Small Freedoms

A friend took us to The Met while it was closed so we could experience all of the art without the COVID.

Berthe Morisot, the French impressionist painter whose tutor once called her “a revolution if not a catastrophe,” has become a little bit of a hero to me. You’re thinking it’s because I, too, would like to be called a cultural catastrophe, and you’re not wrong — but, more than that, it’s because of how Morisot was limited by being a woman in the 19th century, how she knew she was limited by being a woman in the 19th century, and how she painted autonomy into all the women in her work anyway.

It’s a terrible irony that Berthe Morisot became a master of impressionism, an art movement built on rejecting the hierarchies that had previously dominated academic painting, but was, herself, still so confined by her gender. Male artists in Paris were out and about, in bars and coffee houses, traveling domestically and abroad, whipping out their brushes and palettes in social settings whenever the mood struck — which was pretty important on account of impressionists being so into dances and cafes and bright, crowded boulevards — but women were restricted to painting their domestic experiences. They couldn’t even walk around the city alone.

Impressionist painters faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community, but upheld plenty of rigid conventions themselves. And still! Berthe Morisot was in the conversation with Monet and Renoir!

In The Story of Art Without Men, Katie Hessel writes that Berthe Morisot “captured vividly and intimately women’s private worlds, lamenting their lack of independence but also celebrating their small freedoms.”

It was that “small freedoms” line that really endeared Morisot to me because I read it when I was spending almost all of my time in bed reckoning with the ways COVID had wrecked my brain and my body. I grabbed onto the idea that a woman could make art — really, really good art that still touched so many people — even if she was confined to her own little world. I crawled inside that idea like a blanket fort. And for the last five years, almost every day of which I have spent within the four walls of my own home due to my body’s constraints and a complete lack of COVID precautions from nearly everyone else on earth, I’ve kept that idea wrapped around me like a well-loved quilt. I’ve become a little bit of an expert on a woman’s small freedoms.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my wife’s oldest and dearest friends gave us the most wonderful gift: She took us to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art while it was closed, so we could experience all of the art without any of the COVID. I couldn’t even believe it when Stacy told me. It was like finding out we were going to be characters in a whimsical kids’ book or something, like the Boxcar Children but fancy. A private day at The Met? I was so excited I laid out my outfit the night before (jeans, plaid polo, compression socks, Nike Blazer Mid 77’s with a red swoosh to match my plaid), and made a little list of the paintings I would like to see, if we had time.

Among them: Berthe Morisot’s Young Woman Seated on a Sofa (1879) and Young Woman Knitting (1883).

Top: Berthe Morisot’s Young Woman Seated on a Sofa (1879) Bottom: Young Woman Knitting (1883)

I learned a long time ago, of course, that seeing art in a book is nothing like seeing art in person. I’ve had the great good fortune to visit museums all over the United States and Europe — but nothing prepared me for the overwhelming wonder of standing in an empty room in one of the most prestigious museums in the world, wearing a mask, leaning on my cane, gazing at some of the paintings that had sparked a new hope into one of my darkest hours.

Like all of the women in Berthe Morisot’s paintings — and all of her subjects are women — these two aren’t frolicking around Paris; they’re home. But Morisot uses her swift, confident, light-shard brush strokes to imbue each of them with confidence and something like sovereignty. The woman on the sofa is almost smirking! And why wouldn’t she be? The motion of Morisot’s strokes foreshadows a world that won’t keep her contained forever.

The Annenberg Collection: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Masters gallery + Helen Frankenthaler’s Stride (1969)

One of the best surprises was standing in the The Annenberg Collection: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Masters gallery and glancing three rooms down to see Helen Frankenthaler’s Stride (1969). I didn’t even know it was there! I’ve always read that standing in front of Frankenthaler’s work takes away your sense of perspective, because of its scope and size and abstractness, and it was true. As I walked toward Stride, it became a pair of orange legs outside of space and time. And as I came to a halt in front of it, I could feel myself being sucked right into the canvas.

A few other favorites include Marie Victoire Lemoine’s The Interior of a Woman Painter's Studio (1789) and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self Portait With Two Pupils (1785). They are both doing one of my most favorite things in the history of art: Men told them they couldn’t paint in their chosen style, that they were literally incapable due to being an inferior gender, and so these women painted themselves into their paintings, in the style they were told they couldn’t master, and painted themselves teaching other women to paint in that style too. The layers of pettiness!

Left: Marie Victoire Lemoine’s The Interior of a Woman Painter's Studio (1789) Right: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self Portait With Two Pupils (1785)

Of course, no visit to The Met to gaze adoringly at the glory of women would be complete without a Clara Peeters still life. I’ve written before about the way she hid herself in her art, and how heckin badass that is!

Clara Peeters’ A Bouquet of Flowers (1612)

I gasped out loud when we walked into the gallery with one of my all-time favorite ever paintings, Marie-Denise Villers’ Marie Josephine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes (1801). When The Met bought the painting in 1922, they attributed it to Neoclassicist painter Jacques Louis David. Oh, and it was universally praised as an unforgettable masterpiece. Curators finally realized it was Marie-Denise Villers’ work in 1996, and — boom! — here come male critics talking about, “It does have certain weaknesses of which a painter of David’s caliber would not have been guilty.” Feminist scholars have argued, repeatedly, that of course this is a painting by a woman. The gaze is way too autonomous to be a man’s work. In fact, many believe it is a self-portrait of Villers.

Marie-Denise Viller’s Marie Josephine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes (1801)

But the best part of my trip to The Met wasn’t even the art. It was the fact that my wife and our friend and her partner spent an entire afternoon masked and cheerful and patiently guiding me around the museum, allowing me to stand in front of as much art as I wanted for as long as I wanted, while they counted medieval cats and Victorian dogs in paintings, tried to figure out which woman model was most annoyed at the man painting her, sweet and soft and silly and smart. I didn’t feel self-conscious about being slow and clunky with my cane. I didn’t feel unsafe, because I wasn’t surrounded by unmasked masses. I didn’t feel weird about handing our friend a notecard asking to go to a gallery called “Hierarchy, Gender, and the French Academy.” All day, I simply felt overwhelmed by gratitude and the brush strokes of brilliant women.

My freedoms may be small, but I am so lucky to exist inside the kind of love where all beauty comes from.