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<\/p>\nTotal star rating: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u00bd<\/p>\n
The works: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605
The show: \u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n
Around halfway into Manet & Morisot at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the paintings of \u00c9douard Manet (1832-83) and Berthe Morisot (1841-95) begin to look surprisingly alike. The two French painters seem at this point to be looking at the same things in similar ways. The twist is that she was not inching closer to him, but he was approaching her. Even though Morisot was Manet\u2019s junior, one of his favourite models, his close friend, his admirer (though never his student) and eventually his sister-in-law through a practical marriage to his younger brother Eug\u00e8ne, she emerges at this point as a sort of artistic beacon for Manet.<\/p>\n
The convergence can be seen most dramatically in the pairing of Manet\u2019s Before the Mirror (1877) and Morisot\u2019s Woman at her Toilette (around 1875-80). His painting shows a woman in her dressing room from behind, as she gazes into a mirror and adjusts her corset. Instead of his usual palette, with those blacks and browns from Goya and Vel\u00e1zquez, Manet here chose lighter colours, like icy blues and peachy whites, and used a looser, more fluid, brushstroke\u2014all typical Morisot. This is evident in her own toilette scene, where the murky white swirls of the woman\u2019s dress continue onto the wallpaper, obliterating the clear delineation between figure and background. Despite his penchant for solid-looking forms, Manet too has let the white streaks defining the skirt spill over into the background. He seems to be taking his cue from Morisot, shifting from his realist origins to embrace a hazier, more atmospheric\u2014many would say truly Impressionistic\u2014aesthetic.<\/p>\n
The twist is that she was not inching closer to him, but he was approaching herFour seasons<\/p>\n
Soon comes an even more explicit example of Manet following in Morisot\u2019s footsteps. Among her paintings in the fifth Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1880, which he saw, was a pair of oil-on-canvas portraits titled Summer (1880) and Winter (1880), representing allegories of the seasons. Only they are modern, urban allegories, where the model\u2019s chic Parisienne fashions\u2014a ruffled silk cream-coloured blouse for summer, a dark olive coat and muff for winter\u2014announce the change in seasons. In 1881, just two years before his death from syphilis complications, Manet began work on two portraits at the same scale, of models Jeanne and M\u00e9ry. His family believed they were meant to represent Spring and Autumn, and titled them posthumously as such.<\/p>\n
Manet & Morisot makes a persuasive case that Manet created these works to complete Morisot\u2019s series, and it shows all four seasons\u2014the capstone to their artistic dialogue\u2014together for the first time. The exhibition also points to one reason why Manet\u2019s work resembled Morisot\u2019s in his final years: he favoured simpler, single-figure studio portraits and plein-air, garden paintings while he struggled with the neurological effects of syphilis.<\/p>\n
As the curator Emily A. Beeny writes in the catalogue: \u201cIn the last years of his life, as his illness restricted Manet\u2019s daily movements to his home, his studio, and the suburban houses where he spent his summers, his pictorial world came to look more like the one Morisot had always inhabited; the Paris of a late 19th-century male invalid was not so different from that of a late 19th-century lady.\u201d<\/p>\n
One challenge in organising this exhibition, which is very loosely chronological, was how to make the narrowing scope of Manet\u2019s painted world, which was initially dismissed as too frilly or feminine, seem substantial. The other, even bigger, challenge: how to pair earlier work by the two artists without overshadowing Morisot, whose paintings tend to be more intimate in scale and more subtle in their effects.<\/p>\n
The opening gallery does not have this problem. It consists mainly of Manet\u2019s keenly sensual portraits of Morisot. The centrepiece is The Balcony (1868-69), his multi-figure composition that shows a dark-eyed Morisot looking out over a green balcony railing with a serious case of ennui. (One of Monet\u2019s personal favourites, he kept this canvas until his death, when it was purchased by another lover of balcony scenes, Gustave Caillebotte.) The trouble starts in the second gallery, which contains more direct Manet and Morisot comparisons, from their city views of Paris to various harbour and beachside scenes. Here Manet\u2019s paintings eclipse hers in size, drama and power, the way an extrovert outperforms an introvert at just about any public gathering.<\/p>\n
Structural sexism<\/p>\n
It is now clear to me why curators have already delivered on Manet\/Degas, Manet\/Vel\u00e1zquez and Manet\/Monet surveys, but have taken so long to give us Manet\/Morisot. For starters, his canvases are significantly larger, reflecting the support he received from collectors and dealers, while Morisot as a woman struggled to maintain\u2014and communicate\u2014her identity as a serious artist. In his book Paris in Ruins, the art critic Sebastian Smee described both her depressive episodes and her fiercely competing demands: her decorum versus her ambition and the expectation of marriage versus her desire to remain single and single-mindedly devoted to her art. \u201cThe various threads of Berthe\u2019s predicament seemed to be flexed against each other in a self-tightening knot,\u201d he writes, offering an apt image of the binds of structural sexism. (Smee also notes that Morisot was \u201cin love\u201d with Manet, who was married, but Beeny pushes back on that assumption for lack of documentary evidence.)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Manet\u2019s The Balcony (1868-69), which depicts Morisot seated at the front<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RMN-Grand Palais\/Art Resource, NY<\/p>\n
Furthermore, Morisot\u2019s early paintings can seem sketchy and unfocused compared to Manet\u2019s bolder forms and colours. Her city view in this exhibition seems downright depressed, perhaps reflecting her trauma over the Franco-
Prussian War. Or take their beach paintings on loan from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (weirdly hung here top-to-bottom instead of side-to-side), each featuring sailboats in the distance. With minimal brushwork, Manet captures the taut curve of a mainsail shaped by the kinetic energy of the wind. Morisot\u2019s sailboats are daubs of paint bobbing about, no sense of motion or direction. As a feminist who wanted to fall in love with her work, I am sad to say the direct comparisons did not help her cause or mine. Maybe I am too conditioned by the Modernist (read: male) project of C\u00e9zanne and other Post-Impressionists, but Manet\u2019s economy of form and gesture proved startling, moving, in picture after picture, eclipsing Morisot\u2019s more diffused approach.<\/p>\n
Just one year ago the Legion of Honor hosted a larger Impressionist survey, Mary Cassatt at Work. Bringing nearly 100Cassatt works to San Francisco, it gave visitors a chance to fully inhabit and appreciate her pastel-hued and blue-tinted world of nannies nursing babies and women busy knitting. With Manet & Morisot the double focus prevents us from real immersion, until the very end. Devoted to Morisot\u2019s work after Manet\u2019s death, the final gallery is filled with paintings of her daughter Julie at different stages, from the toddler playing in the sand to the teenager playing the violin. At last, this gallery gives us the time and space to sink into the shimmery, but never fake-cheery, world that Morisot created: one where she used quick flicks of the brush to grasp at the feelings that make everyday, fleeting moments worth remembering.<\/p>\n
Manet & Morisot<\/a>, Legion of Honor, San Francisco, until 1 MarchThe show will travel to Cleveland Museum of Art<\/a>, 29 March-5 July 2026Curator: Emily A. BeenyTickets: $35 (concessions available)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Total star rating: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u00bd The works: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605The show: \u2605\u2605\u2605 Around halfway into Manet & Morisot at the Legion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[32045,32046,32044,101,103,102,104,106,105,32043],"class_list":["post-49490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-berthe-morisot","tag-edouard-manet","tag-legion-of-honor","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-the-big-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}