At the Musée d'Orsay

 

To Paris and the Musée d'Orsay then. The opportunity to supplement a recent viewing of the paintings of Berthe Morisot at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and take in the one painting that I was sad not to see included in that retrospective, proved a lovely and instructive pleasure.

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle (1871)

Morisot's The Cradle was still hard to find. Fifteen years or so since my last and only visit to the museum, I'd somehow forgotten how ridiculously placed the great Impressionist masterpieces were, five floors up in the crowded and stifling attic of the converted railway station. Adam Gopnik, writing in 1997, suggested a cultural anti-rationale for this:  

I still find going to the Musée d'Orsay an infuriating, maddening experience … having to take the escalator up all the way to the far upper floors - a garret, in museum terms, in order to see the great pictures … It is a calculated, venom-filled insult on the part of French official culture against French civilization, revenge on the part of the academy and administration against everyone who escaped them. French official culture, having the upper hand, simply banishes French civilization to the garret, sends it to its room. What one feels, in that awful place, is violent indignation - and then an ever-increased sense of wonder that Manet and Degas and Monet, faced with the same stupidities of those same academic provocations in their own lifetimes, responded not with rage but with precision and grace and contemplative exactitude.

The New Yorker in Paris is spot on. Up I went, higher and higher, zigzagging through the bustle, pausing when it seemed rude to rush past a casually placed masterpiece, and eventually coming across Morisot's cot, thankfully not attracting any kind of significant crowd. Standing there, I thought back through the decades, and how I had been drawn towards the translucent shimmer of pink gauze, a kind of bubblegum stretched impossibly thin. The execution of this detail still dazzled, but despite falling in love with the painting back then, I realised that I'd perhaps found myself sidelining and neglecting the mother - Berthe's sister Edma Portillon - and her role in the scene.

Listening to Katy Hessel's podcast Great Women Artists, and her guest Cindy Kang, a curator at the Barnes Foundations, had drawn my attention to the ambivalence of the mother, questioning the conventional reading of 'intimacy, sweetness and protective love'. Hessel and Kang's suggestion of a tension between motherhood and duty, and the desire to hand over those duties to the nanny and get back out into the vibrant hubbub of Parisian life, struck a chord. The clutch-collar that she is wearing very much indicates that she is about to head out for the evening. And then the highlighting of a detail that is all the more resonant when you delve deeper into the biography of Berthe's sister. Both girls were from a young age talented artists and encouraged to pursue their enthusiasms. Yet when Edma married in 1868, her career effectively ceased. To approach The Cradle through that biography is to sense, not so much disappointment, but rather an intriguing unreadability worthy of La Gioconda. Is it too tenuous to suggest that Edma's right hand - tenderly and carefully placed upon the edge of the cot - is in conflict with her left - supporting a mind brimming with thoughts of roads not taken? Or certainly the anticipation of dances and dinners where it is de rigueur to wear a clutch-collar?   

If I required any further convincing of that, Renoir was about to help me out. On an adjacent wall - beyond the crowds encircling it and almost becoming part of the scene - is his gloriously noisy Dance at Le moulin de la Galette. The woman right at the centre of the crowd, leaning over her friend and smiling at the seated gentleman, is rocking a clutch-collar necklace similar to Edma's. There's even a likeness. And although Renoir's model for the Dance has been identified, the juxtaposition is still provocative, and, when you turn back to the quiet of the The Cradle, one that heightens the ambiguity and tension at the heart of that painting.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le moulin de la Galette (1876)

Berthe herself married and also had a child. Yet her genius flourished. Perhaps Edma sensed something special in her sister's work and therefore, feeling not up to to it, retreated from painting? Or perhaps domestic life was suddenly too hectic. Either way, though Berthe's genius is clearly recognised, the lack of a crowd around The Cradle, indicates that that genius is somewhat neglected. Does domesticity suffer because of an unfair perception of smallness? The Renoir crowd scenes, Monet's big beasts en plain air, and four or five rooms away Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône (and you can't argue with that, partly because you can’t get anywhere near it), seem to suggest so. What of Renoir's domesticity then? I threaded my way back through the rooms and positioned myself in front of Jeunes filles au piano.

Renoir, Jeunes filles au piano (1892)

It is truly awful, a cloying dose of kitsch that would be overly sentimental even if you found it on the cover of a Ladybird book. Its colours are meant to conjure up Fragonard, but all I can think of are rows of mason jars crammed with boiled sweets. Look at how Morisot brilliantly tackles a similar subject in the very same year.

Morisot, Lucie Leon at the Piano (1892)

It feels almost like an insult to compare them. Notwithstanding the amazing things that the colour blue is doing in this painting - I mean, just look at the extraordinary way that the light catches the black flats and sharps - there's a directness, a seriousness depicted in the task at hand that is entirely absent in Renoir's syrupy frivolity. Of young girls and their permitted hobbies, you see this seriousness in my pick of the works on display at Dulwich: Paule Gobillard Painting. Renoir's women and girls are asides; Morisot's are out to do things with vigour and aplomb, taking their art above and beyond their sex.  

Morisot, Paule Gobillard Painting (1887)

Am I being unfair to Renoir? Partially. I've already mitigated some of that criticism by saying I do like the Dance, and there are others that I have a soft spot for. Luncheon of the Boating Party always makes me smile, as my mum had a print of it on the wall of her Danish dining room. Time and propinquity give you the chance to gravitate to certain characters and develop a dislike for others: I grew quite fond of the woman leaning coquettishly over the balcony but would often find myself sneering at the boorish, bearded man in the vest. 

Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881)

Thus, these individuals - unlike many others of Renoir - live and breathe, charm and antagonise. Something of that is also at play in The Umbrellas. In London's National Gallery, I initially came to dislike this work, but gradually found myself more and more intrigued by the questioning and steady gaze of the small girl in the bottom right corner. Indeed, it's that intensity of gaze found in all of Morisot's paintings, that 'eye-on-the-object look' that I've already wrote about. Which brings me back full circle to what was drawing me in on the top floor of the Musée d'Orsay. Morisot is not a footnote to Impressionism; she is part of the full body of the movement and is more than a match for Monet and Degas, and pushes Renoir into the sentimental margins of the late nineteenth-century. 

Time to descend then and find the energy to take in Rodin, Vuillard, and perhaps best of all Pierre Bonnard, but still finding five minutes or so to spend with the actor Richard E. Grant's favourite painting, Toulouse-Lautrec's Le Lit, before hitting the elevator.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Lit (1882)

Is there a better portrayal of romantic ease and bliss than this - it's almost as if all those long, dizzying nights at the Moulin Rouge were not really what the artist was craving. As Grant writes of the painting: 

When I met my wife, she had a Laurie Anderson spiky haircut, and the woman on the left of the painting looks uncannily like her, while the other person in the bed vaguely resembles my lantern-jawed face. It feels so intimate and private; two people facing one another and clearly having a good old chinwag. Someone asked me what the secret of our long marriage was and my answer was simple - we began a conversation in 1983, and slept together in the same bed for the next 38 years, until her last earthly breath on September 2, 2021. 

That is some testament and worth more than a thousand pages of the most erudite art criticism. It caused me to think deeper about my own favourites here. Bonnard's own brand of gentle but stunning domesticity in the portraits of his wife Marthe; the strange, calming presence of Vilhelm Hammershøi's interiors; and what it was that was drawing my ten-year old boy to the fecund dreamscapes of Henri Rousseau. 

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior, Strandgade 30 (1904)

Unlike Adam Gopnik, I love that the museum is a converted railway station. Apt then to find something that truly belongs here. The word iconic has lost its lustre. Yet when you are faced with something truly worthy of that adjective, you sense the exceptionalism that it is meant to convey. Hector Guimard's Art Nouveau Métro signs are encountered on the streets and also in the Museum. We know words are beautiful, but sometimes we need a literal reminder, be this from the illuminated manuscript of a Lindisfarne monk, or the elegant design and craftsmanship of a Lyonese architect.  

Hector Guimard's iconic Métro sign

Is it any wonder that whenever I think of Ezra Pound's famous lines set in a Paris Metro station - 'The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough' - I do not see a group of people waiting for a train, but rather Guimard's sign?

Adam Gopnik's very valid complaints aside, the museum is quite splendid. The Louvre may be bigger and give you access to the greatest flowering of art that the world has ever known, but Musée d’Orsay dims the religious fervour and turns the light on in the world as we know it. You leave the Louvre and want to reach for your art criticism book; you leave Musée d’Orsay and you want to hop on the Métro, go dine at Les Deux Magots, and then stroll along the embankment of the Seine, giddy in the Parisian night.