In the spring of 1870, Berthe Morisot was fretting over one of her submissions to that year’s Paris Salon. Still in her twenties, Morisot was a respected painter, best known for her landscapes, and had been tutored by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the influential Barbizon school painter of fluttery fields and woodlands. She had shown in all but one of the previous six Salons, but the new work was a departure—a double portrait of her beloved sister Edma and their mother, seated together while Mme Morisot reads.
On the advice of the painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Morisot had reworked her mother’s head but was still dissatisfied. Seeking another set of eyes, she turned to Édouard Manet. He and Morisot had become friends—their families ran in the same circles, and she had served as a model (clothes on, with her mother in attendance) for his enigmatic set piece The Balcony (1868–1869). He came round to consult and, Morisot reported, thought her double portrait “very good” with the exception of the lower part of Mme Morisot’s dress. To show how it might be fixed, he grabbed some brushes and added a few accents. Then he kept going. By the time he put the brushes down, hours later, the figure of Mme Morisot had been retouched from hem to head. Berthe was mortified.
Such a situation is not uncommon. We could call it mansplainting. This particular instance, however, departs from cliché in important ways. First off, the man in question actually was an expert—not only better trained in depicting the human body (a study not easily accessed by young women of the haute bourgeoisie) but one of the great painters of the nineteenth century. Second, Morisot would herself go on to become a decisive force in the decoupling of art from naturalism. Finally, in overcoming this vexing moment, the two would establish a painterly repartee that altered the trajectory of their own work and, by extension, modern art.
“Manet and Morisot,” an extraordinarily pleasurable exhibition organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Cleveland Museum of Art, makes this case through pictures that speak not just for themselves but to one another. In San Francisco it opened with a pairing of Manet’s Balcony and Morisot’s painting The Artist’s Sister at a Window (1869). The Balcony is textbook Manet—grand in ambition, ingeniously composed, visually charismatic, and socially unfathomable. Four people (and one small dog) are arranged inside and outside open balcony doors, ignoring one another. A boy, barely visible in the shadowed interior, focuses on the coffeepot he is carrying; a mustachioed man (the landscape painter Antoine Guillemet), his expression as stiff as his shirtfront, stares off to our right; a bleary-eyed woman with a green parasol looks straight forward (Fanny Claus, Manet’s wife’s best friend). But the figure who commands our attention is the dark-haired woman seated in front, her face set in the counting-the-minutes expression of someone waiting for the action to begin: Berthe Morisot.
In paintings and photographs, she appears handsome rather than pretty, with heavy brows, large dark eyes, and a perpetual look of mild skepticism. It’s easy to see why Manet wanted to paint her, though less obvious why she would have agreed—even with clothing and a chaperone, modeling was not something nice girls generally did. But as Isolde Pludermacher points out in the exhibition catalog, doing so gave her “privileged access” to Manet’s studio, his working methods, and the atelier equivalent of watercooler conversations. The experience seems to have nudged her to take the observational skills and improvisatory touch she had honed through plein air landscapes and put them to work on domestic scenes.
The Artist’s Sister at a Window is a fraction the size of the Manet canvas, light and lithe where his is stolid and dark. And while it also features a balcony, its vantage point is reversed: Manet’s composition places the viewer somewhere in midair above the street looking into the apartment; Morisot sets us on the floor inside the apartment looking out, along with a young woman, comfortably seated and toying with a folded fan. Manet’s picture is a tour de force of invented drama and art historical allusion (he borrowed the basic setup from Goya, though Goya’s women are chatty). Morisot’s is a breezily captured moment, though beneath the gentility, fluffy fabrics, and suffused light, her composition is buttressed with verticals and intersecting diagonals that could keep a bridge up. Manet declared it a “masterpiece.”
This kind of call-and-response animates gallery after gallery. The similarities between Manet’s View of the Exposition Universelle (1867) and Morisot’s View of Paris from the Trocadero (circa 1871–1872) are self-evident: both pictures are long and low, both show a diagonal path rising from lower right, and both show the same part of Paris. Equally obvious are their differences. Her picture is again much smaller, and again she has flipped his viewpoint: he looks north across the Seine from the Champ de Mars, she looks south from the Trocadéro. On a deeper level they also have quite different agendas. Morisot’s is a fairly conventional (if beautifully painted) plein air cityscape into which two women seem to have wandered along with a little girl who stands with her back to us. Distant pedestrians and carriages are indicated with little more than flicks of the brush, like the half-present passersby in long-exposure street photographs. The people are incidental, but the place is fully present—we can see the statuary of Pont d’Iéna, the curve of reflective water, the gilded dome of the Invalides glinting on the horizon.
Manet’s city, by contrast, is little more than a nominal backdrop—“a fragmentary jumble of monuments,” as the exhibition’s curator, Emily Beeny, puts it—onto which he has pasted a parade of social types. There’s a boy in a boater walking a shaggy briard, a posh lady seated sidesaddle struggling to turn her horse, a gardener tending an array of flowers, a mysteriously anachronistic trio of soldiers in Napoleonic-era bicorn hats. Manet even throws in the hot air balloon from which Nadar took aerial photographs. As in a novel by Balzac or Dickens, each vignette is introduced separately, and the fun is in imagining the plot that will pull this cast of characters together.
Insofar as the Manet–Morisot story has been told at all, it has usually been about what she (younger and female) learned from him (older and male): her response to his balcony, her response to his view of Paris. But once “Manet and Morisot” gets going, the flow of influence looks less like a stream running downhill than like the energy display in a hybrid car—now moving this direction, now that. Take, for example, that little girl with her back to us in Morisot’s Trocadero. She has a near relation in Morisot’s Woman and Child on a Balcony (circa 1871), this time looking through a metal railing. Manet then casts a little girl with her back to us looking through iron railings, one of the two stars in The Railway (1872–1873). Morisot subsequently picks her up again and takes her to the beach for In a Villa by the Sea (1874).
Artizon Museum, Tokyo
Berthe Morisot: Woman and Child on a Balcony, ca. 1871
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Édouard Manet: The Railway, 1872–1873
The Bridgeman Art Library
Berthe Morisot: Eugène and Julie Manet in the Garden at Bougival, 1881
For all the knocking back and forth of motifs, however, Morisot’s work never looks much like Manet’s, or vice versa. He was the master of flatness and opacity, whereas her brushstrokes seem to operate like flash mobs, gathering for a moment before going their separate ways. The child in Manet’s The Railway, all dolled up in her fancy frock and earrings, is a monumental and static figure, locked in place by belching steam and the equally monumental woman beside her. When Morisot’s children look away it feels like a momentary distraction, an attitude that might change in an instant.
Each painter seems to have looked to the other for an alternative to their own instincts. What she seems to have picked up from him was an interest in human actors. What he picked up from her was the power of lightening up. His grand Boating (1874–1876) began as a picture of a solo sailor in which both the man at the tiller and the water that frames him look rock solid. But Manet later revised the composition, adding a female passenger rendered so loosely that the blue stripes of her dress detach themselves from the fabric and float in open air. Meanwhile, Morisot stuck by her own dashing brushwork in her painting of two women in a boat, Summer’s Day (Lake in the Bois de Boulogne) (1879), but borrowed Manet’s peculiar vantage point from Boating, up close but looking down (to have painted her picture en plein air she would have had to perch on the gunwale).
Manet and Morisot were of course also engaged with the work of other peers, but the intensity with which they shared ideas evinces a singular bond. Predictably, the nature of that bond has been the subject of ongoing conjecture. Were they simply colleagues? Or impassioned lovers, in spirit if not body, thwarted by bad timing and the social strictures of their time and class? With no ardently romantic correspondence or diary entries to go on, inquiring minds have sought clues in the art. It’s possible to see Manet’s sprightly 1872 portrait of Morisot in a teetering black bonnet and a violet corsage (known as a bouquet de berthe) as the work of a lover—he made three prints of the composition, though his passing the painting along to a collector suggests an unloverlike lack of sentimentality. He did give her a still life that featured violets, a closed fan, and a folded note on which we can read “A Mlle Berthe” at the top and “E. Manet” at the bottom, but this looks more like playful gallantry than a profession of passion. What is certain is that in 1874—the same year she overrode his advice and joined the first Impressionist exhibition—Morisot married his brother Eugène. She and Édouard would continue to be in and out of each other’s lives and studios until his death in 1883. But the balance shifts.
The final galleries of “Manet and Morisot” sweep along in a flurry of family life and lovely gardens, white muslin and leafy bowers. Morisot’s work continues to gain in confidence and brio, but Boating is the last of the major multifigure Manets on view. Instead we see him working smaller and taking up distinctly Morisotian themes and formats in several individual portraits of elegant women set against vaguely botanical backdrops.
As with the balconies and the views of the Seine, however, Morisot and Manet seem to be looking at the same subject from opposite sides. In Morisot’s Young Woman Dressed for a Ball (1879; see illustration on page 43), brushstrokes leap and dive around their subject, who stands in an off-the-shoulder, garlanded white dress. Flux and instability, action and reaction are everywhere. She has dressed to be seen, but her gaze shoots off to the side with a look that mixes excitement and apprehension, the pleasures and uncertainties of being on display. Morisot showed the picture—which would become the first of hers to enter a French national collection—at the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, along with a pair of new half-figure pictures titled Winter (Woman with a Muff) and Summer (Woman Beside a Window) whose evocative and elusive charms were widely praised. Morisot, the collector Charles Ephrussi wrote, “grinds flower petals on her palette” to produce “something subtle, lively, and charming—something one senses rather than sees.”
At the Salon two years later, Manet showed a portrait of the sixteen-year-old aspiring actress Jeanne Demarsy as the embodiment of spring. That picture and the similarly formatted Méry (Autumn), left unfinished at his death, have been seen as his shoulder-season rejoinder to Morisot’s Summer and Winter. Though the same Salon included his A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)—one of the most inventive, beautiful, and obstinate paintings of his career—it was Jeanne (Spring) (1881) that won critics’ hearts: “She is not a woman, she is a bouquet, truly a perfume for the eyes,” one of them wrote.
Getty Museum, Los Angeles Édouard Manet: Jeanne (Spring), 1881
“Manet and Morisot” in San Francisco gathered all four seasons together for the first time. Manet does not come out the winner. While the kimono fabric backdrop in Méry is wonderful, the face is weirdly clunky. This may not be Manet’s fault, since the picture was “finished” after his death by other hands, but even the celebrated Jeanne looks stilted beside Morisot’s Summer and Winter. Her women are caught mid-movement—one lifting her head, the other turning slightly. Jeanne and Méry, posed in the coin-like profile format of early Renaissance portraits, are stiff as mannequins.
Manet had become fascinated with female fashion, and—ever the diligent researcher—he visited couturiers and sketched ladies’ bonnets and boots in his notebooks and letters. He presents Jeanne’s ensemble, apparently of his own devising, with enough precision that a seamstress could recreate it. It’s much harder to say what the women in Summer and Winter are wearing—something crinkly and white for one and something woolly and brown for the other. Morisot’s shorthand is a byproduct of familiarity. She is invoking a world she inhabits; he is explaining one he has studied. His aim, we are told, was to present the fashion-conscious parisienne as a social type, and a case has been made for Jeanne as a more formal, Salon-suitable adaptation of Morisotian lightness. But Manet’s usual gift for ambivalent caricature has failed him. With her pert little nose and corseted hourglass figure—all tweaked toward greater exaggeration as he worked—Jeanne looks a lot like the kind of fin de siècle fashion plates you find on the walls of twee Victorian B&Bs.
Despite the initial praise, Manet’s late fashion plates have not been much loved by history. His preoccupation with haute couture was dismissed as trivial, and the spate of half-figures was seen as evidence of his reduced capabilities due to illness. (He was already in chronic pain from the neurosyphilis that would kill him, age fifty-one, in 1883.) The 2019–2020 exhibition “Manet and Modern Beauty,” organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty, with Emily Beeny as a cocurator, made a good faith attempt to rehabilitate paintings like Jeanne (which served as the catalog cover girl), in part by invoking Morisot.
That Manet was drawn to the sparkle of her brushwork—its visceral sense of decisions made in the moment—is clear. Yet nothing about Jeanne feels casual or unguarded. She wears her froufrou clothing like armor. Even the apparent spots of spontaneity have been staged: Beeny notes the “sleight of hand” with which Manet overpainted heavily worked areas “to create the illusion of bare ground visible between sparse, confident strokes of green, à la Morisot.” Instead of its vaunted effect of joyful leisure, Jeanne always strikes me as tragic—a vision of Manet, terminally ill, trying to labor his way into lightness.
Morisot too died relatively young—in her case, of influenza at fifty-four. The following year Renoir, Monet, and Degas put together an exhibition of nearly four hundred of her works. It remains the largest Morisot exhibition ever to have taken place. While Manet continued to be a permanent and prominent fixture of museum life in America and Europe, Morisot was soon written out of the history of modern art to make more room for the boys. It would be ninety-one years until her next major exhibition, “Berthe Morisot: Impressionist,” which was organized by the Mount Holyoke College Museum and the National Gallery in Washington in 1987. Another three decades would pass until “Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist,” curated by Sylvie Patry (Musée d’Orsay/Barnes Foundation) and Nicole R. Myers (Dallas Museum of Art) in 2018–2019. Since then awareness of Morisot as a primary rather than secondary figure in Impressionism—an influencer as well as influencee—has been steadily on the rise, and with it an alteration in how we think about that threshold moment of modernism.
Manet is often discussed as the transformative painter of modern life. By inserting contemporary people, attitudes, and mores into the fabric of grand manner history painting, he reshaped the genre known as “genre painting” from something quaint and reassuring into something disruptive and intellectually provocative. Yet even the infamous Luncheon on the Grass (circa 1863) is in most ways a conventional, Salon-appropriate showpiece—the Arcadian setting, the figures borrowed (as many viewers would have recognized) from Raphael’s Judgment of Paris via Marcantonio’s contemporaneous engraving. What made it scandalous wasn’t the nudity (almost everyone is nude in the engraving); it was the clothing. Once the men were given jackets and ties, the woman seated with them—no longer a goddess—was just plain naked, and the whole narrative apparatus came apart.
The practice of pushing tropes of visual representation to the breaking point remains standard procedure for contemporary art today. But the Baudelaire essay that gave us the phrase “the painter of modern life” was not about Manet or his staged disruptions of the pictorial status quo. Inspired by the illustrator Constantin Guys, it was a celebration of the artist as flaneur—a dispassionate observer of the extant urban world who attends to “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” It’s a far better description of Morisot.
Manet, even out of doors, was a studio painter—endlessly tipping his hat to artifice while luring us into the lie. His compositions are knowing plays on formulas passed down through the canon of European art. His people are consciously on public display—actors playing a role, performing for us. We don’t suspect them of having real lives. Jeanne became a Salon darling because she was indeed “not a woman.”
Morisot, even indoors, was a plein air painter. It is worth noting that she rarely had a dedicated studio. Instead, like many women, she worked in various dual-purpose spaces within the family digs. As Virginia Woolf pointed out, such situations come with obvious costs but also, for the right kind of observer, certain opportunities. Morisot’s women (and men and children) seem inevitably themselves, real people doing real people things. Manet seems to have used his brother Eugène as the model for one of the men in Luncheon on the Grass, lounging in imitation of a Raphael/Marcantonio river god. Morisot painted Eugène sitting with their daughter in a garden, looking a titch antsy, like a man running over a to-do list in his head. These differences are more than a matter of style; they communicate different relationships to the world.
One of the final works in the exhibition is also one of the most radical and disarming—a Morisot painting of two little girls and a huge blue-and-white Chinese bowl. The smaller one plunges her hands into the basin, while the older holds two sticks aloft as if fishing. A splash of orange suggests a goldfish, whether real or imaginary. Neither child smiles; this is serious business. Zigzags and curlicues of paint, applied at speed, give us just enough information to track their expressions, their gestures, the presence of floral wallpaper. Children with a Basin (1886) embodies the effort and pleasures of concentration—that of the girls intent on their task and also that of the unseen adult racing to record this snippet of time before the hands lower and the importance of the fishing expedition pops like a soap bubble.
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris Berthe Morisot: Children with a Basin, 1886
We know who the girls are: the older one is Morisot’s daughter (and Manet’s niece), Julie; the younger is Marthe Givaudan, the daughter of Morisot’s housekeeper. We also know about their porcelain fishpond: it was a wedding gift to Berthe from Édouard. Morisot never sold the painting, nor did Julie. Children with a Basin remained in the family for 110 years, when it went to the Musée Marmottan Monet, home to the largest repository of her work.
Morisot did not have Manet’s academic training in the figure. She neither built on nor undermined the pictorial logic of Western art the way he did. In that sense her work is more “superficial.” It skates across the surface of things, responding to the world as met. But her persistent openness to the unplanned presaged a different but equally important track of modernism. In and around the children and the basin you see squiggles and dashes with bare canvas breathing between them—detached, hovering marks whose relationship to representation has all but evaporated. The only thing they really represent is the presence and actions of the artist. I can’t think of another figurative artist who has matched her refusal to resolve and consolidate. But here and there you can see intimations of what artists like Joan Mitchell or Cy Twombly would be getting up to some seventy years in the future.
“Manet and Morisot” is everything a great museum exhibition should be. It brings together wonderful paintings and an intriguing thesis, while letting you look and think for yourself. The catalog is beautifully illustrated and includes an excellent historical overview by Beeny, followed by a number of more narrowly targeted essays. There’s even a double gatefold that lets us survey all the Manet paintings in Morisot’s collection to ferret out ricochets to our hearts’ content. If you care at all about Impressionism and its legacies, “Manet and Morisot” is an important show to see. She has never looked better, and he has never looked more human.