“Manet, Monet,” says a museum visitor to her companion in a famous New Yorker cartoon. “I hear both are correct.”
Claude Monet may be the more popular and beloved artist, but Édouard Manet is surely the more pivotal figure in the history of modern art. Last year, he got a lot of attention in the monumental “Manet/Degas” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now there’s an illuminating if more intimate exhibit — “Manet: A Model Family” — at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (through Jan. 20).
If there are none of the overwhelming masterpieces that were in New York, this Boston show still has some of Manet at his best, with significant loans from major museums around the world (including three paintings from the Musée d’Orsay) and private collections, and it’s both fascinating and deeply satisfying in the way — probably for the first time — it opens a window on the connections between Manet’s work and his personal life.
It was Curator of the Collection Diana Seave Greenwald’s idea to create an exhibit that focuses on Manet and his family — inspired by the important painting of Manet’s powerful mother in the Gardner’s own collection. Manet’s father, Auguste, a judge, was married to Eugénie-Desirée Fournier, who held the family purse strings, and it was quite a full purse. Then there were Suzanne Leenhoff and her son Léon, who became Manet’s two most frequent sitters, both before and after Leenhoff became Manet’s wife.
Greenwald explained at a press preview that although Léon’s paternity remains unknown, two of the likeliest contenders are Manet himself and his father, both of whom died from complications of syphilis. Greenwald said she leans slightly toward Manet’s father, which would make Léon both Manet’s stepson and half-brother. When Manet predeceased his mother, she regarded that her son had no legal heirs and refused to allow Leenhoff to inherit any of Manet’s fortune, but she could keep his paintings. “Model Family” indeed.
Another member of the family was the celebrated painter Berthe Morisot, whose work Manet admired and who was probably also his lover. Berthe married Manet’s younger brother, Eugène, also an artist. “Manet: A Model Family” includes Manet’s paintings of all of them except his brother, but there are a couple of Eugène’s works on paper and, more important, an enchanting Morisot oil painting of their young daughter. A lovely Manet portrait of Berthe from the Cleveland Museum looks almost unfinished in the way it shares her own lively loose brushwork.
A highlight of the exhibit is the double portrait of Manet’s parents (lent by the Musée d’Orsay) — his dignified father, sitting a little stiffly after his stroke, but with his powerful clenched hand resting on the arm of a chair. Manet’s mother looks watchfully down at him from behind, her hand in a bowl full of multicolored yarn. Was there anything she didn’t have her hand into?
And, of course, there’s the Gardner’s own portrait of Manet’s mother, looking more formidable than ever — still in black, but enough years after her husband’s death to also, subtly, be wearing jewelry. (Greenwald has actually been able to redate this painting to several years after it was originally believed to have been painted.) With major conservation (including a spiffily dusted frame) and vastly improved lighting, it now looks significantly more impressive than it did hanging in a dark downstairs room. In the Hostetter Gallery, while you’re standing in front of the double portrait, you can see Eugénie through a clever space in the temporary wall.
Leenhoff was a musician who came to the Manet residence to give piano lessons. Édouard was 17. Soon she started to pose for him, and became his most frequent human subject. In this show, there are eight pictures featuring her image, and some of them are stunning. The most brilliant (also lent by the Musée d’Orsay) started out as a portrait of Suzanne sitting on a loveseat. Her forthright, round, rosy face looks exceptionally pretty, and her white dress against the white covering of the loveseat, and the white curtains behind her are ravishing. Has anyone ever painted more dazzling, more bravura whites? Folds upon folds of white. One contemporary critic called it, synesthetically, a “symphony in white major.” Maybe eight or nine years later, Manet added the profile of a young man standing behind the loveseat, leaning on the back of it with his left hand, awkwardly bent over an open book in his right hand. It’s Léon, looking more like Suzanne’s brother than her son. The mysterious title of the painting is “Reading.”
Another, more subdued portrait of Leenhoff playing the piano (also from Musée d’Orsay), has an even more complicated backstory — one with particular ramifications for the Gardner. Manet seems to have painted it in response to a painting by his great friend Edgar Degas of Manet, almost twisted around on the loveseat, listening to his wife playing the piano. Degas gave Manet the painting, but Manet had a violent reaction. He tore it in half, leaving only traces of Leenhoff’s profile. Upset, Degas angrily took back what was left of it.
There are many guesses about Manet’s violent reaction. Was it unflattering to Leenhoff? Did Manet resent another artist painting his wife? In his own later painting, her profile at the keyboard is reminiscent of the woman playing the harpsichord in Vermeer’s “The Concert,” the most grievous loss of all the artworks stolen from the Gardner in 1990 and still not recovered. The connection may seem farfetched, but the person who owned the Vermeer before Isabella Stewart Gardner acquired it was a friend of Manet’s, and Manet saw it in Paris before it was sold. In this show, several other Manets echo a number of well-known Dutch and Flemish paintings (Rembrandt, Rubens), all of them including images of Leenhoff.
But she isn’t the whole story. Léon is also a major player. He appears in a number of Manet’s early historical imitations. A painting evasively called “Fishing” (Metropolitan Museum of Art), subtly celebrating Manet’s forthcoming marriage to Leenhoff, is inspired by the famous Rubens “Landscape with Rainbow,” in which Manet and his bride-to-be are standing on one side of a stream dressed in the costumes worn by Rubens and his wife. On the distant bank, a little boy — Léon — is fishing. In an elegant small painting called “The Croquet Party” (from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, it’s the colorful image on the cover of the excellent catalog edited by Greenwald), both a very dapper Léon and his mother, and perhaps even Manet’s mother, are among the wealthy tourists playing croquet at a seaside resort.
But the best images of Léon are in two earlier paintings devoted exclusively to him, “Young Boy Peeling a Pear” (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) and “Boy Blowing Bubbles” (Museum Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon) — both based on older works: an allegorical painting by Ribera and Chardin’s famously charming “Soap-Bubbles.”
“Boy Blowing Bubbles” is one of the most touching paintings in the show. The adolescent Léon is standing behind a low stone wall holding a small bowl and devoting his full concentration to the bubble dangling from the end of his long narrow bubble-pipe (almost like an extra-long straw). In the Chardin painting, the young bubble-blower is bent over the low wall, and a younger child is watching him. But Léon is standing up and more vulnerably alone — and his face rather than his posture is the center of our attention, in an image of the most tender (fatherly?) affection. The depiction of tenderness is not especially common in an artist who does so many other things so astoundingly.
The Gardner also has two related concurrent exhibits. There’s a remarkable little show by the late photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark, “A Seattle Family, 1983-2014” — her tough and tender images of young runaways and street people, especially a teenager whose street name is Tiny who became not only Mark’s lifelong subject but her lifelong friend (through Jan. 17).
And on the façade of the museum (through Feb. 17) hangs one more family picture, a gigantic vinyl photo collage: Mickalene Thomas’s loving portrait of her late mother, Sandra Bush. “Sandra, She’s a Beauty 2009” is the image of a strong, beautiful and open-hearted Black woman you immediately feel you want to know and can’t wait to talk to. It’s maybe the most welcoming image the Gardner has ever placed there.