Seeing Red, A Review 

            Paris Red is a book about seeing and being seen. The story opens with Victorine Meurant, sketching what she sees in a shop window. She is a 17-year-old girl of the streets, all want and hunger. A life of poverty that leaves her perpetually underfed combines with her craving for experience to make her vulnerable to the attentions of Edouard Manet, a somewhat predatory upper-class man of 30 whose first move is to feed the girl.

        Victorine’s story centers on her sexual awakening during her relationship with Manet. As she begins an affair with him and becomes his model, she grows used to being looked at. But she also develops her own way of looking. Always in love with color—her own red hair (Paris red?), her bottle-green boots, Manet’s ruby tie pin—and counting a notebook and drawing pencil among her few possessions, Victorine develops her nascent artistic talent by observing Manet. She studies how he uses shapes to create his compositions and learns that she needn’t paint objects in their true colors. She takes Manet’s used tubes of paint back to her room to experiment with color. When he sees her work, he tells her that she has the eye of an artist.

           While Victorine comes into sharper focus, Manet remains opaque. The author has him give his brother’s name and vocation as his own, and he never does reveal his true name. Victorine notes that he dresses down when he’s with her, scoffing at “his pretend shabbiness, as if you could put a life on with a coat”, and that behind his beard, he hides a pitted, scarred face, even as he insists that there’s only beauty in what’s real. How fortunate for him to find a girl who asks no questions, who enjoys silence.

          Still, Victorine sees Manet for who he is. She knows about his son, and the mother of that son. She understands the appeal of his secret life in the demi-monde, where he can be something other than what he is, with whomever he pleases. “He hides what he loves,” she surmises.

          The story culminates in the collaboration between artist and model for the painting, Olympia. Victorine’s contribution is to portray this courtesan not as an idealized odalisque, but as a poor girl with dirty feet and a gaze that is challenging rather than inviting. She’s thrilled when she sees the completed work, pronouncing it, “Me, but more.” This girl who does not want to be erased will be forever remembered in the painting that signals the beginning of modern art.

            In my novel, La Luministe, Berthe Morisot, an upper-class 19^th century woman, views models as immoral creatures. She is especially threatened by Victorine Meurant, the model for Manet’s most scandalous paintings. These two women at opposite ends of the social spectrum had more in common than they knew—both were artists, and both were in love with Edouard Manet. Still, their lives never intersected.

          So I looked forward to learning the story of Victorine Meurant’s life from her own point of view. How she became an artist in her own right who exhibited at the Paris Salon. How she traveled and lived in the U.S. How she died penniless, despite Manet’s promise to take care of her. But Paris Red is not the story of a woman’s life. It’s about young girl whose eyes are opened.

A model servant

            In addition to using her mother and sisters as models, Berthe Morisot also painted someone who was almost like a member of the family—her maid, Pasie.

            Berthe’s mother had taken the usual route to find her lady’s maid. She brought a teen-aged village girl back with her after a visit to her hometown in the south of France. Even with her auburn hair pulled into a simple bun, wearing a dark blue domestic’s uniform topped with a fresh white apron, Pasie was an appealing model. Berthe painted several scenes of the young maid going about her work in the dining room—clearing off the table and arranging things on the sideboard. One of these, In the Dining Room (1886) captures Pasie at the instant she turns around, inciting the family dog to yap at her twirling hem. She stirs something—furniture polish?—in a small bowl, and behind her, linens hang on the sideboard door. It is a quotidian scene, but marked by Berthe’s use of light, which floods in the windows, and her broken brushstrokes that make the background alive with movement.

            While separated by class, it’s likely that Berthe, so reserved that she was seen as aloof, was more intimate with her maid than with her social equals. Who better than the person helping you dress and arrange your hair would know which social engagements you were anticipating, and which you returned from disappointed?

 When Berthe married Eugène Manet, Pasie followed the couple to their new home. Later, when Berthe had a child, the artist depicted Pasie and her daughter, Julie, together in scenes like The Fable (1883). Julie is rapt, as she is in another scene where she watches Pasie sew. It’s clear that the maid is on informal, even friendly, terms with Julie, her little shadow.

            When lady’s maids reached the age of 30, they were typically let go to return to their villages, marry and start their own families. In La Luministe, I have Pasie choose to stay after Eugène’s death, when Berthe needs her most, until Berthe makes a decision:

I let Pasie go.

                        One day as she was helping me with the difficult task of sorting through Eugene's clothes, I asked,

          "Is your clockmaker still waiting for you?"

          She understood my meaning and burst into tears, saying. “But Madame, how can I leave you now?”

                      Tears sprang to my eyes, too, and I had to pause to restrain my emotions before I answered, “I’ve had my husband; it is your turn to be happy.”

                        It pleased me to think of Pasie standing behind the counter of an horlogerie, surrounded by chiming

           clocks and glittering pocket watches, a much more pleasant position than working from dawn to dusk at a

           bakery or grocery. I sent her off with a trousseau of my dresses and hats that I deemed too frivolous to wear as 

           a widow. Pasie would return to Toulouse, where she would marry and work next to her husband, the prettiest

          and best-dressed shopkeeper’s wife in town. 

            Almost--but not quite--like another sister--Pasie, poor girl from a provincial village—was 

immortalized by Berthe Morisot.           

My Thoughts on Heather Webb's RODIN'S LOVER

                                         

Camille Claudel in her atelier.

            Camille Claudel, who was to become Auguste Rodin's lover, was a late-19^th c. French sculptor, a woman of a particular time and place and medium. But she had much in common with women artists throughout history.

             Many women would never have had artistic training without the support of fathers who were proud of their daughters’ seemingly anomalous talent. Artemisia Gentileschi’s father, a Renaissance humanist who believed that women possessed intellect as well as souls, hired a tutor for her. That support for their feisty, income-earning daughters often dissipated when it came time to marry, however.  Even the proudest father could not change the status quo. In Rodin’s Lover, Camille’s Papa arranges for a sculpting instructor when she is 17. Later, he pays for her studio and materials. But by the time Camille is in her mid-20s, Papa changes his tune.

Damn it, Camille!...[We] want you to be settled and loved like other women. 

That is all.

            Paternal backing was often supplanted—or supplemented—by the support of a mentor. Camille Claudel's was Auguste Rodin.

            It seems obvious that two artists working together would be engaged in an on-going conversation about ideas and techniques. Sophie Tauber-Arp and Jean Arp developed Orphism together. As Camille says, in Rodin’s Lover:

                        Rodin has fashioned his works around my ideas and I have done the

                        same with his.

            But that sharing could cross the line into theft. Fathers and husbands of especially successful artists signed their names to women’s artwork in order to earn more money for those works. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s husband, a mediocre artist, signed his name to her superior paintings in order to improve his own artistic reputation. And art gallery owners were also guilty of fudging the facts. Paintings formerly attributed to Franz Hals, once cleaned, revealed the distinctive signature of 17^th c. Dutch artist Judith Leyster.

            Here is how author Heather Webb describes the moment when Camille discovers that her works have been appropriated by Rodin:

And then she saw them—her Young Girl with a Sheaf, but it was called

Galatée, and her Slave bust was now Tête de Rieur. She froze.

Auguste had stolen her ideas and created his own exact replicas.

Girl with a Sheaf, Claudel

Galatea, Rodin

    

        Misattribution and appropriation, added to the onus of living outside a woman's socially accepted role. Two artists of equal genius, one eclipsed by her partner’s colossal presence. Is it any wonder that Camille Claudel ended up in an asylum? Sadly, the story of Rodin’s Lover was all too common in the history of women artists.

            

Berthe Morisot's paintings of her daughter, Julie Manet

       Images of fashionable bourgeois women were Berthe Morisot’s métier. She relied on her sister Edma and her friends to sit for many such paintings. But when her daughter, Julie, was born on November 14, 1878, she became her mother’s favorite model. Here are representative paintings from each of five stages of Julie’s life. The accompanying quotes are from my historical novel, La Luministe.

1. Here’s my description of Julie’s first appearance, with Angèle, Berthe’s seconde mere:

                                 The Wetnurse, 1879

"As soon as I felt myself again, I began to make paintings of my baby, relying on watercolors in order to work faster. The first fine day of spring, I set up Julie and Angèle in the back garden. As always, I wanted to show my subjects surrounded by space and light. Angèle was a cloud of white in a whirling sea of green. Only her umbrella thrown to one side and her straw hat on the other anchored her to the earth. Perspective and modeling seemed beside the point."

2.  When Julie reached toddlerhood, Berthe used hastily scribbled pastels rather than oils to capture her daughter. One such work, The Veranda, depicts only a discarded     tea set and an empty chair; Julie had already made her escape.

"From then on, Julie was my primary model. When she grew to be a toddler, I showed her holding her doll, or floating her toy boat in the lake in the Bois. She became an angelic, round-faced child, if a sometimes impatient model."

                    Girl with Doll (Julie Manet), 1882

3.  A series of paintings of Julie and her father, Eugene Manet, is especially affecting when you remember that Eugene often cared for Julie so that Berthe could paint. Of course, when Berthe painted her family, in her own way she was a part of the family portrait.

"I tried to capture the kind of father Eugène was to his daughter in the painting I made one summer of the two of them in the garden at le Mesnil. Eugène, in his summer hat, was reading to little Julie as she sat watching her red toy boat drift around a small pond. The boat—the center of the composition—was for my enjoyment, reminding me of the boats of Lorient, Cherbourg, the Isle of Wight, Nice. My little family was the calm in a whirling composition, cocooned in a circle of green and yellow leaves dappled with white light."

     Eugene and Julie in Bougival

4. Berthe and Julie were inseparable. Berthe taught her daughter the alphabet, using a book she illustrated. They often drew or painted side by side.

The Drawing Lesson

5.  After Eugene Manet’s death, Berthe created a series of portraits of Julie grieving for her father. These works coincided with Berthe’s return to Renaissance painting techniques—rich hues and long brushstrokes that were perfect for portraying the willowy young woman that 16-year-old Julie had become.

"Laërtes sat with me during hours of mourning, silent except for an occasional shivering sigh."

                                           Julie Manet and her Greyhound, Laertes, 1893