EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Impressionism and Fashion

Impressionism and Fashion is the title of a new exhibition opening at Paris' Musée d’Orsay this coming Monday.  The key image on the catalogue’s cover and the Museum’s website is Manet’s Young Lady of 1866. The model, Victorine Meurend, is familiar to art lovers from her starring roles three years earlier in Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Like both of those pictures, Young Lady has odd features. Critics have long wondered why she should be wearing a casual nightdress in a nearly life-size formal portrait. It will be fascinating to see how the Museum squares that one without recourse to our understanding here.

As I have explained before, Victorine Meurend is depicted as both model and artist collapsing object and subject into one picture. The violets in Victorine’s hand are named after a color, one of the few flowers that are in both English and French, and she is about to apply paint to the surface we are looking at. The monocle in her other hand, then a male accessory, helps express the figure's androgyny while emphasizing visual perception as the painting's subject. Most significantly for the Museum’s current interest in fashion Victorine wears a nightdress because in French a nightdress is peignoir, a verbal pun on the verb to paint, peindre. 

What will the museum say? Impressionism and Fashion has as its key image a work that is not Impressionist by an artist who was not an Impressionist with a choice of costume that has little or nothing to do with fashion. If you're in Paris, enjoy it anyway. It's bound to be full of masterpieces.