Berthe Morisot is considered a founding member of the “Impressionist” art movement. The most notable milestone in her career was when in 1874, one of the French Impressionist artist’s paintings entered Paris’s Musée de Luxembourg.
The Musée d’Orsay’s Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Collections, and Chief Curator, Sylvie Patry, said that this milestone “was very important to her. For a woman, it was even more important. For Morisot, it was recognition that she was a professional.”
Almost one hundred and fifty years after Morisot’s demise, many museums are celebrating the artist’s legacy with an international tour centered on the “Woman Impressionist”. The Orsay Museum will also host an exhibition devoted to the artist. It will feature many of her works, which will be arranged in a well-curated setting.
Most of the works by Morisot are held in international private collections. They will all be brought together for these exhibition(s). The expo is organized by the Barnes Foundation, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’Orsay, the Dallas Museum of Art in, and Musée de l’Orangerie.
The expo will be presented at each of the art centers, one after another. In other words, one retrospective will tour from one venue to the next, so each one will be held in different time periods and different parts of the world. The Orsay Museum will host it from June 18 to September 22, 2019. That means you can find out interesting things about the artist and her works when next on a Musee d Orsay guided tour.
The Parisian museum’s website states, “The exhibition traces the exceptional career of a painter who, at odds with the practices on her time and her circle, became a key figure of the Parisian avant-garde movement in the late 1860s up until her untimely death in 1895.”
Morisot painted her own sisters, with their kids, as well as rich women dressing for events or in the fashions which defined her period’s French femininity. Once Morisot married, her darling model was her child Julie. In one painting of her daughter, Morisot left the toddler’s right foot incomplete on canvas, detailed only using a brushwork or flourish as the artist experimented with leaving portions unfinished. The museum also opines that “Painting from a model allowed Berthe Morisot to explore several themes of modern life.”