TOLEDO – Walking through the Toledo Museum of Art’s Canaday Gallery the viewer will
likely encounter familiar faces.
Maybe it’s the boy blowing bubbles or the stylish Berthe Morisot with her bouquet of
violets. Then there’s that couple at the outdoor caf?©, the man leaning
seductively over his companion, the waiter impassive behind them. Or the mother
and daughter at the train station. The girl in her dress with the large blue
ribbon studies the trains on the other side of the iron fence as the mother
absently reads her book with a small dog asleep in her lap.
These folks as portrayed by the 19th century French painter Edouard Manet have all
become icons in the world of art.
The Toledo Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Art have brought all of them
together the children, the dogs, the writers, politicians, revolutionaries and
the artists for Manet: Portraits. The major international exhibit opens to the
general public Sunday.Tickets are $8 for adults, $5 for seniors and students,
and free for TMA members.
The combination ticket for admission to both Made in Hollywood and Manet: Portraying
Life is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and students, and free for TMA members.
This is the only North American stop. When the show closes on New Year’s Day it will
be packed up and shipped to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Bringing all these faces together wasn’t an easy task. Lawrence Nichols, the Toledo
Museum curator who worked with one of his counterparts in London to put the show
together, said Manet: Portraying Life has been in the works since 2007. When
Brian Kennedy became director he looked at what projects to pursue, and the
Manet project was worth financing. "Money follows a great idea."
The show was built around one of the Toledo collection’s treasures, Manet’s 1880
portrait of Antonin Proust. The painting was purchased by Edward Drummond Libbey
in 1924, a year before he died and bequeathed the work to the museum. Nichols
said he wanted to bring the Proust portrait together with a contemporaneous
painting "Chez La Pere Lathuille." Both were originally exhibited in
the same show, and they represent two contrasting styles of portraiture. The
Proust painting is a straight on subdued portrait of a man formally attired. The
cafe scene is free and easy and spontaneous, executed with a burst of color and
free flowing strokes.
And as in all the paintings in the show, the names of the subjects are known. That
was a restriction the curators placed on themselves, Nichols said.
"If we didn’t know who’s in the painting, we didn’t ask for it," he said.
"We wanted to have an awareness of biography. We wanted to address the
interaction between Manet and these individuals."
Photos of the subjects are displayed as well.
This is the first ever exhibit focusing on Manet’s portraits, which represent half of
the 400 known paintings by the artist.
Still for all the familiarity to contemporary viewers these paintings were
"daring" in their time, said Kennedy. They were more informal, casual,
carrying even an erotically charged, and in some cases unfinished.
Kennedy said this was not unlike the concerns over Facebook now where people worry
about how unfettered they should be in how they present themselves. That’s why
the museum is staging several other related shows in conjunction with Manet:
Portraying Life.
Manet lived through a time of revolutions – political, social and technological.
Those changes are evident in the works on display.
People had more leisure time, and paintings of capture that.
Kennedy said Manet "describes the nature of middle class life in bohemian
Paris."
It takes a certain trust to convince other museums to loan their precious treasures.
"It’s professional reciprocity based on mutual respect," Nichols said,
"and this institution has international respect to say the least."
The curator said: "Toledo is a very generous institution lending works of art,
so on those occasions when we say we’d like to borrow your X, we have good
results."
Other museums said they were interested in having the show, but that wasn’t possible,
Nichols said. "You can procure more loans if you confine the number of
venues."
As is some of the pastels in the show will not travel to London because they are so
fragile, he said. Others will take their place at the Royal Academy.
The paintings are key parts of museum collections, and it’s harder to get those
museums to let them go for longer time.
They are, after all, what viewers may expect to see when they visit a museum.
