The Hostetter Gallery, the space for contemporary exhibitions in the Renzo Piano–designed expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, now has an eight-year track record of programming. The exhibitions make one forget the controversy around the removal of a carriage house that the new building necessitated. They haven’t all been triumphs. The Gardner’s contemporary programming is as reliably dismaying as its historical programming is thrilling. But the highs have been superlative, well in excess of the old Italianate horse barn. Much credit for that goes to Nathaniel Silver, now Associate Director and Chief Curator at the museum. Silver organized 2018’s “Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth,” which reunited four reliquaries that had probably not been seen together since they were painted in the Quattrocento. That seemed impossible to top until 2022, when Silver curated “Titian: Women, Myth, and Power,” assembling a six-work series that the master painted for King Philip II of Spain. They likewise had not hung in the same room since they were on display in Philip’s palace in Madrid in the late 1500s.
There is now another curatorial dynamo to track at the Gardner: Diana Seave Greenwald. The museum elevated Greenwald to William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection last year. She had published, in 2021, Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art and coauthored, with Silver, the 2022 biography of the Gardner’s namesake. (There are a half dozen biographies of Isabella to date, including a title published since then, but only one has her museum’s imprimatur.) Greenwald is the chief force behind “Manet: A Model Family,” currently on display at the Gardner, and the editor and main author of its monograph.
The conceit of the exhibition is a pun on “model.” Édouard Manet’s wife and her son figure repeatedly in Manet’s images. They posed for some of his best-known works, including Boy Blowing Bubbles (1867), on loan to the Gardner from the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, and Reading (ca. 1868–73) from the Musée d’Orsay. Manet’s friend and student Berthe Morisot also posed for several paintings, until she married Manet’s brother Eugène.
As for the other sense of model, “exemplary,” the museum is making a sardonic comment with it. It quite fails to apply. Édouard’s father Auguste, a jurist, hired Suzanne Leenhoff as the Manet family’s piano teacher. She remained in that role until the late term of a pregnancy. The child’s father remains unknown. Historians have three suspects: a traveling musician by the name of Koëlla, Édouard, or Auguste. Unfortunately, there are reasons to suspect that Auguste is the most likely. The baby was christened Léon. The boy and Suzanne continued to live in the Manet household as brother and sister until the ruse became untenable. After Auguste died of syphilis, Édouard married Suzanne and took Léon as a godson. Léon’s adult name, Léon-Édouard Koëlla, looks like an attempt to contrive a respectable identity for this misbegotten boy from thin air. Nevertheless, they lived happily together until the death of Édouard, also by syphilis. At that point Édouard’s mother, Eugénie-Desirée, recognized the daughter of Eugène and Berthe as the Manets’ only legitimate heir, thereby cutting out the Leehnhoffs and making Suzanne reliant on support from Berthe and the Manet family lawyer.
The catalogue is excellent, mostly, and Greenwald has penned an anchoring essay that evinces enormous command of the germane history. She, with her subspecialty in economics—note the Painting by Numbers subtitle—steers the narrative of the Manet clan from mere soap opera to a complex appreciation of the material and legal necessities of Manet’s working life and the subsequent efforts to maintain his legacy. Excepting Hilton Als, who has a callous essay titled “Paris is A Mother” that reads like a first draft, the other contributors are just as able. Greenwald made an astute decision to involve Bill Scott, a Philadelphia-based painter whose worthy abstractions were on view in his tenth solo exhibition at Hollis Taggart in Chelsea last month. As a younger man, Scott worked in the studio of Joan Mitchell after she decamped to Vétheuil. He is thoroughly marinated in French painting. Greenwald credits him in the acknowledgments for having “lent his insights and deep knowledge of the Manet and Morisot families” and calls him “an invaluable partner” for the project. His notes on Morisot for the catalogue, especally on the Manet portrait of Morisot lent to Boston from the Cleveland Museum of Art, are points of insightful grace to which many of the rest of the catalogue authors seem to aspire.
The Cleveland loan shows Manet’s gifted hand. Scott notes Morisot’s observation that Manet “once reworked a canvas twenty-five times to achieve an image that to him appeared effortless.” The Morisot portrait gives us a clue as to what the initial pass looked like. It’s hardly perfect. The shadow delineating the throat lands hard and dirty. The break in the lips angles weirdly. The ear is oversized. But the whole of the expression is exquisite. Manet captured a sensitive incisiveness and nervousness that one believes is true to the subject. As Beth Archer Brombert recalls in her biography of Manet, Rebel in a Frock Coat (1996), Morisot’s mother wrote of Berthe, “We know all too well how she can want things and want them passionately when she puts her mind to it. She makes herself sick, that’s all.” Interestingly, the mass of the body, wrapped in fur, recalls more than anything the planarity, hachure, and exposed canvas of the later Mont Sainte-Victoire pictures of Cézanne. (Cézanne, who was only seven years younger than Manet but took longer to find his stylistic footing, claimed to want to make something solid of Impressionism. One wonders if the source of that solidity was Manet’s understanding of how to construct an Impressionist picture.) Morisot’s hair, conversely, is all curvilinear fluidity, raven black except where it catches auburn glints.
The prospect of reworking a canvas two dozen times in order to make it appear effortless would be hopeless without such an ability to make the brush dance. In point of fact, a labored Manet looks less effortless than decisive. If you know what to search for, superficially simple organizations of paint in a Manet have a visible history. But the topmost strokes that cause the forms to cohere possess a concision born of intelligent guesswork scraped away beforehand. As Walter Darby Bannard said (in Aphorisms for Artists) of the geometric abstractions of Piet Mondrian, “There may not be much in them, but there is a hell of a lot behind them.”
One such case is the aforementioned Boy Blowing Bubbles from Lisbon. For years, I have been trying to convince students that all you have to do in painting is put the right light color next to the right dark color. The comment is partially ironic, as I know from agonizing experience that they may weep blood trying to discern said colors and put them down in the necessary shapes. But one can point to it where it has been accomplished, and the hair on the boy is an example. It is not much more than a single tint of ochre juxtaposed with a single shade of ochre, with a few highlights dabbed in, but it evinces all the liveliness of a real head of hair. The hand holding the bowl of soap, when examined closely, is an indecipherable patchwork. From a distance at which the viewer can take in the whole image, it coalesces naturally, and the oblongs and smears transform into foreshortened digits. Manet didn’t invent this—the Chardin Soap Bubbles (1733–34) in the Metropolitan Museum to which the Manet is paying homage has similar notes of uncanny summary—but Manet was among the first to realize that the modern topic required a modern painterly approach. What I’m suggesting regarding Cézanne—that his stylistic innovation elevated to the surface paint handling that would have appeared as earlier layers of a typical Impressionist work—was likewise true of Manet with respect to Thomas Couture, in whose atelier Manet spent six frustrating but crucially formative years.
Manet was arguably more conscious of earlier masters than his Impressionist colleagues. His reverence for Velázquez was especially acute. This is evident in the one painting in “A Model Family” from the collection of the Gardner, the portrait of his mother, Madame Auguste Manet, from around 1866. She wears widow’s black against a dark background. It is so devoid of the usual trappings of Impressionism—high-key color, evident brushwork, and so on—that one might be challenged to articulate what makes it an Impressionist picture. Nancy Locke writes in the catalogue, regarding this work,
Modernity, for Manet . . . is the here and now, and we bear the imprint of it the way we inevitably reveal the march of years on our faces and bodies. For Manet, we are social beings, and we intersect with modernity, wittingly or unwittingly.
If that definition would make Velázquez a kind of modern, one could accept it poetically if not chronologically. Locke relates that Bernard Berenson, in a letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, likened the Manet Mme. Auguste to the Seated Scribe in the Louvre, the four-thousand-year-old stone sculpture from Egypt. Perhaps modernity has always been with us, patiently waiting for nineteenth-century Europe to give it a name.
If so, Manet was key to its articulation. He conceived Reading as a markedly different painting than the one that appears in “A Model Family.” As related in a catalogue note by Samuel Rodary, the figure of Léon, leaning in from the right edge with a book in hand, was a later addition. Radiography indicates that the couch was originally a dark color, as perhaps was Suzanne’s dress. Her left hand, which is one of the great hands of the whole run of Impressionism, was originally positioned in her lap. Light, in the form of white paint, has literally flooded what had been a dusky picture, as Manet freed himself from the Spanish Baroque. Léon’s truncation was of a piece with compositional ideas that Manet’s friend Degas had gleaned from ukiyo-e. Suzanne’s arm found its place by elimination rather than intention. “If I were asked what new language Manet was speaking,” wrote Émile Zola, “I would answer, ‘He speaks in a language which is composed of simplicity and truth.’” But it was simplicity and truth founded on shadows and complexity, much as was his family life, which by the accounts of all concerned was lived in good spirits anyway.
