“We find ourselves faced with the only reality—despite ourselves we encourage our painters to reproduce us on their canvases just as we are, with our costumes and customs.” ~Émile Zola (1868)

Does life imitate art, or art imitate life? Addressing that very quandary, a stunningly-curated show at the Met demonstrates how to pull out all the stops, with the depth of a collection being parlayed in the interest of a good story. The exhibit, Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity takes a revealing look at the role of fashion in the works of several impressionist painters. More than 80 major figure paintings by the most notable of the period are assembled from the Met collection, along with some key loans. Paintings are presented in concert with examples of period dress, accessories, fashion plates, photographs and prints, highlighting the vital relationship between artist and subject, the vastly divergent worlds of painter and patron, and the mise-en-scene of bourgeois Paris—between 1860-1880—just then emerging as the style and cultural capital of the world.

Above, left: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) Camille (1866), Oil on canvas, 90 15/16 x 59 1/2 in. Kunsthalle Bremen, Der Kunstverein in Bremen. artes fine arts magazine

With the rise of the newly-invented ‘department store,’ the advent of prêt-à-porter (ready-made wear), and the proliferation of inexpensively-produced, illustration-rich fashion magazines, those on the forefront of the avant-garde—from artists like Manet, Monet and Renoir, to writers like Baudelaire, Mallarme and Zola—turned a fresh-eye to contemporary dress, embracing la mode as a harbinger of la modernité.

The mad scramble for social notoriety in Europe’s most urbane city played well into the hands of artists struggling to make names for themselves in the face of dramatic shifts in painting styles. By 1860, Impressionism was already making a mark on public consciousness, however controversial, as it emerged from the inertial influences of Romanticism and its proponents—the various art academies and juried events—who acted as gatekeepers for traditionalist methods of painting. Keep in mind that this was the very generation of urbanites who had personally witnessed the Prussian siege of Paris, during the humiliating Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Deprivation, disease and death had become a daily reality for rich and poor alike, in the City of Light, as enemy troops surrounded the city to starve them into submission. After France’s eventual surrender and the people’s Paris Commune uprising that followed, newly-evolving political and social forces had much to prove about French resilience and the power of commerce and culture to reinvent themselves. Bourgeois society was soon seen on the fashionable boulevards and in the parks that defined the newly-conceived urban landscape, under the autocratic direction of architect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Impressionist painters, too, scrambled to ingratiate themselves with the growing merchant and industrial classes, applying those same en plein air methods of color application and rapid brush strokes, to capture the distinctive, momentary light-filled effects in studio portraiture, as well.

Left: Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883) The Parisienne (ca. 1875) , Oil on canvas, 75 5/8 x 49 ¼ in. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Bequest 1917, of Bank Director S. Hult, Managing Director Kristoffer Hult, Director Ernest Thiel, Director Arthur Thiel, Director Casper Tamm.

As Impressionism gained credibility and authenticity in the minds of the social elite, the well-to-do sat before some of Paris’s best known artists, resolutely and patiently posing in settings that conspicuously reinforced their status. One important marker for visually representing one’s social standing was the choice of dress. According to one curator, Susan Alyson Stein, “Artists from Monet to Tissot gravitated to contemporary dress as the key to invigorating threadbare traditions with modern sentiment.”

In their various bids for capturing a distinctive treatment of their wealthy patrons, they chose full-length formats which privileged the latest styles over individual facial features, and, inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s definition of modernity—‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent—they sought to capture the ‘look of the moment.” Their guide was to consult popular carte-de-visite photographs and fashion illustrations,” Stein explains. “Such practices held sway as artists refashioned figure painting and set forth their own renditions—some designed to please, others to provoke—of the ‘women of our time, the French women, the Parisienne.’”

Right: The Latest Fashions, Expresssly Designed and Prepared for Le Moniteur de la Mode. March 1, 1887. Lithograph with hand coloring. Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

The exhibit is arranged in a series of suites, designed to read like a narrative of rapidly-changing tastes, design sensibilities and quirky fashion details (the abdomen-defying beehive corsets, alone, stand as testament to feminine objectification; the range of top hat styles seems equally unlikely, today, as a useful accessory). The combination of perfectly-preserved, floor-length, bustled dresses from the museum’s Costume Institute, along with key loans from other institutions shown in combination with the paintings, have the effect of animating both! Wandering among the displays of day dresses and evening wear—positioned in such close proximity to the figurative portraits—offers a sense of timelessness and immediacy to the personalities and players of this multi-color masquerade of affluence, so far removed from our own ‘modern’ world .

The grand scale of history seems reduced (though not diminished), but the realization that these life-sized portraits and their delicately-styled, size-four garments are just that: history on a human scale. This re-alignment of our assumptions about the masters of Impressionism and their subjects places them at eye level with us, leaving little room for aggrandizement or mythologizing. Becoming immersed in the exhibit—say,if a display case were to be opened—one might easily imagine stepping into the wardrobe on display, reinforcing a timeless, humanizing link between past and present.

Left: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) Luncheon on the Grass (central panel)  (1865–66), Oil on canvas, 97 7/8 x 85 7/8 in, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Acquired as a payment in kind, 1987.

One critic asked Claude Monet: “And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?” – “The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.” And this show is filled with light. Light flows through the windows of the salons, irradiating the jewel tones of the striped dress of Monet’s Camilla (1866); dappled light rains down like confetti on the figure in Monet Luncheon on the Grass (1865-66); it filters through rainy skies onto the broad, anonymous and sterile thoroughfares of Paris, in Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877); it blasts through the window—becoming the de facto subject of the painting—cascading over the frills of the figure‘s dress in Renoir’s casually-posed, Lise, Woman with Umbrella (1876) ; it moves like an unseen phantom to fix the images on numerous film plates on display, of men and women whose true personae are frozen for all time by this unforgiving, industrial-age invention.

Light and color truly are the subjects of this exhibition, as the various galleries are organized by fashion statement, highlighting the colors and detailing that helped distinguish them: the white dress for day; the black dress for evening; the bold stripes and colorfully-contrasting adornments—pink slippers, feathered hats, ribbon-trimmed corsets and a range of newly-invented synthetic dyes (aniline) making bold color statements fashionable in a range of the most exclusive settings. But color and frills remained the privileged domain of the gentler sex. Men’s fashions of the period maintained the austerity and severe lines of the black frock coat and gray trousers. Calfskin gloves, a top hat and cane were de rigueur for the gentleman on the street, at his place of business or in the gilded theater boxes and clubs at night. The masculine image bespoke urbanity, power and emotional detachment—the “noble grief, the ephemerality of modern public interactions,” according to Baudelaire—”of exquisite, but unexplored, encounters required of any successful city dweller.”

Women, on the other hand, remained subject to the constantly changing whims of fads and fashion, underscoring their role in French society as a misogynistic showcase for sexuality-just-beyond-reach, a work of artistic perfection and, more pragmatically, as a highly-visible symbol for the prosperity of family and spouse. Once again, Baudelaire—indulging in a bit of fantasy of his own—writes insightfully about the place of women in the social strata of the male-dominated world of ‘modern’ Paris: “Fashion should therefore be considered as the symptom of a taste for the ideal…like the sublime deformation of nature, or more like a permanent and repeated attempt at the reformation of nature.” Regarding the ritual of powdering the skin, he suggested that makeup on the face functioned like the maillot worn by dancers and actresses: both brought the female wearer nearer to the statue, that is, to “a divine and superior being.” Black kohl, which transformed the eye into a “window open to infinity,” and rouge, which added to a woman’s face, “the mysterious passion of a priestess,” were not, according to Baudelaire, attempts to imitate nature, but rather “to lift the wearer above it.”

The novelty, vibrance and fleeting allure of the latest trends in fashion proved seductive for a generation of artists and writers seeking to express the pulse of modern life in Paris, with all of its nuanced and conspicuous richness. Without rivaling the meticulous detail of society portraitists like James Tissot or Alfred Stevens, or the graphic flair of fashion plates which had become a ubiquitous fixture of society, the Impressionists nonetheless engaged in successful strategies in the making (and marketing) of their paintings of stylish men and women, seeking to reflect the spirit of the age.

The last Impressionist exhibition took place in 1886. Seurat debuted the, A Sunday on La Grand Jatte, and his pointillist technique. The Met’s version, a final study (1884), gives dramatic form to the striking, bustled silhouette of the day, also represented by two silk day dresses from the museum collection. This painting, with its static figures and frozen action, gives voice to the tenor of the time—an embodiment of dislocation, ambiguity and social isolation—an ‘as if’ world defined by fleeting images of poise and universal definitions of beauty, only attainable in a pointillist world. It is a fictional place where time seems to stand still and the human condition remains unfractured—but only when viewed from a distance. This painting announces the topical end of an era in art. The next generation of artists—the Post-Impressionists—would champion evocation over description, imagination over observation and timeless, emotional themes over the fleeting whims of fashion and social propriety.

Left: Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891), Study for ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’ (1884),.Oil on canvas, 27 1/4 x 41 in. The metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

But, in its time and place in history, Paris and its fashion statements became bell-weathers for understanding the full impact of modernism on human nature, the rapidly-shifting grounds under societal norms and the profound reach of commercialism into a newly-receptive population of conspicuous consumers. It also stood as testimony to the resilience and tenacity of artists of the day to document the facts and foibles defining a generation living in a world, where high art and high fashion would, ever-so-briefly, move hand-in-hand.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Now, through May 27, 2013

1000 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10028

Visit the Met at: http://www.metmuseum.org/

Purchase the catalogue (left) for the Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity exhibit at:

http://store.metmuseum.org/history+culture/impressionism-fashion-and-modernity/invt/ifmuchicago/