HATS OFF TO DEGAS
Famed impressionist feted in new exhibit,
You know in advance that it’s going to be pretty — the exhibit at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor of hats from France’s “belle époque” at the turn of the 20th century, along with paintings by Degas and other masters of the women who wore, designed and sold them.
But there’s more to “Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade” than feathered, flowered and beribboned hats and colorful paintings with fluffy details. It’s more thoughtful than casual museum-goers might expect. The show delves into social and commercial changes, the roles of well-known “modistes” who designed the hats and the small army of unknown women who made them, and the millions of birds who gave their lives for the feathered trim.
If the idea seems too distant, too obscure, the exhibit opens with a startling “newsreel” from 1911 and 1912, showing a modest fashion parade of the latest hats featured at Parisian department stores, including the still-elegant Galeries Lafayette.
The exhibit, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Saint Louis Art Museum, includes about 40 hats (a few for men) displayed as if they were sculptures, and about 40 works of art from the era, not all Impressionist paintings (and not all by Degas).
The way the show is organized in the Legion of Honor galleries, it’s possible to tour the paintings, or the hats or both at once. The paintings, pastels, drawings and posters feature hats much like the ones arranged in plexiglass cases. At the same time, the hats on display seem to leap out of the artwork into the present.
The paintings by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt and other artists may not be their best-known works. But it was Degas’ big canvas “The Milliners” (circa 1898) that inspired the show, after it was purchased by the Saint Louis Art Museum for $10 million.
All of the artwork, of course, features men and women wearing hats, or hats on display, and highlights include paintings from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago and the J. Paul Getty
Museum.
The hats are from museums, too, although they must spend years in the equivalent of climate-controlled hatboxes before they are plucked out for exhibits. Several are from the Fine Arts Museums’ own collection in San Francisco. Others are from Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and, of course, Paris.
Touring the exhibit in the Legion’s downstairs galleries is like visiting a lost world: Who thinks of hats anymore? For men, at least young men, straw hats that used to be called “porkpies” are common, and for women, the African-American community has retained a stylish millinery presence. But wearing a hat is no longer a requirement when anyone leaves the house — as they were in the exhibit’s era.
There is plenty to learn about hat-making in France from about 1875 to 1914, when the outbreak of World War I upset both fashion and manufacturing. It was an era when newly invented department stories like Galeries Lafayette made hats more accessible to an expanding middle class.
Here, to begin, are bonnets and modest straw hats and then wide-brimmed hats arrayed with masses of artificial flowers in the 1890s. The flowers, we learn, were made of silk or cotton, stiffened with flour or gelatin, the petals dyed, hand-shaped, scored and crimped. They’re like confections, and you can imagine that in wet weather they would melt like a cake left out in the rain.
Like other artwork, the hats are labeled with their art material, which might be “wool felt, taxidermied spotted nutcracker heads and golden pheasant feathers.” It appears that the birds have just landed on that hat; on another, an entire tawny owl seems to have landed, died and molted.
It’s estimated that hundreds of millions of birds from Africa, South and Central America and France itself provided these feathered decorations. Hat-making wasn’t safe for humans, either. Arsenic was used in taxidermy, and in dyes, mercury was also a part of the process, and workers were exposed to other toxic chemicals and atmospheres.
The paintings and other artwork in the exhibit depict some weary hat makers as well. Degas may have been fascinated by hats (and ballet dancers, and horses, in other works), but his paintings aren’t merely decorative illustrations. They’re character studies, whether “The Milliners” with its more modern composition, or depictions of women at the theater or walking on the street.
Among the other highlights on the gallery walls are Berthe Morisot’s “Young Girl on the Grass,” a charming portrait with a hat as punctuation; Edouard Manet’s portrait of Morisot, who was married to his younger brother Eugene; and a selection of ToulouseLautrec posters, one for the “Divan Japonais” with his favorite model, the dancer Jane Avril, wearing a hat very much like a real one displayed nearby.
Men get their due in Morisot’s painting “Eugene Manet on the Isle of Wight” (wearing a straw boater) and Degas’s portrait of Zacherie Zacharian (in a bowler.) Educational note from the accompanying hat’s label: The bowler was named not for its bowl shape but for its inventors, London hat makers William and Thomas Bowler.
Visitors to the exhibit may learn a few words of French as well. What is a “garnisseuse”? Why, the woman who trims the hat with ribbons, fabric flower petals, feathers and other “garnish.”