With a federal government shutdown in effect, and the staff of the National Gallery of Art locked out of their offices until further notice, it’s looking a lot like 1995. The intricacies of the budget arguments are not germane here, but out of that first stalemate came something surprisingly beautiful, almost miraculous.

At first, the picture looked bleak when the first major U.S. exhibition of the paintings of the Baroque Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer coincided almost exactly with the 1995 financial crisis. Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft, which had never been out of Holland, were two of the unprecedented 21 of Vermeer’s 35 known paintings in the show. They joined our national treasures, the Woman with a Balance and Girl with a Red Hat (both pictured) for a luminous display, the likes of which had never been seen in one place. (Even as fine an encyclopedic collection as the Art Institute’s contains no Vermeer paintings.)

National Gallery of Art curator Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. had worked eight years to secure loans and complete research for the exhibition, but it closed on November 13 in the government deadlock—just two days after it opened. The National Gallery stayed dark for only a week on that occasion, but even after drawing such phenomenal crowds that weekend viewing hours were extended to 7:00p.m. and then 9:00pm, the Vermeer exhibition was shuttered again on December 15. The federal budget talks had failed once more, leading to a shutdown with no end in sight. There was no possibility of an extension, as this once-in-a-lifetime show was scheduled to go directly on to Holland to its second venue, the Mauritshuis in The Hague. By then, with blizzards further complicating the issue, the exhibition had already been closed for nineteen days of its precious three-month run. Something had to give.

Private funds were eventually found to reopen the exhibition (the rest of the museum was closed) for the ten days of the remaining federal furlough, and the crowds kept coming. Tickets were free, but all the advance passes were long gone by the time the show reopened, and despite the winter conditions, daily ticket lines increased. As a high school student in D.C. at the time, I couldn’t wait in the morning lines, and might not have seen the show at all, if not for a stroke of luck and some slight subterfuge. My mother and I came to see if we could get in, just at the time someone had left an extra ticket at the visitor desk. She folded it in half in her hand in an attempt to make it look like a pair. By the time the guard stopped me to ask for my ticket, she was already in the exhibition. “My mother has it,” I replied, went in, took the single ticket, and gave it to the guard. Then I disappeared into the luminous prospect that was, against all odds, Johannes Vermeer at the National Gallery.

Images courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Johannes Vermeer, Dutch, 1632 – 1675.  Girl with the Red Hat, c. 1665/1666, oil on panel.  Andrew W. Mellon Collection,1937.1.53

Johannes Vermeer, Dutch, 1632 – 1675. Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664, oil on canvas. Widener Collection, 1942.9.97

As Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity comes to a close, we decided to take a look back throughout the exhibition with the person who knows it best, exhibition curator Gloria Groom. Gloria graciously answered a few questions for us about how visitors have responded the exhibition and what’s next on deck for her. . .

You’ve toured hundreds of people through the exhibition. What has been the most fun painting or garment to talk about with visitors?

Most visitors are blown away by the Hat Shop—the hat vitrine with the reflected image of the Art Institute’s own Degas’ Millinery Shop. It’s as though they are seeing it for the first time.

Also, the black dress paired with Manet’s The Parisienne. The jet beading built into the fringe is just so amazing that it stops people in their tracks.

What has surprised you most about visitors’ response to the exhibition?

People just can not believe these are the actual fashions worn at the time of the paintings. They’re also amazed that they didn’t know who James Tissot was before the exhibition.

Which painting (or garment) will you be most sad to say goodbye to?

For paintings, it’s a tie between two Manets: Lady with Fans (Portrait of Nina de Callias) (far right in the image immediately above) and Young Lady in 1866 (top image).

For fashions, the aforementioned black dress but also the Worth Robe de Promenade, the last dress in the exhibition with the extraordinary starburst silk damask fabric. I’m in Venice as I write and that fabric is reminiscent of the luxury goods one still sees in textile boutiques.  

What’s next for you?

Van Gogh’s Bedrooms coming in September 2015—stay tuned!

Thanks Gloria!

Image Credits:

Édouard Manet. Young Lady in 1866, 1866. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Erwin Davis.

Formal Dress, c. 1877. France. Gilles Labrosse Collection.

Day dress, c. 1886. Charles Frederick Worth. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; gift of Mrs. William E.S. Griswold, 1941, 2009.300.664a,b.

Who doesn’t love a good glass of wine? The French certainly do. For centuries, wine has been a quintessential part of the French culture, so it makes sense that wine and its less-French, but still popular sidekick, beer, find their way into the paintings in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity.

Strolling through the exhibition, it’s impossible not to place yourself in the paintings and wonder ‘how would I spend an afternoon in Paris?’ What would I wear, what would I do? And the answer for me is pretty simple—I’ll hop into Monet’s Luncheon on the Grass and straight into that polka-dotted frock any day. In this painting, a fashionable group of people (for the record, they’re not in Paris, but in the forest of Fontainebleau) model their very en vogue summer fashions and picnic and lounge their way through what appears to be a lovely summer afternoon. In the bottom left corner of the central panel, a luncheon is spread out on the blanket, complete with with a bottle of wine and a flagon of beer to wash it all down. The fact that it all seems so realistic speaks to Monet’s aim to represent a scene of present-day life in the open air, presumably recorded as it was being observed.

Since France is sadly out of the question for me, the next best thing is wine. If you feel similarly, treat yourself to a wine flight at Eno in the InterContinental Hotel created in honor of the exhibition. Check in on Four Square to get a discount on the Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity wine flight, as well as a free ticket to the museum! Hurry! The exhibition closes this weekend!

—Oksana Schak, Coordinator of Tourism Marketing

Image Credit: Claude Monet. Luncheon on the Grass, 1865–66. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, acquired as a payment in kind, 1987, RF 1987-12.

It feels somewhat fitting to conclude our series of posts about paintings in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity with a painting that hangs in the final gallery of our exhibition—the Art Institute’s own A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884.

For those of you who haven’t had the chance to visit the exhibition, this painting is placed in context with three dresses (one pictured below for reference) that all highlight the apogee of the bustle. Bustles first appeared in Parisian fashion in the late 1860s and remained in style until the mid-1870s when the prevailing style moved towards a narrower, tighter fishtail shape. But in 1883, bustles returned with a vengeance. And this time around, ‘the bigger, the better’ was the name of the game. Bustles extended horizontally at nearly ninety-degree angles, creating a shelf-like shape.

Seurat began working on La Grande Jatte in 1884, just after the bustle returned to fashion. In the painting, he features two women with bustles, most prominently the woman on the far right standing with a male companion (and a monkey!). This woman’s dress would have been right on trend. In addition to a voluminous bustle, she also wears a dress with a low waist, high neckline, and tight sleeves, all the more to accent her backside. When Seurat first conceptualized this painting, however, the bustle was significantly smaller. We’ve learned, through conservation research, that as the painting developed from preparatory drawings to the final work, Seurat increased the bustle’s size not once, not twice, but three times, ensuring that this woman stay as on trend as possible. The bigger, the better indeed.

Image Credits:

Georges Seurat. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, 1884-86. Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.

Dress, 1887. American. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

One of the revelations for many visitors to Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity has been James Tissot and his luminous, finely rendered, enigmatic portraits. Raised in Nantes by his drapery-merchant father and hat-designer mother, Tissot was steeped in fashion from an early age, and, like many aspiring artists, sought fame and fortune in Paris. However, unlike many artists, he actually succeeded, having paintings shown at the Salon in 1859, just a few years after his arrival. For reasons not entirely clear, he left Paris for London in 1871 and there quickly replicated his Parisian success. Friendly with many of the Impressionists, Tissot was asked by Degas to exhibit his work in their public debut, but he refused, preferring to remain immersed in London society and his lucrative commissions.

Tissot’s Shop Girl was painted in 1883–85, upon his return to Paris from London after the death of Kathleen Newton, an Irish divorcée who had been, somewhat scandalously, Tissot’s companion for most of his London years (it is suspected that the son she gave birth to in 1877 was Tissot’s). Most likely reeling from her death, Tissot embarked in Paris on an ambitious series called The Women of Paris, from which Shop Girl comes. Unlike his previous paintings of wealthy, beautiful subjects at elaborate balls or in seaside cottages, the series represents women of different stations and classes, like the young and inviting female who opens the door of this Parisian store.

Here Tissot has represented the “modern” Paris, signified of course by the presence of the young and attractive shop girl but also by the shop itself—plate glass windows, freely displayed merchandise, a tumult of ribbons and accessories on the table. These new Parisian shops, working off the model of the new department stores, were a far cry from the dim, family-run retail hovels of the previous generation that Émila Zola depressingly depicted in his novel, Au Bonheur des Dames: “the ground-floor shop, crushed by the ceiling, surmounted by a very low storey with half-moon windows, of a prison-like appearance . . . two deep windows, black and dusty, in which the heaped up goods could hardly be seen. The open door seemed to lead into the darkness and dampness of a cellar.” Tissot’s bright, clean shop is an emblem of the modern Paris, fully reveling in the art of retail.

And so too does the shop girl. She is fashionably dressed, inviting yet assertive, and as much on display as the merchandise to her right. To underscore that point, Tissot has created a vignette in the upper left of the canvas where a man in a top hat appears to be making direct eye contact with another shop girl reaching for a package on an upper shelf. The visual and social dynamics of Shop Girl is a lesson in ambiguity, reflecting the conflicted status of the “new woman”: a consumer force at the center of a revolutionary and lucrative new industry but yet still a confection, a display, as sensuous and inviting as the silks she has packaged for us, the customers for whom she opens the door.

Image Credit: James Tissot, The Shop Girl, 1883–85. The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

How do we use fashion to communicate who we are? In July, 15 teens explored this theme through a 2-day workshop entitled Experimental Fashion: Technology, Identity, and Environment. Starting with self-portraits, they explored how culture, expressed through fashion, informs how we communicate our identity and how we perceive ourselves.

The group began with a tour through Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, with research associate Terah Walkup facilitating a discussion with the teens on how portraiture and fashion from the late 1800s captured the contemporary moment, a snapshot full of fantasy and fiction of both the artist and the subject. The teens were then charged with envisioning headwear in which they could control what aspects of their identity might be revealed or concealed.

In the Ryan Education studios, teens used photography and drawing to design a headpiece concept that was capable of communicating, through technology, social messages to both the wearer and the observer. They worked with teaching artist Jessica Hyatt to combine technology and materials into futuristic, wearable mock-ups of their designs. They also worked in groups to compile their drawings and images into reproducible fashion zines.

To make this millinery come to life, the group learned some fundamentals about materials, shapes, electronics, and programming. As personal electronics and mobile devices get smaller and more ubiquitous, these objects are becoming more like our fashion accessories—think Google Glass. What does it mean when our fashion accessories are ‘smart’ with sensors and Internet access, like many of our phones.

I was especially excited to help develop the technology portion of the workshop. A couple years ago I embarked on my first fashion and technology project: the #TFF – a dress that flaps its wings and sings bird songs when I get a tweet on Twitter. These kinds of projects can be categorized as part of the ‘maker’ movement, which emphasizes project-based learning through collaborative problem solving and creativity. You may have heard about the Chicago Public Library’s new maker space initiative and other maker space initiatives.

To dig into these ideas, the teens learned the basics of electrical circuitry and sewed with conductive thread. They also learned how to program on open source “microcontrollers” called Arduino Lilypads. We used Protosnap LilyPad Kits from SparkFun Electronics to get up and running quickly. With just a little orientation, LED lights were flashing in complicated patterns, and noises buzzed and boomed out of vibrating motors and speakers. Several participants even had elements that responded to light or temperature sensors—quite a feat for a two-day workshop!

In these two days, the teens designed thoughtful and imaginative headpieces. For example, the image immediately above is inspired by her love of gardens (and is, in fact, a wearable garden) and the headpiece in the top image is inspired by telepathy. Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity is on view through September 29, so we invite you to take some time to fashion your own impression.

Pink may seem like a fairly innocuous color, but it became the surprise focus of critics’ response to Édouard Manet’s larger-than-life-sized painting of his favorite model, Victorine Meurent, in a salmon-pink dressing gown. One critic complained that while it might have been Manet’s intention “to engage in a symphonic dialogue, a sort of duet, between the pink of the dress of the young woman and the pink tones of her face… He did not succeed.” Another found the color “delicious” but also commented that her head was “lost in a modulation of pink.”

The arguments over pink, however, were somewhat colored by the piece of clothing that came in that much-discussed hue, the peignoir. Requiring no corset or crinoline, a peignoir was a loose-fitting dressing gown that was worn at home among family and the closet of friends. In spite of its intimate nature, the peignoir could still be quite elaborate and fashionable and was often the outfit of choice in paintings of ladies in domestic settings including Renoir’s Woman at the Piano  and even in portraits of fashionable women of means, like the Marquise de Miramon.

Manet’s model, however, is not at home or in a domestic setting, nor is her peignoir terribly au courant, a detail that the ever-fashionable Manet would have intended.  Rather Victorine wears her plain gown slightly unbuttoned in the artist’s studio in a setting carefully constructed with various, seemingly incongruous props—violets, a monocle, a parrot. It’s been theorized that these accoutrements can be read as an allegory of the five senses: the half-peeled orange as taste, the man’s monocle around her neck as sight, the nosegay in her right hand as smell, the satin of the peignoir as touch, and the squawking parrot as hearing. Allegory or not, at least two of these props—the monocle and the flowers, perhaps given by the monocle owner—tease at the rather suggestive presence of an unseen man. (The parrot could also be added to this group. Manet was known for making references to other artworks and genres in his work, and the Realist painter Gustave Courbet had just scandalized the 1866 Salon with his painting Woman with a Parrot depicting a nude woman sprawled amid her discarded clothes with a parrot on her finger. The bird was notoriously interpreted as a stand-in for a male lover.)

Add on top of all this the fact that French literature at the time was rife with references to peignoirs in connection to undressing, bathing, and, yes, being sexually available, and you can see why critics were saying that the painting of Victorine—with her confident gaze and coy pose—was “made with a pink that is both false and louche.” Pretty in pink, maybe, but for whom?

—Lauren Schultz, Associate Director of Communications

Image Credit: Édouard Manet. Young Lady in 1866, 1866. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Erwin Davis.

 

Dyes, hot irons, and gels were just as common in the ancient Roman world as they are today. Well-to-do women had servants who would painstakingly style their hair every day into elaborate confections of braids, buns, and curls that kept pace with the ever-changing demands of fashion.

The elaborate coiffures of stylish Roman women are one of the subjects of Fashion and Antiquity, a series of text panels throughout the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art that focus on fabrics, hairstyles, and adornment in the classical era. Fashion and Antiquity is part of a larger museum-wide focus on fashion in conjunction with the exhibition Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity.

Recently, scholar Janet Stephens, a professional hairstylist and experimental archaeologist, rediscovered important tools in the ancient stylist’s kit that had been forgotten over the centuries—a simple needle and thread. Without recourse to elastic hair bands and hairspray, experts had assumed that the Romans’ gravity-defying hairdos were only possible with wigs. Though such hairpieces have been found in archeological contexts, Stephens, through careful analysis of archival texts and lots of hands-on trial and error, realized that Roman women were able achieve the complicated styles by simply having the hair sewn into place.

Empresses and women of the imperial family were the trendsetters of the ancient Roman world of fashion. The second-century A.D. portrait bust of a woman pictured above reflects a style worn by the empress Faustina the Elder (about 100-140 A.D.), as recorded on coins that bear her portrait (below). The long braids that are similarly wrapped around the head of the marble portrait elegantly announced the sitter’s elite status; moreover, the diadem suggests that she’s a priestess.

To learn more about the art of ancient hairstyles, please join us for a special Boshell Foundation Lecture that will be presented by Janet Stephens on Thursday, September 19 in Fullerton Hall at 6pm. During her lecture on Ancient Roman Hairdressing: Fiction to Fact, Ms. Stephens will recreate several fashionable ‘dos of ancient Rome. It will be a lecture like you’ve never seen before.

—Terah Walkup, Research Associate, Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art

Image credits:

Portrait Bust of a Woman (detail), A.D. 140-50. Roman. Restricted gifts of the Antiquarian Society in honor of Ian Wardropper, the Classical Art Society, Mr. and Mrs. Isak V. Gerson, James and Bonnie Pritchard, and Mrs. Hugo Sonnenschein; Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Bro Fund; Katherine K. Adler, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Alexander in honor of Ian Wardropper, David Earle III, William A. and Renda H. Lederer Family, Chester D. Tripp, and Jane B. Tripp endowments. Photo by Erika Dufour.

Still from “The Hairstyles of Faustina the Younger,” Janet Stephens. Youtube video. (September 18, 2012)

Denarius (Coin) Portraying Empress Faustina the Elder, Deified, after A.D. 141. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of William F. Dunham.

We’re going to take a slightly different direction with this post. Because there are too many fun facts about Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children to pass up, in no particular order, here are five pieces of trivia about Renoir’s illustrious painting.

1. In the 1870s and 80s, Renoir was an in-demand society painter and it all started with this painting. Madame Charpentier and Her Children was commissioned in 1878 and first exhibited at the Impressionist Salon of 1879. Viewers and critics instantly recognized socialite Madame Charpentier as the wife of Georges Charpentier, the head of a successful publishing house. Society followers took note and a trend was born.

2. This painting features Madame Charpentier with her son and daughter. Yes, you read that correctly. Her son is in the painting. Paul is seated on the sofa next to his mother while his sister Georgette perches on the family’s Newfoundland. And while it was fairly common for young boys to be dressed like girls while they were very young, it was much less common for a boy to be dressed exactly like his older sister in matching white silk reception dresses.

3. This portrait also reflected the relatively new development in portrait painting of including the subjects’ surroundings. We can clearly see the Charpentier’s luxurious living room decked out in the of-the-moment Japanese style with painted screens and bamboo furniture. If you’ve yet to go through the exhibition, take note. Japanese influence in interiors is evident in several other paintings.

4. The Charpentiers had very close relationships with many 19th-century French luminaries. In addition to Renoir referring to himself as the Charpentier’s court painter, Madame also hosted a very influential Parisian salon, welcoming artists like Degas, Monet, and Manet and writers like Zola (Paul’s godfather) and Flaubert into her home.

5. When the Charpentier’s collection was sold at auction in 1907, The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased it through an intermediary for the unprecedented sum of 92,400 francs. It was thus the first painting added to the Met’s collection of Impressionist art.

Image Credit: Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children, 1878. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Are we having fun yet? The answer appears to be a definitive “no” in this painting by Frédéric Bazille of his bourgeois family at their country home in Montpelier. But as we’ve discussed previously, most of the subjects of Impressionist paintings aren’t smiling, so just what is it that makes this painting feel different?

It’s due to the fact that each figure can also be read as an individual portrait. All are stiff and posed, as if for a camera. Most of the ten subjects (nine of Bazille’s family members with the artist in the upper left) stare straight out and appear to directly address the viewer.

Compare this with Monet’s Women in the Garden painted the year before. Here the focus is more clearly on the garments and the effect of light on the dresses, not as much on the individuals. Bazille was, however, very inspired by Monet’s en plein air painting and worked closely with the artist, even sharing a studio at one point. He also purchased Women in the Garden from Monet shortly after it was finished, so Family Reunion likely took some sun-dappled influence from Monet’s painting of contemporary fashion out of doors.

—Tricia Patterson, Marketing Coordinator

Image Credit: Frédéric Bazille. Family Reunion, 1867. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The Impressionists clearly didn’t believe in “all work and no play.” At least not in depicting it. We’ve seen their subjects picnicking, shopping, strolling, and attending balls, circuses, and the opera, among other leisure activities. But not engaging in a lot of work. Until now. Degas’s Portraits at the Stock Exchange depicts bankers and investors furtively whispering tips and speculations on the street in front of the Bourse, the Parisian stock exchange.

And what a uniform they’re wearing. We’re looking at a sea of almost indistinguishable top hats and sack coats. As you look closely, you notice small differences—slight variations in color, small differences in collars—but they’re a rather homogeneous group. Which definitely spoke to the work they were doing. Their plain, sober clothing emphasized their practicality and respectability. These men clearly prioritized professional identity over a more personal one.

Most of the men are anonymous, but we do know that the man in the middle with the beard is the then thirty-four-year-old financier Ernest May. May was a collector and admirer of Degas’s work, and the painting may in fact be commenting on the idea that for businessmen like May, engagement with the art world represented another kind of speculative enterprise.

Image Credit: Edgar Degas. Portraits at the Stock Exchange, 1878–79. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, bequest subject to usufruct in 1923 by Ernest May, RF 2444.

Finally a smile! It’s funny, but I never really noticed how serious the subjects of other paintings in the exhibition were until I saw this painting of a young woman at the opera. And why not? She’s at the Paris Opéra House and dressed to the nines. Her formal pink evening gown is tastefully accessorized with a single strand of pearls, a corsage, and a flower in her hair. The look is completed with a fan and a pair of ever-present gloves, all of which further signal her youth and unmarried status by their lack of ostentation.

And we can even tell what she’s directing her smile towards. If you look behind her to the left, you’ll notice that you see her reflection. So we’re actually looking at a mirror and seeing precisely what she sees: balconies filled with well-dressed people who, in turn, are also looking out at each other. And while this might make one feel self-conscious, this lady’s relaxed posture and expression demonstrate that she’s actively enjoying herself.

Cassatt first showed this work at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in 1879, the same year it was painted. Viewers at the time noticed the colors—gray, in particular— she used to paint the subject’s pale skin. Although it was probably staged in a studio, Cassatt translated both the gas-lit interior and the mirrored reflections from the gilt trimmed balconies, creating an immediacy and almost palpable sense of anticipation. It’s hard not to wonder. . . what happens next to this young ingenue?

Image Credit: Mary Cassatt. Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge, 1879. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bequest of Charlotte Dorrance Wright, 1978.

I was walking through the Modern Wing recently on a bright and sunny afternoon, and I noticed something peculiar. Along the oak floor was a perfectly straight line of round circles of light.

My first instinct was to look up to see if any spotlights were on. They weren’t. The only light was coming through the rectangular panes of glass that make up the Renzo Piano-designed skylight.

And I have to admit, I have been noticing unusual tricks of light everywhere: at the train station, in my friend’s living room, in dappled sunlight from trees. I credit this new awareness to our current photography show, Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door. Morell’s process, which utilizes the concept of a camera obscura, examines the physics of light to create images.

A camera obscura is simply a dark box (or room) with a hole in it that creates a lens. The hole causes light to be refracted and projected upside down and backwards on to the opposite wall. To get a better sense of what this might look like, check out the image below. This is Morell’s image of a self-created camera obscura.

Painters in the 17th century used this simple phenomenon of physics to project and then create paintings with intricate details, and the technology eventually led to the invention of the camera and photography in the 19th century.

But you don’t have to build a camera to witness this phenomenon of light. Morell shows that even leaves from a tree can create this lens effect to “project” an image of the sun on the ground on a sunny day. The little dots are “pictures” of the sun.

And here is the same phenomenon, observed during a solar eclipse.

While I’m not exactly sure what’s happening in the Modern Wing (I won’t pretend to be a physics expert), it’s exciting to see how an exhibition can create new awareness in my everyday life. Check it out for yourself! The effect I noticed in the Modern Wing is most pronounced around 2:00p.m. on a sunny day. And while it won’t be going away any time soon, the exhibition will be. This weekend is your last chance to see Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door before it closes September 2.

—Nina Litoff, Public Affairs

Ed. Note: Our resident legal eagle is at it again. Don’t worry, not with a complicated insight on the law, but with yet another puzzle! However, this one’s only doable for the next month because it features Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity. So cancel your Labor Day plans and take a visit to the museum to help Elise construct her dream garment. . .

Download the puzzle here and leave your best guess in the comments: Retro Chic Puzzle

Bonne chance!

In February 1866, Monet temporarily abandoned Luncheon on the Grass and hurriedly prepared a new canvas featuring his nineteen-year-old mistress, Camille Doncieux, in a green-and-black striped walking dress, small “Empire” bonnet, and fur-trimmed jacket. One of Monet’s most frequent early subjects, Camille posed for all four women in Women in the Garden and also appears in the aforementioned Luncheon on the Grass, among other paintings. The difference is that none of those paintings name her by name. The painting above is, in fact, titled Camille.

Now in the 1866 Salon, where this painting was first shown, there were plenty of portraits. Portraits made up approximately one out of every seven of the 1,998 paintings total in the exhibition. Some were designated by full names and titles, or more commonly by the euphemistic “Monsieur X,” “Madame X,” or “Mademoiselle X.” Just a handful of portraits were titled with first names only. And even fewer featured subjects from more middle-class backgrounds. Such large scale paintings (it’s over seven feet tall) were typically reserved for royal or distinguished personages.

We’re not sure why Monet did this, but we do know that it might have backfired. By trying to elevate her, he may have cast doubt on her social status. We also know that for at least one critic, her name entered the lexicon to describe a certain type of lady. Léon Billot, who saw the painting in 1868, described her as “not a society woman, but a Camille.”

Image Credit: Claude Monet. Camille, 1866. Kunsthalle Bremen.

Sometimes it feels like walking through Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity is one big game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The art world was, of course, much smaller than it is now, both geographically and in terms of the numbers of active participants. But the principle players were also much more interconnected.

The woman you see here, Yves Gobillard, was artist Berthe Morisot’s oldest sister. Family friend Edgar Degas asked to paint this intimate portrait of her when she was visiting her family in Paris.

Morisot also featured herself and another sister, Edma, in another painting in the exhibition, fittingly called The Sisters. In this work, they sit on a couch wearing matching outfits that symbolize their close relationship. A fan painted by Degas hangs on the wall behind them.

Morisot also serves as the subject of another painting in the exhibition, Édouard Manet’s Repose. She would eventually become his sister-in-law, marrying his brother Eugène just a few years after this was painted.

And this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Besides the ones we’ve already mentioned, what other Impressionist connections can you find?

P.S. For the record, Yves Gobillard was painted by Edgar Degas who—and this is a leap—appeared as a character in 2011′s Midnight in Paris played by actor François Rostain. Rostain appeared with Michael Sheen in Midnight in Paris, who also starred in Frost/Nixon with one Kevin Bacon!

Image Credits:

Edgar Degas. Madame Théodore Gobillard, 1869. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929, 29.100.45.

Édouard Manet. Repose, c. 1871. Museum of Rhode Island School of Dedign, Providence, bequest of Mrs. Edith Stuyvesant Vanderbilt Gerry, 59.027.

We know that the Impressionists themselves were inspired by 19th-century fashion designers like Charles Frederick Worth and Madame Roger, but how could these paintings then inspire the fashion designers of today? That’s exactly the challenge that exhibition curator Gloria Groom posed to six designers-in-residence (and two alumni) of the Chicago Fashion Incubator at Macy’s on State Street. They each chose a painting from the exhibition as a starting point and then created a contemporary ensemble influenced by it.

Check out the video above to learn more about what sparked the designers’ interest—for example, it wasn’t the spectacular dresses in A Ball that inspired Katelyn Pankoke, but the vibrant red curtains in the background of the painting—and get an insider look at their process.

You’ll also get to see the winning ensemble by designer Shelby Steiner. She chose Bartholomé’s In the Conservatory, the only painting in the exhibition for which we have the actual garment that was featured in it. She created a three-piece look in which she combined textiles and patterns—hand painting every single stripe and dot—and created an original mirrored plaid digital design that not only evokes the garment, but also the windowpanes of the conservatory and the flowers inside.

If you’d like to see the garments in person (which we highly recommend), visit the 7th floor of Macy’s on State Street before September 29. We guarantee that you’ll see the corresponding paintings in a totally new light.

For all of the talk about fashion on this blog over the last few months, there’s been surprisingly little said about shoes. And that’s primarily because until the 1880s, shoes were rarely exposed due to the volume of the dresses. The advent of dresses with flatter fronts (and a bustle in the back) were among the first to make ladies’ footwear visible.

Although the image above by artist Eva Gonzalès prominently features a pair of delicate white satin slippers trimmed with swansdown, she infrequently showed them in her work. Of her thirty-five paintings that include full-length figures, only seven reveal shoes. But with mystery came fascination. Shoes were fetishized because they covered a part of the body not intended to be on view. In many of the Impressionists’ intimate portraits, a mule or slipper dangles from the subject’s foot, heightening the informal dishabille of the sitter.

In the exhibition, this painting is placed directly over a case that features shoes very similar to those you see here. And although it’s hard to get a sense of scale as you’re looking at the image above, you’ll be shocked when you see the actual slippers. They’re incredibly tiny and narrow, further illustrating a point we’ve made in several other posts: women in the mid-1800s were, on average, significantly smaller than we are. The shoe, in this case, definitely will not fit.

Image Credit: Eva Gonzalès. The White Slippers, 1879/80. Vera Wang.

Sorry to say, summer is fleeting. Summer fashion? It changes so fast it’ll make your top hat–covered head spin.

In 1863 Edouard Manet painted a scandalous work titled Luncheon on the Grass which showed voluptuous nudes striking classical poses in the company of men dressed in the fashions of 1860s Paris. In the minds of the public, making the outdoor scene contemporary corrupted the work in a shocking way.

Perhaps in a nod to Manet’s Luncheon, several years later Claude Monet began work on a group of figure drawings also named Luncheon on the Grass. Monet, like Manet, sought to use imagery of the Parisian middle class at leisure in the forests of Fontainebleau to push the envelope. While the ambitious goal of presenting this large project at the Salon of 1866 didn’t pan out, two large, life-sized panels (the central panel above and the left panel below), as well as a number of sketches and studies, show the scope of what Monet aimed to accomplish.

Standing atop the artificial grass among fashionable visitors from around the country and world, Monet’s groundbreaking explorations come into full focus.

The middle-class crowd sprawled out in the woods is not organized according to some classical calculus. The faces of the figures are not the focus (you can’t even see the faces of three of the women!), nor are the food, drink, or trees. What does pop, however, is the fashion that most certainly was the very epitome of style at the very moment depicted. The brightly-colored accents on the dress on the left panel, the brilliant white of the dress at center, the complicated motion of the beige dress, and the cut and fit of the men’s suits are, in my mind, Monet’s tour de force. The ephemerality of these garments—very much alive in the panels—are sure to fall from favor at the end of the season just as the leaves will fall from the forest trees. What strikes me about this painting is that it’s timeless by not showing the timeless, classic by rejecting the classical. It, through fashion, shows how life really is: momentary, colorful, and always in flux.

Monet’s beautiful snapshot of modern life is still contemporary today even after 150 cycles of summer fashion have passed. And, just like hot summer fashions of 2013, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity will go off view at the end of September.

Image Credit: Claude Manet. Luncheon on the Grass, 1865–66. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, acquired as a payment in kind, 1987, RF 1987-12.

For my money, the best way to experience Edgar Degas’s The Millinery Shop in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity is with your back to it. Now don’t get me wrong, looking at it straight on is lovely. You can peer—as if through a shop window—at the macaroon-like chapeaus and the woman admiring (or perhaps working on?) them. But when you turn around, you see a real life display case full of 19th-century hats. The jaunty headpieces— made of velvet, silk and lace—mimic the placement of those in the painting, propped on stands at varying heights. There is also a mirror behind them that gives 360-degree view of the objects. But perhaps more importantly, the mirror allows you to see the painting itself, igniting comparisons and creating an experience that just isn’t possible if you were, say, looking at this image on a computer.

In fact, throughout the entire exhibition, objects are mounted in cases and flanked with mirrors. This choice—a conscious one made early in the exhibition planning—allows viewers to see garments and accessories in the round. It also creates an immersive and interactive experience you might not expect.

Plus, the mirrors do one more thing. They add you. Suddenly, that shirt you saw on a blog, bought on a website, and picked out to wear today is in conversation with Degas and his milliner and the hats of real 19th-century ladies. In my case, that conversation creates the feeling of being wildly underdressed.

—Tricia Patterson, Marketing Coordinator

Image Credit: Edgar Degas. Millinery Shop, 1879/86. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.