Impressionists and the Wall of Exclusion

Edgar Degas, "Singer with a Glove"
1878 (pastel on paper)

What are we listening to this morning? Why, Lemon Jelly (Experiment #6  it's the musical log of an in-vivo experiment; neither freaky nor hokey, but weirdly cool), David Gray, and a Sparkle Horse-Danger Mouse remix. Right, and Royksopp because my ears have a steady diet of Royksopp, especially Royksopp Forever. Slow to start, I know. But gorgeous once it gets going.

I'm about 26% (according to my Kindle) through Private Lives of the Impressionists. It's an impressive book, filled with specific details on the travails of each member in the group. At left and just below, I include some images of Degas' work, some of which I remember studying in college (a period when I was far more interested in 20th century Modernism--the Futurists' dynamism, the Expressionists' angsty goodness--than looking at flowers or landscapes or women in frilly outfits). Still, I appreciated the women illuminated by theatrical footlights (like the performer at left), since gas light always gave a ghoulishly freaky cast to everything. I recall a discussion in my Impressionism course about the woman's black glove operating as a kind of visual exclamation mark to this work, while the sound wave that appears to be coming from her mouth is almost auditory.

I'm now fascinated by Degas' ability to create texture and replicate the drama of stage lighting by way of a few broad patches of pink and white against the greyish purple meant to indicate shadow. I'm assuming he used chalk pastel rather than oil pastel, which is more like a creamy crayon. But his application perfectly simulates the airy quality of tulle.  

 

Edgar Degas, "Dancers"
(pastel on paper)


Interesting to me, too, is the backstory to Berthe Morisot, who was, by all accounts, beautiful and restless. Although the book doesn't go into extensive details on the subject--perhaps because there is not sufficient concrete evidence--she was a genuine threat to Manet's wife, Suzanne. Manet, who apparently recognized his own magnetism, was flirtatious with many women, while his wife (once his mistress, who'd born his child out of wedlock, until he finally married her) brooked his womanizing with a quiet anxiety. She attempted to befriend Berthe, but Berthe had a thinly-veiled contempt for Suzanne, whom she regarded as an unequal rival for Manet's attention. Even though Morisot was every bit as engulfed in the difficulties of the Impressionists and their public vilification, she was never given this kind of attention in my Impressionism courses. More attention was paid to paintings for which she posed than paintings she executed herself.

I'm to the point in Private Lives of the Impressionists where they have organized the independent society, a move perceived as markedly political, specifically leftist in a society scarred by recent war with Prussia and ruinous civil in-fighting percipitated by rebels hoping to sieze power in Paris. Any organized group seeking to dissociate themselves from the accepted system (in this case, the Academic Salon), like the Independents (soon know by their derisively intentioned nickname, "Impressionists," thanks to a satirical article by Louis LeRoy in Charivari) was considered an expression of leftist political ideals. To add insult to injury (or so the public believed), the Impressionists did not depict edifying or didactic subjects but instead painted from real life, using what looked like unfinished brushwork. Some didn't even paint recognizable subjects, but tended towards "the primitive", like fringe-Impressionist Cezanne--who was nearly kept out of the Independents exhibition for his technique and, interestingly enough, later in life accused Van Gogh of painting like a mad man.

Sales for all of them ceased after they made this unified act of individuation from the salon system, and they and their families (many of them still growing baby by baby, year by year) all suffered for it in the short term. Unless you've studied the public reception of the Impressionists, it's hard to imagine now the height of the wall of exclusion they ran against. Again and again and again.



Savannah Schroll Guz, "Girl with
Green Eyes" 2012
(ink and colored pencil on paper)



Fall down seven times; get up eight.  Look at them now. Dead, I know, the lot of them, and if they got up now, we'd be killing zombies. I meant that metaphorically. Their paintings are on tote bags, umbrellas, and puzzle boxes in every major museum of the western world. Take that, Louis Leroy. Posterity remembers you only for your relation to the Impressionists. I wonder, though, at the mental desparation this exclusion caused the painters at the time, the depth of sadness that descended on them when they saw that rebellion came with such severe punishment (their dealer Duran-Ruel, who had been keeping many of them solvent on the most basic level, had over-purchased their work and was himself in financial straits, having to stop paying each of the artists he represented and making matters worse for all). And yet they painted on. But I suppose, what else could they do at the point? One foot in front of the other keeps you from going down all together. 

For my part, I've been doing some general doodling by the light of the TV. Here's the most recent illustration, "Girl with Green Eyes", which I started before Doc Martin (awesomeness, truly) and ended by 9 a.m. this morning.    



Whatever Happened to Victorine Meurent?

A page from the amazing
"Whatever Happened to Victorine Meurent?"
Read about the comic's artist, Victoria Morris,
at her blog here.

So, I am more or less fully recovered from my bout with the flu, and apart from a terrible coughing fit I experienced while teaching last night, I am again a fully functioning human being. And I have to say: what a delightful thing that is.

Until you're sick, you forget how fantastic it is to breathe through your nose. No, don't laugh. I'm very serious about that. I really dislike being a mouth-breather. It's behavior *affecting a British accent* unbecoming a lady. Ha!

What's this on the left, you ask? Only something totally awesome I found here: Whatever Happened to Victorine Meurent? It's a comic (this is page three, on the left, which details Victorine's early life).

Who is Victorine Meurent, you ask? Only Manet's most enchanting model. And I say enchanting because the girl had some incredible self-possession.

Whether art history likes it or not, Victorine Meurent has become one of Western art's most iconic female figures, despite the fact that this same figure was ridiculed by critics in the worst possible terms when it went on display (in painted form) in the 1870s. But who hasn't somewhere seen Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, where Victorine levels her gaze at the viewer in a way that indicates--even if she were there in person--she would neither blink nor avert her eyes. And surely you've seen Olympia, where she poses as a naked courtesan presented with a gift of flowers from a customer by her maid. These are essential works in any survey of Western art, and sadly, Victorine has likely never gotten to appreciate one iota of her fame.

In fact, Victorine was a painter herself, one who was extremely talented. She exhibited repeatedly in the Paris Salon before even Manet enjoyed acceptance there. But her work was marginalized, perhaps because she was a woman or perhaps because recognition of her face and figure in Manet's paintings created a stir that eclipsed her own professional efforts. By 1879, she had been shut out of Manet's circle because her tendency towards free love incited violent jealousies among the men (I'm sure retrospective telling has toned down the scandal, and at the time, the gossip and examples of wounded pride were much more dramatic).

The comic (again, whose page three is visible above) gives a visual history of Victorine's life, and the author (whose name I haven't been able to find...Who are you? I'd love to give you credit because what you've done is totally wonderful!) has done some amazing excavations to fill in the long informational gaps that exist in Victorine's biography.

Victorine's GLBTQ encyclopedia entry, which I also gleaned from the comic's bibliographic page, indicates that in the early 1890s, she was the "intimate friend" of a courtesan named Marie Pellegrin, but had also turned to alcoholism. Yet, she continued to paint into the early 1900s and was still listed among professional artists. Then, she lived in the suburbs of Paris with a woman named Marie Dufour, a secretary and piano teacher.

Really, period critics, even many art historians have consistently given Victorine a raw deal. I am glad to see that she is not forgotten. She is a kind of hero to me, in the same way that my favorite chain-smoking, baggy-eyed male intellectuals are. She simply was, and although I'm absolutely certain I don't know the whole story behind Victorine's emotional life, she never apologized for being Victorine that I know of. And this is something to celebrate. It really is, since pretty often, life can be tough.

When I was in graduate school, I focused on the German Modernists and my boy George Grosz (whom I realized, sort of looks like Michael...hmmm...coincidence? I don't know.), but I was also lured by the Impressionists....not so much by their painting, but by their milieu: the theater crowds; the demimonde; the horse races, the absinthe, the flamboyant and disgusting beauty of the prostitutes. All of this fascinated me. Still, the frothy atmosphere Monet offered and the ballerina tulle Degas often choked me with made Impressionism somehow less potent than the angry absurdism of the Dadaists or the outright emotionalism of the Expressionists (okay and I dug the Post-Impressionists, too, but I won't get all the swank terms out of my tackle box right now *closing the lid*).

Anyway, anyway, this, this is a really good book. I read it in graduate school: Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model & Her Own Desire. Eunice Lipton goes over to Europe and finds primary source documents in her atttempt to trace the path of Victorine. There's some self-revelation there and some "navel-gazing", but most importantly, Victorine begins to come to life again. 

It is sad that so little information still exists on Victorine. Even her paintings are largely lost, with the exception of one that sold for around $5,000 in the 1930s. Not a bad price, given that it was the beginning of the Depression. Still, no one can account for her work now, at least to my knowledge. I hope very much that a few of these paintings still exist and are just quietly waiting to re-emerge somewhere on one side of the big pond or the other.