San Francisco Legion of Honor’s Manet & Morisot exhibit examines artists’ relationship

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Slip into the Manet & Morisot exhibition at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor and you might feel like you’re eavesdropping on a pair of chatty friends. Wondering, if there’s suddenly a spark in the air.

Edouard Manet is perhaps the better known of the two. He’s really kind of the father of modern painting,” says associate curator of European paintings, Isabella Lores-Chavez, Ph.D.

Lores-Chavez walked us back through the decades-long friendship between Manet and Berthe Morisot. Blossoming during the heat of the Impressionist movement, they painted, corresponded, and influenced each other’s work. Like the motif of a child staring away from a female adult, with both artists painting their own versions back and forth.

“And so they’re intrigued by this challenge of putting these elements together, says Lores-Chavez. He seems to get it from her first. And then, Manet picks up on that motif to create this masterpiece of the railway, which is also on loan here for the exhibition.”

But if the pair are collaborators, they are also an enigma. What to make of the daughter of a bourgeois family, reclining back as the married Manet captures her dark eyes staring at him nonchalantly?

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“There’s something I think amused in her expression. But also, something a little bit daring, a little challenging. It may be the reason that he cut it down to this format, rather than showing her full length in repose, because it might have been a little too indecorous really” she suggests.

A hint of attraction, or maybe something more? The art world can be a bit divided. Whatever the nuances of their relationship, their world was filled with twists and turns. The pair remained in Paris during a communist uprising, continued influencing the free-flowing impressionists, and stayed tucked in their unique friendship. With Manet reportedly convincing Morisot to marry his own younger brother, as she was sitting for a famous portrait.

“And allegedly during the sitting, he’s, you know, persuading her to consider marrying his brother. So they’re probably having quite an intense conversation. So, really puts you in this very moment, and yet you can’t completely decode it, right? You can’t completely understand what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling,” says Lores-Chavez

Morisot would ultimately marry the younger brother and give birth to a daughter. Leaving only her work to offer clues to her decades-long friendship with her famous collaborator Manet.

And the exhibit is a unique chance to understand the two artists. The Legion gathered works from several different museums, and many are now hanging side by side for the first time in the single exhibition.