The Cross-Dressing of Art and Couture

‘Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,’ at the Met

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity Monet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” and a white cotton piqué day dress in this exhibition at the Met. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

In name, at least, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,” the thrilling, erudite show opening to the public on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sounds like a double dose of pandering. Impressionism and fashion? The pairing portends blockbuster-bundling and seems so excessive as to be unhealthy — possibly illegal — like 32-ounce sodas. Brace for “Van Gogh and Motorcycles,” “Rembrandt and Fabergé” and “Norman Rockwell and Tim Burton.”

But fear not. In reality, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” is neither your father’s Impressionist blockbuster nor a focus group’s. With its mixture of great paintings and lavish garments and accessories — everything 19th-century French or inspired thereby — it is certain to attract multiple demographics in great numbers. But its broad allure derives from its visual fireworks, historical clarity and pitch-perfect contextualizing. It builds webs of new information and viewpoints around some of the best-known, most beloved paintings of all time, quite a few of which don’t often travel to this country.

For starters, both of the surviving panels of Claude Monet’s colossal “Luncheon on the Grass” — cut into pieces when it wasn’t finished in time for the 1866 Salon — are being shown together in this hemisphere for the first time, lent by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where the show had its debut last fall and was thronged.

In fresh, groundbreaking ways this show details the entwined rise of modern painting, modern fashion and modern (upper middle-class) life over some two dozen years of rapid change in Paris, 1862 to 1887. The period included the rise of department stores, illustrated fashion magazines and ready-to-wear clothing, but also the couturier fashion house, most notably that of Charles Frederick Worth. Black emerged even more emphatically from the weeds of widowhood to become emblematic of urban sophistication. And men and women strolled the widened sidewalks and radiating boulevards, browsing shop windows, seeing and being seen in Baron Haussmann’s new Paris, “the capital of the 19th century,” in Walter Benjamin’s inspiring phrase.

Painters and writers intent on bringing a new reality to their work were among the first to see fashion as a vital expression of modern life. Briefly in 1874, no less than the poet Stéphane Mallarmé published a fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode, and largely wrote it, too, using bylines like Mademoiselle Satin and Marguerite de Ponty.

The show tells its tale through a dazzling surround of visual culture high and low, small and large, flat and round. I recommend not missing a thing: not a pleat, ruche or lace parasol; not a painted background, glove or slipper toe; not a photograph or magazine; not a corset, fan or black choker, whether depicted or actual. Such attention reveals frequent similarities of garments (and poses) in the magazines, photographs, paintings and costumed mannequins. A result is an intense, almost hallucinatory swirl in which art and artifact continually change places, and a basic wisdom is demonstrated: any well-selected thing can illuminate any other.

The ratio of 14 dresses to 79 paintings is just right. A little goes a long way with mid-19th-century day dresses, ball gowns or summer muslins; they are as intricate as Gothic cathedrals.

Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago (where it will be seen in June), in collaboration with the Met and the Orsay, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” and its excellent catalog have been overseen by Gloria Groom, a curator of European art at the institute. The curator Susan Alyson Stein was in charge of the Met’s version, which has a completely different wardrobe from that of the Orsay show, but mostly the same paintings. These include, as a bonus, Courbet’s stunning forerunner, “Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine,” from 1856-57, with its precise rendering of the dresses and petticoats of its women of the street, flopped, exhausted, on the grass.

Ms. Stein’s crisp installation is aided by labels that excerpt the observations, both astute and nearsighted, of contemporary critics, and by vivid quotations that are sprinkled across the walls. One of the first and among the most giddy: “The Parisienne is not in fashion, she is fashion,” from Arsène Houssaye, writing in the magazine L’Artiste in 1869.

With sections titled “Refashioning Figure Painting,” “En Plein Air,” “The White Dress” and “The Black Dress,” this show limns the milieu in which the Impressionists, led by Manet and Degas, came into their own as painters of modern life, determined to portray their contemporaries and their world in a way that also radicalized their medium. Velázquez and the Spaniards served as models, but so did new means of mechanical reproduction, especially the hand-colored steel engravings, called fashion plates, often set into fashion magazines. No less than Cézanne, hardly known for his attention to haberdashery, is shown to have painted a small, nearly exact copy of one in 1871, just before his thick-handed early style exploded into separate brush marks.

Berthe Morisot uses a photograph of herself in a low-cut black evening dress, with slight changes, as the basis for her 1875 painting “Figure of a Woman (Before the Theater).” The labor required for such finery is barely hinted at, primarily in Degas’s soundless depictions of milliners and their shops.

The Impressionists shared their awareness of modern dress as an increasingly prominent expression of their times with far more conservative painters, non-Impressionists — quite abundant in this show — who wanted to paint modern life, but not in such modern ways. They sought the veracity and high finish of Ingres, but were rarely up to it. Fantin-Latour’s marvelous three-quarter portrait of Manet, the impeccably top-hatted, watch-fobbed gentleman of 1867, comes closest, in the one gallery devoted to male attire. (It leaves you wanting more.) A wide miss is Albert Bartholomé’s cloying 1881 “In the Conservatory (Madame Bartholomé),” the only painting to be shown with the actual garment it portrays.

The tension between the innovative and the staid — the Impressionists using clothes as occasions to explore paint; the loyal opposition focusing on them as things in themselves — is the show’s main engine. The artists from both sides of the aisle knew, borrowed from and competed with one another, formulating together a new combination of genre painting and portraiture, catching their subjects in the moment, yet often in a full-length, slightly larger-than-life scale.

The artists’ differences are announced by the face-off of paintings in the first gallery. The contrasts are especially apparent in Tissot’s zealously detailed 1866 “Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon,” a somewhat daring depiction of a lady of obvious high rank wearing a chic deep-pink dressing gown in the privacy of her well-appointed home, and Manet’s “Young Lady in 1866,” defined by the challenging gaze of an unnamed woman, clearly in the artist’s studio, whose even more chic dressing gown is also a pyramidal plane of robustly worked pale pink paint.

This gallery is presided over by a gray silk faille day dress from 1865-67, accessorized by the essential wool paisley shawl from India (which fell from fashion, once French manufacturers learned to make cheaper ones). The mannequin might have stepped out of Monet’s nearby 1868 portrait, “Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert,” in which the train of the gown unravels in loose brushwork resembling jagged mountain ranges. It is illuminating to see what Monet was looking at and what he did with it.

Tissot, represented by 10 canvases, more than those of any other artist, appears in nearly every gallery, becoming a cautionary leitmotif about coarsening talent. His best work is his earliest: the ambiguous 1864 “Portrait of Mademoiselle L. L.,” a dark-eyed ingénue perched on a desk in a fashionable red bolero and dark soft skirt, evoking Corot as much as Ingres with a subtle eroticism that Balthus must have envied.

While sometimes a step ahead of his more adventuresome colleagues in subject matter, Tissot is soon in rapid descent, heading for the garishly tight, treacly paintings fit for chocolate-box covers found in the show’s final gallery, where a few too many other paintings tend in this direction.

As compensation there is the alluring Haussmannian vista of Gustave Caillebotte’s immense “Paris Street: Rainy Day” (1877) and two utterly astounding day dresses by Worth, their extreme architecture (bustles) echoed in paintings by Georges Seurat, Jacques-Émile Blanche and Henry Lerolle.

The best of the wall quotations comes from Degas: “Think of a treatise on ornament for women or by women, based on their manner of observing, of combining, of selecting their fashionable outfits and all things. On a daily basis they compare, more than men, a thousand visible things with one another.”

Of course “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” is about much more than ornament, as were the women in Degas’s quotation. The show chronicles the circular flow of life and art. But its deep content may be the prominent roles women always play in culture, and it is worth noting that 10 of the 15 contributors to the catalog are women. As Elizabeth Wilson wrote in her pioneering 1985 book, “Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity,” which is curiously absent from the catalog’s extensive bibliography: “Dress is the frontier between the self and the not-self,” and fashionable dress “one of the ways in which women achieve self-expression.”

If I were to tell you that a small, economically depressed Mohawk Valley village, about 200 miles northwest of New York, is home to a museum rich in significant works by 18th- to early 20th-century American luminaries such as Gilbert Stuart, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and George Bellows, you’d probably say, as I did, “Who knew?”

The Arkell Museum at Canajoharie has now become somewhat less obscure, thanks to its loan of nine paintings—by William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam and Theodore Robinson, among others—to this summer’s popular “American Impressionism: Paintings of Light and Life” exhibition at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, about 30 miles away.

The sparsely attended Arkell recently saw an uptick in visitors thanks to this Cooperstown exposure, according to Diane Forsberg, its director and chief curator. Ms. Forsberg hopes that the recent spurt of interest in the Arkell may help her attract desperately needed financial support for a shoestring operation whose annual budget last year was down 45% from 2008. The museum currently lacks both a registrar and an education curator.

A precursor to the corporate art collections that flourished during the late 20th century, the museum opened in 1927 as the Canajoharie Gallery, established by Bartlett Arkell, founder and first president of the Beech-Nut Packing Co. (later Beech-Nut Nutrition Corp.). Arkell “did not use his collection to bolster his position in society,” according to Ms. Forsberg, and didn’t want his name on the gallery. (That happened after a 2007 expansion, 61 years after his death.) His intent, she said, was to create a refuge “filled with inspirational art that his Beech-Nut workers and all Canajoharie residents would view as their own.”

He also collected for a more pragmatic purpose—to promote his company’s products and the attractiveness of its rustic locale: After he purchased J.G. Brown’s “American Farmer” (1908), in the mistaken belief that it represented a Mohawk Valley landscape, Beech-Nut’s marketing department adapted the painting’s idealized image of a farmer leaning on a pitchfork, accompanied by his alert dog, for use in a gum advertisement that touted Canajoharie as “Flavor-Town.”

But last year the food company abandoned its longtime home for a new plant further east on the Mohawk River. Located across the street from the Arkell, the white-walled former Beech-Nut factory is a white elephant with a “For Sale” sign. “The Mohawk Valley is littered with empty manufacturing plants,” lamented the Arkell’s president, Charles Tallent, who does triple duty as the president of the adjoining local library and attorney for the village.

The Arkell’s financial footing was undermined by a 2006 flood that caused some $1.4 million in damage, fortunately sparing its art but creating a net loss of $375,000 after federal disaster aid and insurance reimbursements. The 2008 recession hit just after an $11 million expansion that added a large event space, two changing-exhibition galleries and office and storage space, but also higher operating costs. The museum is still paying off its construction debt. Desperate for income, it recently stopped offering free admission to visitors who are cardholders at the local library, which shares both the museum’s building and its governing board.

Like many recession-hit museums, the Arkell has coped by organizing temporary exhibitions from its own 480-piece permanent collection, supplemented by works from the local Arkell Hall Foundation, established by Bartlett Arkell’s sister. (The foundation lent three works of its own to the Fenimore show.) On view through Oct. 21 is an engaging display of American Impressionist watercolors and pastels, intended to complement the Cooperstown exhibition. Highlights include Mary Cassatt’s deftly sketched pastel “Portrait of Mathilde Valet” (c. 1890) and Childe Hassam’s luminous “Brush House” (1902), a pastel that shimmers and nearly dissolves in the sunlight.

The show also features a charming harvest scene, “The Pumpkin Patch” (1878), from the Arkell’s cache of 21 works by Winslow Homer. The museum is lending a tempestuous winter coastal view, “Watching the Breakers: A High Sea” (1896), to the Portland Museum of Art’s “Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine” (Sept. 22 through Dec. 30). And the Arkell hopes to mount its own Homer exhibition in 2014, in partnership with the Fenimore (which will show it first), culled from its deep collection and enriched by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s possible loan of a watercolor, “Inside the Bar” (1883), that was purchased by Bartlett Arkell and donated to the Met by his widow.

Also on view (through Jan. 5) is “Pastoral and Parkland: American Landscape Paintings,” which prominently features one of Ms. Forsberg’s favorites—George Inness’s “The Passing Shower” (c. 1860-68), a sweeping, idyllic landscape crowned by a double rainbow and gazed upon by an indolent shepherd, reclining on a grassy slope.

But for me, the most riveting display was neither of the enjoyable but qualitatively uneven temporary exhibitions. The unexpected richness of the Arkell’s collection is best appreciated in the densely hung, sky-lit, vault-ceilinged exhibition hall that formed the core of the original museum.

I was immediately arrested by a Gilbert Stuart portrait—not the Arkell’s “George Washington,” painted about 1820 (one of Stuart’s many copies of the dollar-bill image), but “Mrs. Thomas Bisse” (c. 1785), a symphony of sumptuously textured textiles, topped by a voluminous, gauzy bonnet that seemed incongruously elegant for this plain-faced matron.

An austerely attired gallery neighbor of the showy Mrs. Bisse is the austerely dressed “Portrait of Mrs. Stokes” (1903), the forthright, no-nonsense mother of the artist Thomas Eakins’s former pupil, Frank. The son deemed it a “good work, not a good likeness”—a critique often leveled at Eakins. At least this unflattering, mannish portrait survived. Eakins biographer Henry Adams wrote that the artist “gave a portrait of … Frank W. Stokes to his family, who destroyed it.”

Bartlett Arkell was drawn not only to the psychological acuity of portraiture and the soothing prettiness of American Impressionism but also to the gritty realism of the Ashcan School. Clustered together in the grand gallery are works by George Bellows, Robert Henri and George Luks. Like the bulk of Arkell’s purchases, these came from the now defunct Macbeth Gallery in New York, which specialized in American art and pioneered in exhibiting the Ashcan School’s unsparing portrayals of urban life.

In the midst of this improbable bounty, usurping an entire wall at the far end of the gallery, is a full-size copy of Rembrandt’s best-known masterwork, “The Night Watch,” which Arkell commissioned after having admired the original in the Rijksmuseum. “He wanted people to see what he had experienced when he went to Europe,” Ms. Forsberg explained. All but one other of the Arkell’s 21 Old Master knock-offs by copyist Martin Kopershoek were destroyed in the 2006 flood. (Most of the museum’s original art was, luckily, stored off-site during the expansion’s construction.)

The challenge now is to entice art lovers to experience these out-of-the-way riches firsthand. Ms. Forsberg dreams of teaming up with other art museums in the region—the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum in Utica and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse—to collaborate on cultural tourism.

“We need to let people know that this is a place to go when they’re on vacation,” Ms. Forsberg said wistfully.

-By LEE ROSENBAUM