Continuing through March 1, 2026
What’s not to love about a canonical face-off show? My inner art-history undergrad relishes such dynamic juxtapositions, a compare/contrast show is an opportune moment to track the dynamic ricochet between artists from within the canon. Consider it the curatorial equivalent of “Tango & Cash,” pairing towering modernists in head-to-head blockbuster dialogues that proffer both scholarship and spectacle. I live for this.
Happily, the 21st century has been a boon, offering the opportunity to revisit, reframe, and rethink the relationship between the greats. Pairing Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot is only the latest such example. We’ve had “Matisse Picasso” at the Tate Modern and MoMA (2002–03); “Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912” at the Kimbell Art Museum (2011); “The Age of Picasso and Matisse,” also at the Kimbell (2013); “Klimt and Schiele: Drawn” at the Royal Academy and MFA Boston (2018); and “Natural Forces: Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington” at the Denver Art Museum (2020).
If you are interested in how Manet related to his heroes and peers, it has been a great time to be alive, with “Manet / Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting” (2003) and “Manet / Degas” (2023), both at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, now followed up with San Francisco’s “Manet & Morisot.” The focus of the current exhibition is on the fecund relationship between Manet and Morisot, one that began with Manet as the mentor. The show aptly tracks the morphology of Morisot from muse and model to sister-in-law (she married Manet’s brother Eugène) and colleague. The premise here of a mutually beneficial professional and personal relationship is well-established, and a good excuse to borrow and showcase a number of exquisite works. Emily Beeny, chief curator of European paintings at the Legion of Honor, deserves praise for gathering so many top quality works by both artists.
To see Manet’s “The Balcony” (1868-9) outside of the crowds at the Musée d’Orsay is worth the trip out to Land’s End alone. My own dogged devotion to dynamic duo face-off shows notwithstanding, seeing this many Morisot paintings in one place is an exquisite joy and proof that she now deservedly shares her place in Manet’s exalted company.
Manet and Morisot enjoyed a complex, evolving relationship, first marked by mutual flirtation that eventually smoldered into sublimated desire after Morisot’s marriage to Eugène. She chose the right brother: “Eugène Manet and Julie Manet in the Garden at Bougival,” (1881) is the most singular painting of paternal devotion in 19th-century France. By contrast, consider the faint presence of Manet’s stepson and possible half-brother Léon in the shadows of “The Balcony,” whose pose is lifted from his earlier painting, “The Spanish Cavaliers” (1859). Family dinners must have been tense.
Each painter drew from distinctly separate sources, even when approaching similar subjects, even when painting like one another. “The Balcony,” Morisot’s debut as Manet’s muse and model, owes much to Goya’s “Majas on the Balcony” (c. 1808-1814), but also evinces Manet’s rich polyvalence. Partially based on a scene observed by Manet at Boulogne-Sur-Mer in 1868, and filtered through the last gasp of his Spanish-influenced phase, it is both a Baudelairian view of modern life and art historical pastiche. Wearing his sources on his sleeve, Manet suffered for them endlessly at the Salon.
In the neighboring “Young Woman at Her Window” (1869) Morisot painted her sister Edma sitting by a window, studying a fan by a balcony. Here we get the difference in perspective between the two artists. Manet, the studio painter, took his motifs from the outside of the building; Morisot, the younger Impressionist, painted a similar subject from inside the room. It tracks. According to Yale art historian Carol Armstrong, Manet quoted how Edma’s dress fell between her legs for his own portrait, titled “Eva Gonzalès” (1870), of his only official student (not included in this exhibition). To the left, in another genre-busting painting featuring her sister, “The Harbor at Lorient” (1869), Morisot quotes the very same side-saddle pose that she modeled in “The Balcony,” adding an umbrella.
Manet’s quoted motifs from old masters were combined with things seen on the street and then reassembled in the studio. By contrast, Morisot was attracted to the plein air practice of the Impressionists (of whom Manet was never a part, and with whom Morisot exhibited exclusively) as well as the Rococo drawing room. The luminescent scenes of parks and parenthood in the thatched brushwork of Morisot’s hand share very little common aesthetic ground with her top-billing brother-in-law. The 18th-century subtext of so much of Morisot’s work might have been explored more deeply, especially considering the curator’s expertise, but doing so may have risked adding further distance between the titular names.
Another among the many highlights is Morisot’s “Lilacs at Maurecourt” (1874), a pastoral scene of a woman and two children beneath a tree in a park. Curator Beeny argues that this was based on a similar pair of paintings, one by Manet and another by Renoir, of Claude Monet’s family in a garden at Argenteuil. Maybe. Equally plausible is that Morisot was also thinking of Antoine Watteau, whose excellent “The Foursome” (c. 1713) is itself a highlight of the museum’s permanent collection.
Morisot’s gauzy glowing light in the verdant garden transforms a mundane scene of domestic privilege into a thunderous rumination on the tenuous dance of nature and culture, as much a concern among intelligentsia of the Third Republic as it was for Watteau and others within Pierre Crozat’s circle. This small painting, part of a private collection and thus, after this show, unlikely to be exhibited locally again, shares the podium with “The Balcony” in the Olympic argument for why this show must be seen.
Another highlight of this flop-free exhibition is the suite of the four seasons, two each painted by Morisot and Manet (the wall text of which coins the term “morisotian” in describing what is missing from Manet’s “Autumn (Mery Laurent)” (1882)). Morisot painted “Summer” and “Winter” (both 1880), both rendered in her painterly language of broken diagonal touches and masterfully handled scumbled dabs of secondary tones. She left the other two seasons unpainted, for whatever reason, which Manet subsequently realized in a tighter, flattened manner. The canvases are all the same size, and the dialogue between the two great artists is electric. This is the first time that the group has been shown together.
Morisot’s ghostly self-portrait anchoring the end of the show recalls Manet’s “Self Portrait with Palette” (1879) featured in “Manet/Degas,” but sadly absent from this show. As much as that Manet is missed, Morisot’s late portrait underscores the lingering presence of the Rococo in Morisot’s praxis, which is mostly absent from Manet’s, excluding his version of Goya’s caustic variant. Morisot may have posed her sitters like Manet, but she painted like Fragonard.
The reasons behind these choices, shared motifs, and tantalizing pastiches are not today clearly understood. Manet and Morisot seldom painted in the same way, even when Manet dabbled in Impressionism in the 1870’s, as evidenced in “Boating” (1874/1880). It is the inexorable mystery at the heart of their relationship that helps sustain and deepen the appeal of both artists, but the works stand on their own, outside of the face-off. The aesthetic friction between the two of them sparked a lifelong obsession of unquenched thirst. Drink in this effervescent thrill of that unknown.
