Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Art History, San Francisco
Immediately before the American Psychoanalytic Association’s
San Francisco midwinter convention, there was a forecast of snowmageddon that
might shut down numerous airports. I
rescheduled my flight from Monday to Saturday, and my hotel was happy to accommodate
my staying a couple of extra days, so I found myself to be a footloose San
Francisco tourist. I had been there with
the family long ago, when we did things the kids wanted to do, like go to Alcatraz,
and things we dragged them to, like SFMOMA, and I had been the year before also
to the meetings, but my experience was largely limited to downtown and the
north shore. So I decided to walk from
downtown out to the Legion of Honor, a traditional art museum in the northwest
corner of the city, stopping to indulge my fountain pen and stationaryinterests in Japan town along the way.
The slice of San Francisco – Geary Street – that I traversed
felt like a bigger, more sprawlly version of two towns near me here in Ohio:
Athens and Yellow Springs. Both are
college towns and have a bit of a hippie vibe, and the housing and shops in all
three seem to have a sort of Shabby Chic, with fresh paint not seeming to be in
high demand. It is as if the choices in
color that were made a generation ago have only improved with age while fading into a comfortable, lived in tone.
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| Rodin - Christ and the Magdelin |
The Legion of Honor is approached by making a right turn through a public golf course that looks, to this non-golfers eye, to be challenging if, for no other reason, than that the changes in elevation are considerable. Had I made a left turn a little earlier, I would have gone to the DeYoung Museum of American Art. Apparently DeYoung (who, along with Hearst, had an eponymous downtown building) was competing with the benefactors of Legion of Honor. I can’t speak to who won, because the DeYoung was closed on Monday, when I intended to visit it, but the Legion of Honor is a Solid museum outlining the history of Western Art with a particular focus on a very nice collection of Rodin sculptures, including an erotic marble sculpture of Mary Magdalen bring Christ down from the cross – one that the curators note is his only overtly biblical sculpture.
But the reason to write about this museum trip is not to
describe their standing collection, but instead to highlight a special show
reimagining the relationship between Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Berthe
Morisot (1841–1895). Manet was older and
used the younger Morisot as a model, and he convinced her to marry his brother. The received wisdom is that he was her mentor
and guide as she entered into and joined the impressionist movement that Manet
had helped to found. This narrative
allowed Morisot to get somewhat lost in Manet’s shadow.
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| Manet - Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets |
The show brings together paintings and describes them as artifacts of a relationship in which Morisot pushed and propelled Manet every bit as much as he instructed her. The curators present them as peers, but my read, informed by them, was a bit different. I think that Morisot was trying to instruct Manet, an exemplar of the male gaze, in how to appreciate the female perspective. Another way of saying that is that Morisot was anticipating Freud’s female patients by about fifty years.
Freud’s patients helped Freud move from the objective point
of view of treaters of the day like Charcot, who would hypnotize his patients
and show them to his fellow neurologists to marvel at the vagaries of hysteria –
a supposedly female disorder. When Freud
listened to, instead of observing, his female patients, he discovered that the,
too, had a hysterical personality.
Indeed, that he had an entire inner world that had been unknown to him. That said, he also imposed the dominant
masculine perspective of the day on the women that he treated – and he seemed, later in his career, to recognize that he never truly was able to see the world through their eyes.
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| Charcot hypnotizing |
Similarly, Morisot had a willing student in Manet, but one who continued to value the masculine perspective, never quite being able to make the radical shift that completely taking on the female gaze might have afforded him. Like the feminists who would pick up Freud’s work – horrified by it, but also drawn to his attempts to understand women and using his insights as a springboard to more clearly articulate women’s minds – Morisot, in her own work, painted with the mind of a woman, pushing Manet forward, but also appreciating women as engaged with the world, not simply observed by it.
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| Manet - Luncheon on the grass |
Manet was a well-established painter, if one teetering on penury, when he first crossed paths with Morisot. Two of his masterpieces had shocked the Parisian art world when they were shown. He submitted The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) to the Paris Salon of 1863. It was rejected and shown in the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected). It depicts a nude model sitting in a Parisian Park with fully dressed gentlemen. While it references classical subjects, it does so in a novel way and is credited with being the first example of Modern Art. Depicting contemporaries rather than classical subjects per se or famous or important figures was part of what distinguished this from the accepted style of the time.
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| Manet - Olympia |
Manet followed this with Olympia in 1865, a depiction of a nude, but not as a chaste alabaster skinned near goddess, but, again, as a contemporary – and as a prostitute. Someone who was brashly displaying herself, even as her African servant delivers flowers from an admirer. A cat, also a symbol of female sexuality (a friend from France assures me that pussy is used to the same effect in French as in English) further underlines the overt sexuality of the painting.
So, Manet is both breaking with tradition – portraying people
as they actually are, rather than idealizing them, and he is taking a
traditional approach – the women in both of these paintings, while they observe
us observing them, are clearly on display; they are objects to be viewed,
primarily by men. This, of course, is
mirrored by Freud, who, forty or fifty years later speaks frankly with women
about their sexuality and their sexual experiences and fantasies, breaking
tradition, but retains a kind of tin ear approach to what these women are saying,
filtering their words through his world view as he describes them to his medical peers.
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| Manet- The Balcony |
In 1868, Manet meets Morisot and he begins to paint her and to admire (and edit) her work. His first portrait of her is a group painting of three people in the light and one in shadow. Morisot is the woman on the lower left of the painting The Balcony. She is a member of the upper class, and Manet is not, and he depicts her as an object – perhaps, some have speculated, of desire. The shadowed figure, by the way, is a man who is the child of Manet’s father’s (August) lover. The lover, after the death of his father, became Manet’s lover. It is not clear whether the child, then, is Manet’s half-brother or his illegitimate son, but he is an illegitimate relative.
Morisot, too, became a relative. While Manet was painting Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet
of Violets (1872), Manet successfully convincing Morisot to marry his brother,
which she happily did. He also managed,
during this time, though, to thoroughly anger Morisot. She had nearly finished a painting of her
sister and mother which she intended to enter into the Salon, but she was
dissatisfied with it. Manet came to her
studio and, on the day the people were coming to pick it up, reworked the
figure of her mother in ways that did not suit Morisot at all, but there was no
time to undo the damage. The painting
was taken to the salon with Manet’s mangling (in Morisot’s mind) of it. It was accepted and shown, but Morisot told
her mother that she would rather be at the bottom of the Seine than show the work as her own.
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| Morisot - Young woman at her window |
The art historians who put together the show in San Francisco (and it will travel to Cleveland after that, so we in Ohio can see it in our neighborhood) made a case for Morisot communicating with Manet in a variety of other ways. For instance, they maintain that her Young Woman at Her Window is a direct response to The Balcony. She is saying, in effect, what would it be like if we were to look over a woman’s shoulder – to be curious about what she sees – rather than to look at her, and therefore to be focusing on what we see? She is not just saying this about women, but also about men – much later she used the same approach to seeing what her husband saw when he was looking out the window.
It was at about this time that Morisot introduced Manet to
painting en plein-air. This was the style of working outside of the
studio and catching changing conditions of light – something that Morisot went
on to promote as a central figure in the impressionist movement. She is the artist who showed in the most
impressionist shows – more than Degas, Monet, or any of the other
impressionists. She also was central to
this revolutionary movement in a way that Manet never was, even though his step
into modernism was what allowed for the emergence of it.
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| Morisot - View of Paris from the Trocadero |
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| Manet- The Railway |
I am here about to take significant license. At the APsA conference, my research group was
presenting information about the differences between in person psychanalyses
and telehealth psychoanalyses. We
proposed that the zoom screen, or the telephone receiver mediates between the
psychoanalyst and the patient (just as the air, but also the room that the
analyst provides for an in-person meeting mediates the therapeutic relationship). The goal of analysis, we proposed, is to have
an unmediated experience – an experience of presence – with both the analyst
(to feel present not just to the person, but to their mind) and for the patient to feel present with their own
mind (to appreciate the functional elements of the mind that are usually available
only through things like symptoms more directly – to feel things that they
usually defend against).
So, I am going to try to have an unmediated experience of
the Railway – to imagine my way into the mind of the artist. He has presented us with a work of art – it is
mediating between his mind and ours. And
if I draw on Wilfred Bion, an analyst who proposed that consciousness is finite
and the unconscious is infinite, I will propose that my musings may have something
to do with the infinite process that Manet was condensing – working and reworking to
condense – in The Railway. I am fully prepared to admit that it may
actually have noting to with what was in Manet’s mind at the time, but it just
might, so here goes…
The woman in The
Railway is facing the viewer, but what she is displaying is a feeling that,
to me, speaks of world weariness. We
cannot see the child’s face, but we can imagine that she is excited about the
possibilities of life – that she may travel to places far away – that the world
is an oyster waiting to be opened. The
woman in front of us has opened her oyster and found inside a book and a
dog. They are both on her lap. They are the adventures that she has had –
and they are much more circumscribed than the little girl imagines her adventures
will be.
I think it might be going to far to think that Manet is
sympathetic to the plight of 19th century women and the constraints
that are placed on them. Perhaps closer
to home is the idea that he, himself, is more constrained than he would like in
the ways that he sees and understands the world. In two paintings painted near the end of his
life, one by Morisot and one by himself, he paints Morisot’s daughter Julie in
a classical pose atop a watering can in the family garden. Morisot paints Julie playing with the
watering can – using it as a prop in the game she is playing. Despite his ability to move art forward to be
“modern”, transitioning to engaging with the world more directly, to appreciate
it in the moment, as Morisot does, he is still than creating a staged experience of
it, the present still lies beyond his reach. He
still wants to manipulate objects rather than allowing himself, and us to be moved by
them but also to play with them (I am aware that I am asserting this despite my having played with The Railway).
Perhaps my musings are influenced by my sense of Freud. He, like Manet, was a brilliant man who
imagined the mind in ways that others had not fully done before. He is largely responsible (I think) for the
sexual revolution and for our becoming a society that is much more accepting of
the ways in which our animal roots play out in the ways that we construct
ourselves and interact with each other.
Despite this knowledge, I don’t think he was able to transcend the
limits that his own repressive background visited on him. I guess I am proposing that the male gaze is
a kind of prison that is very hard for even the greatest among us to work our way
out of…
I must also confess that I prefer the work of Manet to that of Morisot. Manet's painting was characterized by the curators as "overworked" while Morisot's is immediate. I am in the minority in my family - the reluctant wife and mother - and by the mother's report, the father, all prefer Morisot. I like the concrete - the care that Manet puts into creating a particular picture, that I can then imagine a world into over the less worked, more carefree characters that Morisot captures - or rather sketches - in the moment.
Morisot -
In England (Eugene Manet on Isle of Wight), 1875 |
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