FONDATION PIERRE GIANADDA, MARTIGNY/CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
MASTERPIECE: Morisot’s Jeune Fille Cuellant des Oranges
UNITED KINGDOM SUMMER PEARLS: London's architectural gems along the banks of the Thames
MUSIC: Europe's best pop and rock gatherings
BAGPIPES: The plaintive sounds of Scotland
SUBMARIUM: Journey to the bottom of the sea FESTIVALS: Fun in the sun in West Belfast
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FRANCE and SWITZERLAND VULCANIA: Blow your top at France's volcano park
ART: Berthe Morisot, the unknown Impressionist
FESTIVALS: Aix-en-Provence has it all
ART: The Barbizon School painters come to life
ART: Take a stroll through medieval gardens of delight
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SPAIN, PORTUGAL, ITALY and GREECE SALAMANCA: The city splashes out on culture
MUSIC: God's rock stars: the singing Greek monks
FOOD: Italy's unusual culinary delights
FILM: Great outdoor viewing in Rome
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GERMANY and BENELUX HORTICULTURE: The world blossoms at Floriade
BRUGGE: Belgium's second city shines
ART: Berlin's homage to multiculturalism ART: The best of the world's artists on show at Documenta 11 DANCE: Czech twin ballerinos steal the show in Hamburg MORE ..
CENTRAL and EASTERN EUROPE ART: Yugoslavia's modern art museum is back
ART: A retrospective of Samizdat art and writing from the Communist bloc
GRAZ: Austria's little-known city of culture
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THE NORDIC REGION DESIGN: Denmark celebrates Arne Jacobsen
MUSEUM: Get a blast from the past at Stalin World
STOCKHOLM: Welcome to the Venice of the North
MUSIC: Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes on tour MORE ..
PLUS LISTINGS: Other things to see and do in each region
Two shows unveil the "feminine" yet radical work of Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot was a founding member of the Impressionists. She participated in seven of their eight exhibits, from 1874 to 1886, and her critical reviews, as well as her prices, sometimes surpassed those of her more famous cohorts — Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley. But after her death in 1895, she slipped into semi-oblivion, her reputation as an artist eclipsed by the fame of her friends and by her own renown as the haunting, dark-eyed model in an extraordinary series of 15 portraits by Edouard Manet.
Now, in a double-whammy of a restrospective show — the first in Europe since 1961 — Morisot is being given her long-deserved due. Currently at Lille's Palais des Beaux-Arts (until June 9), "Berthe Morisot 1841-1895" will reopen at the Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland on June 20 in a significantly different and greatly enlarged version, with a total of 140 paintings, drawings, pastels, watercolors, engravings and sculptures garnered from museums and, most notably, from many private collections in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Many of these pictures have not been exhibited in Europe for several generations, and at least one, a self-portrait with her daughter Julie, has not been seen in public since 1896.
Born into a wealthy bourgeois family, Morisot was hardly destined for life in the avant-garde, but by the time she was 15 she had firmly decided on an artistic career. She and her sister Edma took lessons with the academic painter Joseph Guichard, and eventually with Camille Corot. In 1868, while copying at the Louvre, the Morisot sisters were introduced to the decade-older Manet, who had already created successive scandals with his paintings of Le Déjeuner Sur L'Herbe and Olympia. Manet promptly portrayed Berthe as the central figure in Le Balcon, and during the next six years he painted 14 further portraits of her, an unprecedented series that ended only when she married his brother Eugène in 1874.
Although Manet was widely considered the leader of the "new painters," he always refused to show in their exhibits, determined to make his mark in official salons. But Morisot instinctively gravitated toward the open-air immediacy of Impressionism, gradually developing her own distinctive style: a light palette, paint almost transparently fluid, long brushstrokes rapidly applied in all directions, and a predilection for leaving parts of the canvas barely covered, leading to charges that her work looked "unfinished."
Her preferred subjects were "feminine," but also radical for her time, when history and mythology still set the academic standards: everyday scenes of young women and children in tranquil domestic activities, reading, sewing, at dressing tables or mirrors, in gardens or elegantly gowned for society balls. Everything is delicate, fragile, ephemeral, with colors melting into the air. In the several years before her death in 1895, Morisot veered off into the late-period style of her close friend Renoir, but at her best, in the 1870s and 1880s, she was perhaps the most literally "impressionistic" of them all, trying not so much to capture light as to stop time. "I want to paint fleeting moments," she said, "before they disappear forever."
Palais Des Beaux-Arts, Place de la République, 59000 Lille, France • Phone:+33 (0)3 20 06 78 00 • Website:www.mairie-lille.fr
Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Rue du Forum 59, 1920 Martigny, Switzerland • Phone:+41 (0)27 722 39 78 • Website:www.gianadda.ch
