Homme au bain

For centuries the nude in the bath was almost always a woman, softened by some excuse from mythology. In 1884 Gustave Caillebotte painted a man instead, an ordinary man seen from behind, roughly toweling himself dry after stepping out of a metal tub, his wet footprints still on the floorboards and his clothes folded on a chair. There is no goddess and no story, nothing to make it respectable, just a body offered up to be looked at the way paintings had always offered a woman's. When Caillebotte sent it to an avant-garde show in Brussels in 1888, the organizers found it so improper that they pulled it from the main gallery and hung it alone in a small back room, where few visitors would stumble across it.