In Impressionist painting, figures and clothing lose, to take Mallarmé’s observation about Manet, “a little of their substance and their solidity”, or, in the words of the Goncourt brothers, they “are transfigured by the magic of  light and shade”. The figure, whether moving or at rest, became more integrated into the surrounding atmosphere. The descriptive reality of the man and woman in the 1860-1880s and of their daily appearance
underwent an undeniable metamorphosis because of these aesthetic approaches. On the other hand, thanks to the swiftness of execution, the gestures and play of fabric against the body became more authentic. Thus, we learn much more about the look during this period than we would from the posed society portrait or the artificially natural genre scene.

This observation is based on some sixty masterpieces by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Caillebotte. Some of them have not been shown in Paris for many years, for example Renoir’s portrait of century [Madame Charpentier and her Children] (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Manet’s Nana (Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle) exhibited at the Manet retrospective in 1983 (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais), and The Theatre Box by Renoir from the Courtauld Institute in London.

For a better understanding of the Impressionists’ approach, their works will be displayed alongside those of their contemporaries — Tissot and Stevens for example — who concentrated even more on portraying Parisian women and the elegant society of the Second Empire and the early days of the Third Republic. But comparing these 
images with the real thing is much more instructive.

And for this, a display of around fifty dresses and accessories, including ten hats, presents an overview of women’s fashion at the time of the Impressionists, a fashion that was mainly characterised by the gradual abandonment of the crinoline in favour of the bustle. Men’s fashion, less varied and more uniform, is evoked through some twenty pieces. All these examples of textiles come from public or private collections in France. And finally, an important documentary display brings together designs, fashion plates, fashion magazines, including La dernière Mode, a short-lived review edited by Mallarmé, and photographs from the Disdéri studio.

General curators: Gloria Groom, curator, Art Institute, Chicago. The exhibition has been organised by the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of  Art, New York, and The Art Institute of Chicago. It has been produced in Paris with the special participation of the Musée Galliera — Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris.   

Painting: Edouard Manet, Nana, 1877. Oil on canvas, 164 cm x 115 cm (104 in x 45 in). Kunstalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany 

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