At the Gardner, ‘Inventing Isabella’ meets a modern intervention
Isabella Stewart Gardner cultivated a mystique. “Inventing Isabella,” opening at the Gardner Museum on Friday, examines her branding.
“She was a careful operator,” said Curator of the Collection Diana Seave Greenwald, who organized the show with Museum of Fine Arts Senior Curator of American Paintings Erica Hirshler.
Gardner wore a veil in public and ducked cameras. As a portrait subject, she actively collaborated with artists such as John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn. She kept some portraits from the public eye.
“I’d call it strategic withholding,” said Greenwald. The result: an aura of mystery.
When she did appear, in paintings and in public, she was canny about fashion. Along with “Fashioned by Sargent” at the MFA, “Inventing Isabella” turns the Fenway into a nexus of art and fashion.
Sargent was Gardner’s friend and frequent collaborator. She reached out to him to paint her portrait after he exhibited his notorious “Madame X” portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. Negative reviews poured in. That painting is in the MFA show, and one of Sargent’s related sketches is on view here.
“When other sitters shied away from scandal, she sought it out,” Greenwald said.
Sargent’s 1888 portrait set tongues wagging, too. Rumors circulated about Gardner’s alleged affair with a young writer, according to exhibition wall text. Her husband asked her to remove the painting from the public eye, and she agreed — in a way. She made it viewable by invitation only.
Two other exhibits at the Gardner, “Fabiola Jean-Louis: Rewriting History” and “Carla Fernández: Tradition Is Not Static,” explore intersections of history, identity, power, and culture. Fernández, a Mexican designer, crafted a mural for the museum’s façade that showcases the connections between ancient Indigenous art and today’s fashion.
Jean-Louis “pushes paper to extremes,” Greenwald said, to make paper gowns reflecting what powerful women have worn in historic portraits. In her photographs, Black women model the gowns.
“It’s an intervention, presenting Black women as powerful in positions of nobility,” Greenwald said.
One of the Jean-Louis’s rococo gowns, made with newspapers, is on view along with the photographs.
“For centuries, women have used fashion and how they are depicted to express their power and agency,” Greenwald said. “Isabella did it in the 19th century. Fabiola and Carla are recasting those narratives.”