Unmasking Manet’s Morisot
11:00 a.m., Friday, Nov. 10, 2006
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission free

“Unmasking Manet’s Morisot” provided a case study of veiling in artistic practice and analyzed the effects of that veiling on the identity of a particular sitter. Here, Dr. Marni Kessler focused upon a group of portraits that Manet painted of the artist Berthe Morisot between 1868 and 1874. Through analyses of the cultural context, the relationship between Manet and Morisot, and the paintings themselves, she argued that these images tell us far less about the sitter than they do about the painter. Manet ultimately depicts the ideal bourgeoise, Morisot, as excessively maquillée and not as the respectable woman she was, thus betraying not simply the complexity of his feelings toward her but also her unclassifiable status within the social order. Elaborate and complicated uses of paint and canvas allow Manet to veil, both metaphorically and literally, the semblance of one of his most challenging colleagues.

Dr. Marni Kessler is an assistant professor of 19th Century European Art in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University. Her forthcoming book Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) links the phenomenon of the veil to modernist art practice, medical theories, French imperialism in North Africa, and architectural conditions in late 19th century Paris. She has published articles in Art Bulletin, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Woman’s Art Journal and has forthcoming essays in Picturing Power: The New York Chamber of Commerce, Portraiture, and its Uses.