Estate Unsettlement: L’Affaire Wildenstein in Paris

The art collecting world remains as much about collecting name cache as it does about collecting art. Becoming a trusted dealer and banking on that brand name allows you to build your bank account. It’s that seemingly unbreakable circle of influence that makes the recent L’affaire Guy Wildenstein in Paris all the more scandalous and troubling for art collectors and art lovers. Wildenstein, an international dealer in Old Master and Impressionist art for decades, stands accused of stealing valuable art works from the estates of dead customers entrusted to his care. The French government seized a room full of works believed to have been seized unlawfully by Wildenstein. Mix in the fact that Wildenstein is a major contributor and “bon ami” of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and you have the makings of a major scandal of international proportions that leaves not just Wildenstein’s estate and his victims’ estates unsettled, but shakes the foundation of art dealing to its very core. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Estate Unsettlement."

The Great Chain of Being

I’ll confess that I will always find the idea of the Great Chain of Being attractive, despite what post-modernists say. Just call me old fashioned. My mind simply works better when trying to find a connect everything to everything else in a coherent universe, especially when it comes to art. Even someone as game-changing and ground-breaking as Edouard Manet cannot escape the net. Born January 23, 1832, Manet finds himself hailed as the father of modern art, the first artist to break with the old sensibilities and depict modern life as it is, shorn of all falsifying mythology. Manet offered The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) (above, from 1863) as a first glimpse of that brave new world. Yet, how much of this is really new? Art historians point out that Manet “borrowed” the composition from a drawing by Raphael of The Judgement of Paris. The strange, “modern” juxtaposition of dressed and nude figures may have come from Manet’s study of the Renaissance paintings in the Louvre. Sixteenth century works The Pastoral Concert and The Tempest, both likely begun by Giorgione and completed by his student Titian, set the stage for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As much as we may want to isolate Manet as a lone genius blazing a trail into the unknown, Manet steps backwards and points to the past to point to the future.

Where The Luncheon on the Grass befuddled, Manet’s Olympia (above), also from 1863, enraged. Manet completely gives up the pretense of mythology as a way of making the female nude acceptable. But how valid was the entire pretense of mythologizing nudes, especially female nudes, to begin with? Again, Manet looked to the Renaissance and Titian, particularly The Venus of Urbino. The gamesmanship of calling a recognizably realistic nude a Venus or Aphrodite and thus giving the painting respectability always seemed a strange gentleman’s agreement. Manet breaks that agreement in Olympia, recognizing that Titian himself most likely never fully signed on either. As “modern” as Olympia appears, her knowing and direct look reflects similar glances in previous artists as well. Goya's Nude Maja, which Manet most likely knew in some form from his study of Spanish paining since Velazquez, challenges the viewer with her eyes more than half a century before Manet’s Olympia does. Manet rejects the idea that confident women comfortable in their skin can only be fictional and simultaneously points back to all the “real” women since the Renaissance.

Manet, however, didn’t turn a blind eye to the art world going on around him. Although he never accepted the label “Impressionist” or agreed to exhibit with the Impressionists, Manet appreciated what the Impressionists were trying to accomplish and became friends with Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro. Manet’s Self-Portrait With Palette (above, from 1879) shows Manet trying to keep up with the times and paint in an Impressionist manner himself, momentarily abandoning his clear draftsmanship yet still clinging to his dark, Spanish background. Even more forward-thinking, Manet encouraged women artists Berthe Morisot and Eva Gonzalès when even some Impressionists continued to cling to the all-boys’ club mentality. Manet falls into the cracks between many categories because he doesn’t paint like a true realist and his works are Impressionist in their independent spirit yet not Impressionist in visual style. The inability to lump Manet in with others isolates him. In truth, Manet belongs everywhere, stretching across styles and even across space and time. More than his art, it is Manet’s mind, always searching for new ways of seeing with total disregard for the rules, that helps create the atmosphere in which modern art is born.

Model Student

Édouard Manet must have seen something special in Eva Gonzales to take her on as his only true student. Born April 19, 1849, Gonzales came from a cultured family. Her father wrote novels and her mother played music. Despite that cultured background, Gonzales had to model for Manet and several other Impressionists before gaining entry into their circle. Once initiated, however, Gonzales proved a quick study. Her painting A Box at the Théâtre des Italiens (above, from 1874) shows her sister Jeanne and husband Henri Guérard in a pose similar to Manet’s The Balcony, which showed Manet’s other female protégé Berthe Morisot and her husband, Manet’s brother Eugene. Like Morisot and many other women artists, Gonzales painted many scenes of friends and family, restricted by the mores of the time from the more outrageous subjects Manet and others depicted. Gonzales Box differs from Manet’s Balcony in her inclusion of a musical or theater theme, something close to her heart considering her family history in the arts.

I remember seeing one of Gonzales’ seascapes pushed off to a far corner of the PMA’s 2004 exhibition Manet and the Sea. I’m not sure if it was her Plage de Dieppe vue depuis la falaise Ouest (above, from 1871), but it was something similar. Again, she copies Manet to an extent, but differs as well. Manet’s marks his seascapes with strong narratives—men rowing in boats or ships in rough seas. Gonzales, however, paints from a distance, allowing the haze of the sea air to blanket over the scene. It’s tempting to ascribe the difference to gender, but I think there’s definitely a softer feel to her work that approaches Whistler in some ways. Whistler, too, found wallspace in the Manet and the Sea exhibition, but much more prominently than Gonzales did. Looking back, it seems like it would have been quite easy to move Gonzales’ works without anyone noticing.

Gonzales’ Morning Awakening (above, from 1876) shows how far she moved away from the influence of Manet and his dark, Velázquez –inspired style. There’s a great gentleness to this picture that, for example, Manet’s Olympia, for all its greatness, lacks. Again, I hesitate to label Gonzales as softer and gentler for fear of falling for all the old gender roles, but such labels seem truly to fit in with what she attempted and achieved. Gonzales exhibited her work annually at the Paris Salon, testifying to her acceptance among contemporaries. Sadly, Gonzales died in childbirth when only 34 years old, less than a week after Manet himself died. Because of that short life and relatively short oeuvre, Gonzales usually falls to the second or even third tier of Impressionists. What she could have done with years of maturity and motherhood under her belt is a question that will never be answered.

Butterfly Kisses

Born on this date in 1841, Berthe Morisot is in many ways the First Lady of the Impressionists. After studying under Camille Corot and exhibiting in the Salon de Paris, Morisot threw caution to the wind and threw in with the ragtag bunch of upstarts joining forces under the leadership of Édouard Manet, who became her friend and second great influence. Manet’s 1872 portrait of Morisot (above) shows the confident, beautiful young woman painter at the beginning of her career, two years before she joined the Impressionist revolt. Although Berthe later married Manet’s brother, Eugene, and developed into a fine artist, she always had to struggle against sexism. Once, when Manet made a criticism of one her paintings and she agreed, he actually took it upon himself to correct it with his own brush. I just can’t imagine him doing the same thing to Renoir.

A common criticism of Morisot’s painting is that she painted only lighter subjects, clearly a code for “not serious” and, therefore, female. Considering the lighthearted subject matter of most Impressionist art, it’s hard to really buy into such criticisms. Morisot’s Chasing Butterflies (above, from 1874) epitomizes the airy, gentle touch and subject matter of much of her work. The difference between the “feminine” one sees here and the “feminine” aspects of Renoir, Degas, or Monet is entirely in the gender of the artist. Perhaps you can make the case for a “masculine” brand of Impressionism in the works of Manet, especially his more scandalous nudes, but that still wouldn’t differentiate the works of Morisot from any number of male Impressionists. I bet you could have easily slipped a work such as Chasing Butterflies into the Renoir Landscapes exhibition recently at the PMA without anyone noticing.

Morisot always placed a greater priority on her roles as wife and mother than on her life as an artist, which held her back to some degree. The Artist's Daughter with a Parakeet (above, from 1890) shows some of the pleasure Morisot took in the family life she fostered, unlike so many of her male contemporaries who buried themselves in their work and, perhaps as a consequence, suffered the woes of a dysfunctional family existence. In this respect, Morisot’s art resembles that of Mary Cassatt, who painted beautifully intimate scenes of motherhood despite never being a mother herself. In many ways I’ve always seen Morisot as the most well-adjusted of the Impressionists, the one who had her life always in balance. Some might say that she was never willing to pay the price to become a great artist. You could say equally that she was never willing to pay the price of being a great artist.

Child of the Streets

At its peak, the Montmartre section of Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pulsated as the heart of the bohemian art scene, with the Moulin Rouge and other lively venues as the accompanying soundtrack. In the middle of all that excitement, Maurice Utrillo was born and raised. Born on Christmas Day 1883, Utrillo grew up to paint countless scenes of the Montmartre streets (one example above) he knew and loved. Perhaps the most famous fact about Utrillo involves the mystery of his father, who may have been one of the great artists of the time.

Suzanne Valadon, Utrillo’s mother, posed for such artists as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas after her career as a circus acrobat ended with a fall from a trapeze. Valadon learned to paint watching these artists and eventually Degas served as a mentor. The beautiful Suzanne bedded many artists as well, which led to the disputed patrimony of Maurice (whose La Belle Gabrielle Montmartre appears above). The minor Spanish painter Miguel Utrillo y Molins legally claimed paternity in 1891, but the rumors of an art star father dogged Utrillo to the end of his life, overshadowing in some ways his own artistic achievement.

There’s a long-standing joke that Miguel claimed parentage of Maurice just to put his name to a creation by Renoir or Degas. Maurice’s work, however, is not a joke. Works such as La Rue Tholoze (above, from 1913) capture quietly the daily life of Montmartre in a way that Toulouse-Lautrec’s boisterous café scenes do not. Utrillo shows the flip side of Montmartre—the side that a young boy growing up amidst all the noise and excitement would know firsthand. Few people populate Utrillo’s street scenes of Montmartre, giving the feel of the quiet early morning when people were sleeping off the effects of the previous night’s festivity. Despite the clear quality of his renderings, Utrillo’s name often appears on bad fakes that take advantage of the touristy hunger for souvenirs of the bohemian neighborhood. There’s a Hopper-esque quality to some of these scenes in their architectural emptiness, the loneliness of a café when everyone has gone home. You might even see a hint of loneliness from a man who never truly knew his full heritage but could only guess at potential genius in his blood.