Berthe Morisot — Musée d’Orsay — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 18 → September 22, 2019

A leading Impressionist figure, Berthe Morisot remains to this day less well-known than her friends Monet, Degas and Renoir. Yet she was immediately recognised as one of the group’s most innovative artists.

The exhibition traces the exceptional career of a painter who, at odds with the practices on her time and her circle, became a key figure of the Parisian avant-garde movement in the late 1860s up until her untimely death in 1895.

Painting from a model allowed Berthe Morisot to explore several themes of modern life, such as the private life of the bourgeoisie, the popularity of holiday resorts and gardens, and the importance of fashion and women’s domestic work, while blurring the borders between the interior and exterior, the private and the public, the finished and the unfinished. It was her belief that painting should endeavour to “capture something that passes”.

Modern subjects and rapid execution are thus linked to the temporality of the representation, and the artist tirelessly tackled the ephemeral and the passing of time. Her last works, characterised by a new expressiveness and musicality, provoke an often melancholic meditation of these relationships between art and life.

Curators :
Sylvie Patry, chief curator, director of conservation and collections at the musée d’Orsay
Nicole R. Myers, Lillian and James H. Clark Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Dallas Museum of Art
With the participation for the presentation of Paul Perrin, curator at the musée d’Orsay

The exhibition is organised by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Barnes Foundation, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie.

The exhibition will be successively presented at each of the museums:
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec, from 21 June to 23 September 2018
Barnes Foundation, Philidelphia, from 20 October 2018 to 14 January 2019
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, from 24 February to 26 May 2019.