For years, we have known Berthe Morisot-if we have known her at all-through the work of other artists.
Edouard Manet had just met her in 1868 when he asked her to sit for him. The result was ”The Balcony,” the first of many portraits Manet would paint of Morisot. It shows a dark-haired, inscrutable young woman, leaning on a copper railing. She is intriguing, even beguiling, and yet inaccessible.
In ”Repose,” painted by Manet in 1870, Morisot is wearing the same mysterious expression, along with a billowy white dress. Plumped casually back on a dark red sofa, she exudes a sphinxlike strength that belies her doll-like posture and trappings. And in 1874, Manet painted Morisot in an engaging, sexy pose, her dark eyes meeting the viewer`s through a black lace fan. It was Manet`s last portrait of her, a wedding present to Morisot and Manet`s brother, Eugene.
So, if we thought of Morisot at all, we thought of her through association with fellow artists-not just Manet, but also Monet, Degas, Renoir, Fantin-Latour, and the poet Mallarme.
She was, however, an artist herself, a leading light in the Impressionist circle. Totally respected and accepted in her time, she participated in almost all of the Impressionist exhibitions (she missed one because she was having a baby). And Morisot and the American painter Mary Cassatt so dominated the sixth such exhibition that women, for the first time in recorded history, were singled out as the undisputed leaders of avant-garde art.
Yet historically, Morisot, along with Cassatt, has been generally regarded as a pretty footnote to the Impressionist story, a glossy piece of female fluff among the men, best suited for modeling rather than painting, more interesting for whom she knew than for what she did.
It has taken 100 years to turn to the woman herself and her work. The National Gallery of Art`s exhibit ”Berthe Morisot: Impressionist,” which was jointly organized with the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, is the only major museum retrospective Morisot ever has had.
The exhibition catalog, written by Charles F. Stuckey (recently appointed as Curator of 20th Century Art at the Art Institute of Chicago) and William P. Scott is published by Hudson Hills Press, ($45). It, along with the concurrently republished ”Berthe Morisot: Correspondence” (Moyer Bell Ltd., $19.95), reveals a woman artist as good as her male colleagues-and who often even pointed the way for them.
”In the United States, where people are Impressionist crazy, everyone knows who Van Gogh and Seurat were,” says Stuckey. ”There are musical comedies and plays about them. But if you said the word, `Morisot,` most people frankly wouldn`t know who we`re talking about.
”Here was a woman who was accepted on a par by the single greatest group of artists, a group who changed the course of art entirely and overnight. And they accepted this woman without question. It wasn`t as if she had to try out for the band, so to speak. From the word go, she had as much of a center stage position in this movement as any of them; she took all the risks with them and she remained close personal friends with them throughout all her life.”
Stuckey, who was the Curator of Modern Painting at the National Gallery before coming to Chicago and who has published monographs on Monet, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat, became interested in Morisot in a roundabout way. ”In the midst of trying to do various work on the Impressionists, I inevitably knocked up against Morisot,” he says. ”It struck me that the story had never been told. And that it was very curious that the story had never been told.”
Curious precisely because this was during the 1970s, the age of the women`s revolution. Feminism was making itself felt in all areas, including art history.
”One felt that one`s female colleagues were, in fact, going after the great untold stories of women who had left their mark and were telling them. So I wondered how it could be that they would leave this story untold. Because it just seemed to me, in a very partisan way, that this was arguably the greatest woman artist who had ever painted. And no one knew about her.”
Berthe Morisot was born in 1841, the youngest of three sisters and one brother in a privileged French family. Their mother arranged for the girls to take drawing classes. Later, one of their teachers gave Mme. Morisot a dire warning.
”Given your daughters` natural gifts, it will not be minor drawing-room talents that my instruction will achieve,” he said. ”They will become painters. Are you fully aware of what that means?”
He had a point. For middle class girls, such a course was revolutionary. Yves, the oldest sister, quickly became bored with the lessons. Edma eventually chose marriage, although her letters continually expressed regret over the loss of her art. Berthe, though, never stopped painting; yet she wrote Edma that she, too, was not entirely happy.
”This painting, this work you mourn for, is the cause of many griefs and many troubles,” Berthe wrote. ”Come now, the lot you have chosen is not the worst one.”
While Morisot expressed self-doubt in her letters, by the early 1870s she had begun to move in a certain crowd; Pissarro, Degas, Manet and Monet became her friends, and then her colleagues.
At first, the men might have looked on Berthe as more suitable for a model than an equal. Shortly after meeting the Morisot sisters, Manet said to a friend, ”Too bad they`re not men. All the same, women as they are, they could serve the cause of painting by each marrying an academician and bringing discord into the camp of the enemy.”
By the 1870s, though, Morisot began to paint remarkably strong, challenging pictures that dissolved into light and nuance. And the male Impressionists began to admire her work and even, at times, follow her lead.
Although Morisot`s letters show that she had strong second thoughts about whether she should ever marry or have children, she did in 1874 marry Eugene Manet, brother of painter Edouard. They had a daughter, Julie, who appears in many of Morisot`s paintings.
Little is known about Eugene, but according to what evidence there is, he evidently actively encouraged, supported and respected Morisot`s career.
This was not an issue for Morisot; her priorities were clear. ”Men incline to believe that they fill all of one`s life,” she wrote. ”But as for me, I think that no matter how much affection a woman has for her husband, it is not easy for her to break with a life of work.”
Nor was it easy for Morisot to separate herself from self-doubt and anxiety about her art. ”My work is going badly and this is no consolation,” she wrote Edma. ”It is always the same story. I don`t know where to start . . ..”
She often compared herself-unfavorably-with her male colleagues. However, Morisot`s inclusion as a true Impressionist-albeit the least known and least appreciated one today-has never been in doubt.
Kay Larson, art critic for New York magazine, recently described Morisot`s gifts, as evidenced in the National Gallery retrospective, as
”candor, a brilliant economy with a brush, stunning insights about color, a belief in the authority of vision, and unhesitating courage.”
During Morisot`s lifetime, the critics were not so kind to her or any of the other Impressionists. One review began, ”Five or six lunatics, one of whom is a woman . . ..” And, after attending one Impressionist exhibition, Morisot`s original teacher (the one who had warned her mother about giving girls art lessons) wrote that his heart sank when he saw her current work.
”One does not associate with madmen except at some peril,” he wrote to her mother.
Even in the Impressionist group, Morisot established her own frame of reference. She always worked small, a limitation that was due more to emotional concerns evidently than painterly ones. And she never painted men-could not, in fact, even entertain the idea of using a male model. At that time, it would have been too great of an offense against society.
Instead, Morisot`s paintings tend to show women in the privacy of their worlds. Dreamily lying back on a chaise lounge. In the midst of a toilette or looking into a hand mirror. Sewing in a garden. Pinning up their hair. Often one child is also depicted as an active equal in these scenes. It is a domestically textured world, and one of remote mystery and introspection, as evidenced by the fact that Morisot`s subjects often turn their backs towards the viewer. Their interest is engaged by what they alone can see.
”The discovery of Morisot sort of made a believer out of me,” says Stuckey. ”One would like to say, `Oh, all the feminist concerns and claims about great women artists being completely forgotten are inflated.` But, actually, when I took one little subject, like Morisot, and I had the time in my life to think about it and look into it, it turned out that these charges were not in the least exaggerated.”
Why did Morisot slip through some loophole of art history?
According to Stuckey, there are many reasons, starting with Morisot herself. ”There had been such a monumental modesty about her leading role in all this. She had never striven to claim her due; that was not what she was about as a person. So when the first histories of Impressionism were written, she was assigned a very marginal role. And it wasn`t rectified until now.”
Also, there is the simple lack of accessibility when it comes to viewing Morisot`s work.
”Most of the museums of the world do not have works by her,” says Stuckey. ”A great deal of her paintings are either in private collections or still held by her family. There is not a work by Morisot on view in the Metropolitan Museum or the Museum of Modern Art in New York or in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Chicago is lucky in that regard; the Art Institute does display work by Morisot. (The AIC collection includes her 1879 painting
”Woman at Her Toilette.”) So I think that was a problem. The feminist writers in the 1970s tended to go to subjects that were not only significant and untold, but also relatively accessible.”
And, undoubtably, some of the reasons for Morisot`s neglect are attributable to sexist attitudes. ”Part of the problem is her style, which is often categorized as `feminine,` ” says Stuckey. ”It just seems to be that in the whole 20th Century, with its emphasis on cubism and structure, as if all modern art came from the late, semi-abstract visions of Cezanne. And any artist of the late 19th Century who didn`t paint with such a priority on structure and geometry was `retardataire` in a certain way.
”But these are just habits. It`s very hard to get outside of those habits and look at the situation again. But you`ve got to start somewhere.”
Stuckey says that he never believed that the rediscovery of Morisot was going to change people`s ”habit” of sexist attitudes overnight. ”But it`s probably going to begin to change things, slowly. And you`ve got to start somewhere. That`s what I wanted to do with the Morisot exhibit and catalog-to try, in some way, to deal the deck over.”
In 1895, Morisot fell ill with pulmonary congestion and died at the age of 54.
When Renoir received a wire telling of her death, he immediately put down his brushes and rushed to the train station.
After attending the funeral, Pissarro wrote to his son, ”You can hardly conceive how surprised we all were and how moved, too, by the disappearance of this distinguished woman, who had such a splendid feminine talent and who brought honor to our Impressionist group, which is vanishing-like all things.”
The death certificate described Berthe Morisot as ”without any profession.”
