’s early cubist works, with their polished cannons. “Valle de la Luna” (Valley of the Moon) employs a nocturnal palette of muted grays, browns and purples, possibly reflecting its dusk or sunrise shooting time. Also included are four 13 x 13” images entitled “Mino de Litio” (Lithium Mine), arranged on the wall in a grid. They are fine examples of industrial photography done artistically. 

Davey Whitcraft, “Mino de Litio I,”

2025, color photograph on Dibond panel, 13 x 13”.

Davey Whitcraft, “To Those Who Create the Future,” 2025, four-channel 4K video with stereo audio, loop time of 9 minutes and 19 seconds, musical score by Aaron Lepley and additional music by Bob Villain, 50 1/2 x 50 1/2”.

A video, “To Those Who Create the Future,” is a montage of drone shots of the desert landscape. You can sense the metamorphic and metamorphosing minerals found there, all of that trapped lithium just begging to be separated out (with the help of music by Aaron Lepley and a performance by Bob Villain). The title of the video and the show as a whole argues that creating the future by dealing with the present would be wiser than trying to restore a gilded mythical past.

Whitcraft has a complicated relationship with painting. His degrees in Media Arts (he calls it “tinkering”), Philosophy, and Critical Theory — not painting — are complemented by his experience of working with Bay Area painter Raymond Saunders, “the master of color field and gradient.” From Saunders he learned a larger lesson than technique: “My mind was blown by how interesting it was to be an artist.” Whitcraft investigates his subjects using the latest technology (Linux, computer, cinema camera, drones) and presents the results of his media research as art exhibitions. Whitcraft also enjoys painting at times, albeit he confesses, imperfectly, to work out pictorial ideas in the form of studies. Those don’t make it into the show for obvious reasons, but I understand that they garner acclaim behind studio doors from artist friends. Will they ever catch up with those photographs?

DeWitt Cheng is an art writer/critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for more than twenty years for regional and national publications, in print and online, He has written dozens of catalogue essays for artists, galleries and museums, and is the author of “Inside Out: The Paintings of William Harsh.” In addition, he served as the curator at Stanford Art Spaces from 2013 to 2016, and later Peninsula Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2020.

Lisa Yuskavage

by Jody Zellen

David Zwirner, Los Angeles, California

Continues through April 12, 2025

Naked women, the artist's studio, lurid colors, dynamic but thoughtful compositions are all elements closely associated with Lisa Yuskavage's paintings. Yuskavage packs each work, large or small, with quirky, personal narratives that engage the subject of artist and muse and, often, exaggerated representation of female sexuality. The artist is present in her most recent compositions, standing at an easel, sometimes wearing a white lab coat with a paintbrush in hand or seen near scantily clad models who taunt or tease the viewer.

Lisa Yuskavage, “Endless Studio,” 2024, oil on linen, triptych, 12 x 31”. All images courtesy of David Zwirner, Los Angeles.

In Yuskavage's paintings, the studio becomes a stage onto which scenarios are projected. In the monumental work “The Artist's Studio” (2022) — also reproduced on a giant billboard adjacent to the facade of the gallery — a cherub-faced half-nude girl stares out of the painting, dressed in a tight-fitting but also draped pink t-shirt that covers the upper portion of her body. She also wears colorful striped knee-high socks, exposing her bare thighs. She holds a bright green painter's palette that suggests, curiously, she is both artist and model. Behind her is a large painting of a landscape filled with green hills, a few orange clouds, and a single female figure — a peasant character from an earlier work, “Nel'zah’s” (2012) — offering a green plate. Toward the back of the studio, a woman sits at a table reading a book. Miscellaneous ladders, props and unfinished paintings are scattered in the space, all with gray, tan, or light brown hues, in contrast to the more finished and vivid depiction of the figure in the landscape.

Lisa Yuskavage, “The Artist’s Studio,” 2022, oil and charcoal on linen 86 x 120”.

From the Renaissance to modern times, self-portraits of the artist at work in their studio have been a common subject, as the model is an ever-present option. In some ways, Yuskavage follows in this tradition, inserting herself and prior artworks into her recent paintings. But Yuskavage often poses an ironic challenge or provocation. “Painter Painting” (2024) is a large-scale oil with the artist at its center, her back to the viewer. She is in the midst of creating a grayish portrait of a doll-like woman with huge breasts. The painting within the painting dwarfs the artist, whose head is smack in the middle of her subject's cleavage. Two sketches/studies of nudes are adhered with blue tape to the painting in progress. A small sculptural maquette of the naked woman in the painting is placed on a stool nearby. Older works surround the artist, alerting us that Yuskavage is mining her past for inspiration.

Lisa Yuskavage, “Painter Painting,” 2024, oil on linen, 94 x 77 1/4”.

The artist at work is absent in “In the Company of Models” (2024). While the studio setting is similar to that of “Painter Painting,” Yuskavage here presents not as a painter, but rather a younger version of herself as a model who emerges from a bright green wall in a like-colored dress. Though legless, her body position suggests the beginning of a formal dance. The central figure — a seductive female nude wearing nothing but beaded panties — is surrounded by stacked depictions of Yuskavage's past paintings, such as the bright yellow “Rorschach Blot” (1995). 

Lisa Yuskavage, “in the Company of Models,” 2024, oil on linen, 77 x 70”.

This exhibition, Yuskavage's first solo show in Los Angeles in 30 years, includes both large- and small-scale paintings. Seen in relation to each other, the works make informative overlaps that illustrate her process, passions and history — an audacious choice. Yuskavage recontextualizes old works by placing them in a studio setting — as if to say “this is where I began, this is where I am now, and I am happy to take you on a journey from then to now to show you what a magnificent painter I have turned out to be.” Yuskavage has a unique way of celebrating both the vulnerability and stoicism of the artist's model. She has a knack for portraying the complexities of the artist herself at work.

Jody Zellen is a LA based writer and artist who creates interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artist’s books. Zellen received a BA from Wesleyan University (1983), a MFA from CalArts (1989) and a MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1989. For more information please visit www.jodyzellen.com.

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