Incomparable Impressionism Coming to MFAH
By Virginia Billeaud Anderson
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Bougival, 1883, oil on canvas, Picture Fund.
All iImages courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Picture Fund. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / All Rights Reserved
Edouard Manet, Victorine Meurent, c. 1862, oil on canvas, gift of Richard C. Paine in memory of his father, Robert Treat Paine 2nd. 16 | Mv |November + December 2021
raveling in Italy and missing Montmartre, Renoir said he’d choose the ugliest Parisian girl over the most beautiful Italian. His paintings however indicate otherwise. Lise, who modeled for over twenty of them, was stunning. Suzanne and Aline were no slouches either. It’s not certain which posed for “Dance at Bougival.” The painted figure resembles both Suzanne and Aline. Renoir may have combined the features of both women. What is certain is that without entirely abandoning line and form, Pierre-Auguste Renoir used luminous color and skittery brushstrokes to render the nearly life-size dancing figures in the Impressionist style. Following a new sensibility, artists were experimenting with technique and subject matter. Thus, Renoir churned-out a color and light filled depiction of a gussied-up provincial couple shaking a leg with café patrons drinking in the background and matchsticks under foot. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston which owns “Dance at Bougival” weighed in on its steamy undercurrent. “The touch of their gloveless hands, their flushed cheeks and intimate proximity, suggest a sensuous subtext to this scene.” Hot! It landed in Houston. On November 14, 2021, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston opens “Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” an exhibition of 106 of the Boston museum’s most significant paintings and works on paper, through March 27, 2022. Ninety-one paintings and fifteen prints dating from 1830 to 1900 chart developments in French art, in which Barbizon, Impressionist and Post-impressionist artists made innovations in handling and radical subject matter to represent nature and contemporary urban life. If as Professor Jack Flam told us, Paul Cézanne had an “aversion to” using nude models, Édouard Manet on the other hand plunged in. And knocked the traditional idea of a nude as a naked pagan goddess on its ear. Manet’s nude in “Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” called “vulgar” when exhibited, stares defiantly at the viewer. More provocative, the nude in “Olympia” glares comfortably reclined with her hand over her crotch. Today, these are priceless masterworks, too precious to travel, considered steppingstones to modern art. Victorine Meurent modeled for both. Manet painted Victorine eight times between 1862 and 1874. The exhibition features two paintings Manet made of Victorine. One is a straight-forward portrait in which Victorine wears the black neck ribbon worn by the nude in “Olympia.” In the other, Victorine is a street musician departing a café, carrying a guitar, and eating cherries. Street musicians at sleazy cafés were unknown in academic art.
