What a joy to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in any season, for any reason. The “Manet: Model Family” exhibit may be your incentive for a fall visit, but the colorful dahlias, blazing yellow chrysanthemums, umbrella ferns and iridescent greens in Isabella’s Venetian sculpture courtyard will be what you remember most vividly. There is so much to love and remember at the Gardner and we visitors must repeat our silent thanks to Isabella, the adventuresome founder every time we visit. The museum’s new 2012 addition continues to delight with its library, gift shop, exhibit galleries, indoor/outdoor restaurant greenhouse and garden walks.
The Manet exhibit is a gem! Because the Gardner gallery space is limited their exhibits must be judiciously curated and compactly presented. The inspiration for the Manet family exhibit was Édouard Manet’s portrait of his widowed mother, “Madame Eugénie August Manet,” 1866. The painting, purchased by art historian Bernard Berenson expressly for Gardner, is the centerpiece of the exhibit. Gardner Curator Diana Seave Greenwald had the initial inspiration to base the exhibit on the Manet portrait. Greenwald wrote the exhibition catalogue.
Why is Manet’s portrait a masterpiece? The use of black paint and the sad, almost glaring eyes that pierce our souls. First black paint: almost everything in this painting is black. The background, the clothes, the veil, the hair. In a tour de force of the application of paint, Manet differentiates between black objects by the thickness of the paint, its texture and its viscosity. A century later in 1963, the conceptual artist, Ad Reinhardt, developed the concept of a totally black painting. The blackness of Manet’s painting must be seen in person and close up to appreciate his use of the medium; photograph does not convey it.