Vancouver Art Gallery Hosts "The Modern Woman" - Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay

Written by Kevin Griffen Sunday, 01 August 2010 21:12

VANCOUVER, B.C. — "The Modern Woman" exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery begins even before you encounter the first work of art. In the entrance foyer, the walls are painted a deep, deep blue. It's a blue with a name — downpour blue — and it continues throughout the first few exhibition rooms. Further on, the walls are a deep plum. Those chromatically generous colors envelope the viewer and offer a kind of welcoming permission to slow down and enjoy the exhibition's spectacular drawings. As an art exhibition, it doesn't get much better than "The Modern Woman: Drawings by Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Other Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay." Curated by Isabelle Julia from the d'Orsay and Thomas Padon from the VAG, the 97 works aren't just the leisure "greatest hits" of late 19th-century drawings from the d'Orsay. On view through 6 September.

The works are organized around the idea that these artists — which include Edouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro — portrayed women as they inhabited this new modern world that was being created in Paris. Women's roles were changing as the bourgeoisie enjoyed an increase in time and money for leisure pursuits. Women had more time, for example, to shop in the new department stores or hang out in cafes — without the company of men. This had never happened before and led to a certain level of anxiety among men about where all this was heading. Artists had never before depicted the domestic and public life of women like the artists of France did from about 1850 to the end of the century.

The exhibition has a few associated extras to help us understand the late 19th century in France and how truly radical and revolutionary these works were at the time. One exhibition room is about what women wore. It contains a beautiful corset and three dresses. The didactic information usefully explains how the era came to associate fashion with the idea of being a woman — a very contemporary idea.

Another room is all about the re-organization of Paris into the city of boulevards and cafes in the mid-19th century. Spaces were created where people could observe each other like never before.

Many of the works in the exhibition have never before left Paris. The pastels, for example, are extremely delicate and will likely be returned to storage after the exhibition and won't be seen again for several years. That includes Edgar Degas' "A Café on Boulevard de Montmartre," which has been described as one of the gems of the d'Orsay's entire collection.

This is the very same painting that caused a scandal in the Impressionist Salon in 1877 for so brazenly depicting prostitutes. It also upset Degas, who felt the critics and the public were focusing too much on one pastel drawing at the expense of his other paintings.

Some of the drawings are physically small but have an impact far, far greater than their size. When I turned a corner and first saw Edouard Manet's "Portrait of Nina Villard (Madame Callias)," I laughed: I couldn't believe how small it was. It could have fit into the palm of my hand with lots of room left over. The gouache and leadpoint image of Madame Callias has a strength and intensity all out of proportion to its minuscule size.

Georges Seurat's "At the Balcony" uses a minimal amount of detail to portray a woman sitting on a balcony reading. Seurat wasn't interested in mechanically reproducing exactly what his eyes were seeing: he wanted to communicate ideas about the city and about the inner state of a woman shown, once again, without a male anywhere near. Seurat has created the image with nothing but black Conté crayon on white paper yet light feels as if it's being emitted from the surface.

Renoir's "The Country Dance" is a study for his better-known painting of the same name. It's a little gem of a drawing that shows his great technical skill as a draughtsman. It depicts a man and woman embracing as they dance. Her face and surrounding area is rendered in great detail with soft, delicate lines. Moving away from her face toward the edges of the drawing, the amount of detail steadily decreases to nothing more than a single confident stroke to outline his shoes and the bottom of her dress.

"The Modern Woman" is the very first drawing exhibition by the d'Orsay. That's difficult to believe, but it comes directly from Olivier Simmat, the head of international relations for the museum. He said there's no physical space to show drawings at the d'Orsay, a museum created to show off the big Impressionist paintings. The museum is undergoing renovations to add exhibition space for drawings and photographs. (In related museum news, the Vancouver Art Gallery, which also is constrained for space, has launched a campaign to build bigger quarters in downtown Vancouver.)

He joked that it's unfortunate that Parisians will have to come all the way to Vancouver to see these drawings. ( Witten by Kevin Griffen) Visit : www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/

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