Leave it to the French to fixate on fashion to define the times. That’s what the Impressionists did: As Paris became the center of haute couture, Monet, Manet, Degas and Co. painted the styles they saw around them as a way of capturing the pulse of “modern life” — the 1860s to 1880s.
So what better way to display their work now than alongside the frocks, fans and slippers that inspired them? Or, for that matter, to frame a swatch of peach-colored silk from the Marquise de Miramon’s peignoir and hang it beside a James Tissot portrait of her?
And there you have some of the fun of “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity.” Opening Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it hails from Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, where it reportedly broke both attendance records — and hearts — when it left.
Here, on loan from Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago and elsewhere are 80 paintings, many of which feature life-size figures in meticulously detailed clothing, along with the fashions that inspired them: 16 costumes in all, plus accessories, from such temples of haute couture as Maison Roger, along with their made-in-America copies. Even then, when Coco Chanel was in diapers, we were following France’s fashion lead.
“Artists have always appreciated the power of fashion to flatter or describe character, to provoke or shock, but what’s distinctive about the Impressionists’ interest is in reflecting the look of the moment,” says Met curator Susan Stein.
Decades before his first waterlily, Monet strove to capture every crease in the green-and-black striped satin skirt his mistress, the future Mrs. Monet, modeled in his breakout painting, “Camille.” You hardly notice Camille’s face, but you’ll never forget that dress, or the fur jacket she wore with it. Green had just come into vogue then, Stein says — only recently had they perfected the dyeing process — and that painting became widely known as “the green dress.”
There are eight galleries in all, arranged more or less thematically. An entire room is devoted to women in white, another to the black dress. Not the Little Black Dress — because there’s nothing little about these formal and formidable, tightly corseted confections. Back then, black dye was expensive; only the wealthy could afford to wear it. Here, your eye goes to a vintage number that looks very much like the one in the Manet painting across the way.
The show is peppered with perceptive text blocks and sound bites: “Black is the queen of colors,” Renoir declared, while Manet mused, “The satin corset may be the nude of our era.” And yes, there are corsets here, too, along with satin slippers that could have waltzed in from the movie “Gigi” and a case full of men’s hats, from a straw boater to a glossy top hat.
There are lots of the latter in Tissot’s 1868 painting, “The Circle of the Rue Royale,” depicting a dozen dandyish members of a men’s club. Dead center in the foreground is a dalmatian: A vision in black-and-white, he’s yet to go out of fashion.
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