Impressionist sensations
RADICALLY BEAUTIFUL FRENCH AVANT-GARDE PAINTINGS LIGHT UP THE MFAH
The paintings speak for themselves in the companion shows opening Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
No fancy graphics, interactive playrooms or explanatory videos plump out the space, aside from one timeline. Those embellishments would just be noise within the classic, reverential display of works by some of the most popular artists of the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
Even people who rarely go to museums can name an Impressionist artist or two — say, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh or Pierre-August Renoir. Those icons, along with their successors in the French avantgarde up to the mid-20th century, are represented in the 30 or so paintings of “Monet to Picasso: A Very Private Collection.”
But in this polite presentation, it’s ladies
first. One woman, actually, who knew she was as good with a paintbrush as any guy. “Berthe Morisot: Impressionist Original” holds the first two rooms, bringing MFAH into a conversation that has rippled through the museum world for the past year.
Following a major touring exhibition, which re-established the long-underrated Morisot as one of the founders of Impressionism and its boldest experimenter, this more intimate show of about two dozen paintings includes some of the same works while adding four from Houston that did not travel — two owned by the MFAH and two from private collections.
Born in 1841, Morisot was as successful as a female artist could possibly be during her lifetime. She dared to put off marriage for years to concentrate on becoming a professional — an unheard-of aspiration. “She was interested in the avant-garde,” curator Helga Aurisch says. “She didn’t want to be a little Salon painter or an amateur.”
Morisot’s progressive, uppermiddle-class family encouraged her and her older sister, Edma (who eventually gave up painting to marry). They had great teachers, including Barbizon master Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, who recognized the girls’ talents. One even warned their mother, “Do you realize what this means? In your upper-bourgeois milieu, this is a revolution. I might say a catastrophe.”
When Édouard Manet befriended the Morisot sisters and their family in 1868, he saw the limitations. “It is really too bad that they’re not men,” he said.
Still, Morisot became kind of a sensation during her lifetime. A few important collectors bought her work, and somewhat to her chagrin, she was hailed as a “feminine” painter who captured the grace and charm of the modern Parisienne. First accepted into the Salon in 1864, Morisot was a regular of that scene for nearly a decade, until she broke ranks and sided with the Impressionists.
A leader of the club that included Degas, Renoir, Manet and Monet, she supported and participated in all but one of their shows from 1874 to 1886. (She was ill in 1879, after the birth of her only child, Julie.) After her untimely death of pneumonia in 1895, her male artist friends mounted what is still the most comprehensive showing of Morisot’s work. But no way was the rest of 19th-century society going to take a hautebourgeois Parisienne seriously — even a leader of the avant-garde artistic and intellectual scene.
As MFAH director Gary Tinterow notes, she signed her paintings Berthe Morisot, but in society she remained “Madame Manet” — the wife of Eugène Manet, the brother of Édouard.
Because Morisot did not need to sell her art to survive, like some of her male contemporaries, it was all too easy to forget her later. So for nearly a century she disappeared into the same void as many other female geniuses, whose stories were buried by institutionalized sexism.
Morisot the movie
From the distance of the 21st century, the nuances of Morisot’s life and art still need more unpacking.
Her story begs for a Hollywood biopic with an all-star cast of dozens. Imagine what a great cinematographer could do with the lush environments of 19th-century Paris: the buzz of weekly salons; the tantalizing love story (Édouard Manet was smitten with Berthe but already married); the stresses of the 1870 Commune and 1871 Franco-Prussian War (when bombs destroyed her studio); and especially the duality of her paintings, with their many thresholds — windows, doors and balconies that suggest a world of opportunities just outside her reach.
One can even imagine the opening voiceover, as Morisot writes in her diary, “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that’s all I would have asked for — I know I am worth as much as they are.”
Any of the canvases in the MFAH show’s first room could go proudly head to head with masterpieces by Morisot’s male contemporaries. “Her truly radical technique far surpasses what Monet, Degas, Manet and Renoir were doing when they were at their most informal,” Tinterow says.
Aside from the opalescent palette and the daringly sketchy aesthetic of her canvases, what’s great about Morisot is her expression of everything Impressionism is about: the fleeting nature of time, light and life.
Some of this is captured in a technique so bold that some of the canvases look unfinished. But they’re not. “She was perfectly comfortable about leaving things blank,” Aurisch says.
More than half of her 850 or so known paintings, pastels and watercolors have female subjects. But Morisot doesn’t gaze at women like Degas, Renoir and Manet. Her figures are pensive — thinking beings, elevated to more than the sum of their frilly, fashionable dresses.
Morisot chose her subjects strategically, looking for ways to give her work a plein-air sensibility when it wasn’t always convenient to paint in the open. Those portraits of fashionable Parisiennes in their fancy, big-windowed homes also epitomized modernity. Some appropriate and update 18thcentury motifs — she was especially keen on François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who some historians believe was her great grand-uncle. That, too, was trendy. You might think of Morisot’s portraits as the Kehinde
Wiley paintings of their day.
Her figures can blend almost like apparitions into their environments, sensuously ephemeral. In the show’s first gallery, the luminous “Woman at Her Toilette” and “Young Woman Dressed for the Ball” have this quality.
Critics of her time deemed Morisot’s deft use of whites and pastels appropriately “feminine.” One review, reproduced on a gallery wall, reads now like a backhanded compliment, describing how Morisot “grinds the petals of flowers on her palette only to lay them out once more on her canvas, scattered as though by chance, in spiritual brushstrokes, full of the breadth of life.” That shimmering palette, feminine or not, still sets her apart.
Psychologically, these paintings could all be self-portraits, but Morisot’s work also speaks to a more universal 19th-century experience. Some of her best paintings feature the married Edma with her children, and they don’t look particularly happy. Morisot finally married Eugène Manet when she was 33, but she kept working, and he encouraged her. The birth of daughter Julie a few years later gave her a new and compelling modern woman to follow, from toddler to curious girl to confident teenager.
Some of the most tender compositions on display depict father and daughter together. Eugène died a few years before Morisot. Julie, orphaned at 16, would become one of her mother’s greatest champions.
One of several self-portraits Morisot painted hangs prominently in the show’s second room. Aurisch imagines that the colorful blue and red splotches on her frock were the artist’s way of giving herself an honorific medal, something she never actually received.
Progression of ‘-isms’
She is not an easy act to follow, but the companion show “Monet to Picasso” also delights the eyeballs. This is the first exhibition of an important collection compiled in the late-20th century by a couple who remain steadfastly anonymous. Consulting curator Ann Dumas sees in it a progression of “-isms” that unfolded through French avant-garde art of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. In that sense, this show adds context to Morisot’s groundbreaking work.
The hit parade unfolds via 30 works covering nearly 90 years, most of them rarely shown publicly — that illustrate how restless Impressionists and successors like Americans Mary Cassatt and Winslow Homer brought art into the Modern era.
Dumas notes how art became more individualistic as emphasis shifted gradually toward Abstraction. “The story of this exhibition is this journey,” she says.
Monet’s “Valley of the Creuse, Afternoon Sunlight,” several works by Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh occupy the first room. The subject of Renoir’s “Woman With a White Hat” looks more content than Morisot’s women.
Pointillism then comes to life with canvases by Paul Signac. More intense, vibrant Fauvism, with its dark outlines, shines in paintings by Maurice de Vlaminck.
Then images of recognizable objects begin to fracture.
Three large portraits of Picasso’s muses and wives command the room: Olga Khokhlava, Dora Maar and Jaqueline Roque. Cubist masterpieces by Juan Gris and Fernand Léger’s powerful “Two Profiles” also vie for attention.
Henri Matisse’s “Lemons Against a Pink Fleur-de-Lis Background” seems a good coda to Morisot, with its sketchy background.
Morisot would have approved.