Petit Palais Reevaluates Eva Gonzalès, Corrects Birth Year

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A new retrospective at the Petit Palais in Paris,“Eva Gonzalès (1847–1883): A Free-Spirited Artist's Journey,” is re-examining the legacy of Édouard Manet's only formal pupil. The exhibition, on view through January, features approximately 70 works by the artist and corrects her birth year to 1847, not 1849, a discovery made during in-depth research.

Originally slated for 2020 at the Château-Musée de Dieppe as part of the Normandie Impressionniste festival, the exhibition was postponed due to the pandemic. This six-year delay proved beneficial, according to cocurator Stéphanie Cantarutti. The extra time allowed for the inclusion of significant pieces, such as Manet's Portrait of Eva Gonzalès (1870) from the National Gallery and Gonzalès's Une loge aux Italiens (circa 1874) from the Musée d'Orsay. The curatorial team also located Gonzalès's Le Moineau (circa 1865-70), a pastel portrait of a young girl with a sparrow, whose whereabouts had been unknown for decades.“In the end, time worked in our favor,” Cantarutti told ARTnews.

The retrospective challenges Gonzalès's long-standing association with Impressionism, a connection first made by critic Camille Laurent Mauclair in 1904 and reinforced by a 1993 exhibition at Paris's Musée Marmottan Monet.“I am personally opposed to this affiliation,” Cantarutti stated.“I fought to ensure that the term 'Impressionism' would not appear in any communication materials. The exhibition in no way presents her as an Impressionist.” Art historical evidence supports this stance, as Gonzalès never participated in Impressionist exhibitions. Conservator Marianne Mathieu explained that Gonzalès, like Manet, focused on establishing herself at the Salon, while Berthe Morisot, despite Manet's advice, joined the cooperative society that would become known as the Impressionists.

Gonzalès and Morisot, both from cultivated bourgeois families, shared many similarities, including using their sisters as models and signing their maiden names after marriage. However, Morisot resisted Manet's tutelage, especially after he substantially retouched one of her paintings in 1870, while Gonzalès embraced his guidance.“Morisot sought to emancipate herself from the very idea of artistic affiliation, even if that meant becoming part of an emerging avant-garde,” Mathieu noted.“Gonzalès, by contrast, boldly claimed her allegiance to Manet, who was a controversial figure at the time.”

The exhibition also explores why Gonzalès's allegiance to Manet remained largely obscured during her early career. After leaving her first teacher, Charles Chaplin, in 1868, she became Manet's pupil in 1869. However, for the 1870 Salon, she registered as Chaplin's pupil, despite her submitted painting, Enfant de troupe (1869–70), clearly drawing on Manet's Le Fifre (1866). Depicting a young boy in military uniform, Enfant de troupe was acquired by the French State, the only work of hers to enter a public collection during her lifetime, likely due to her father, writer Emmanuel Gonzalès's, connections. Further complicating her artistic identity, Manet exhibited his 6.25-foot-tall Portrait d'Eva Gonzalès at the same 1870 Salon, which family friend and journalist Armand Lapointe called a failure. Ironically, in 1874, the first year she registered as Manet's pupil at the Salon, her submission, Une loge aux Italiens, was rejected.

Gonzalès died young, at 36, limiting the full expression of her artistic abilities. She focused on subjects traditionally considered appropriate for women, such as portraits of family and friends, domestic scenes, and still lifes, which helped her avoid controversy. Critic Jean-Marie Tasset observed:“Behind her intimate scenes and landscapes lies a fierce energy, a blazing fire that reveals itself as soon as Eva sets her brush to canvas. All the dark magic of the blue note.” Under Manet's influence, her style became more spontaneous.

The Petit Palais exhibition guides visitors through Gonzalès's career chronologically, with digressions exploring her relationship with her husband, engraver Henri Guérard, and their artistic partnership, including time spent in Normandy. The couple married in 1879 and remained together until Gonzalès's death in 1883. Guérard later married Gonzalès's sister-in-law, Jeanne, a dynamic that Cantarutti notes could inspire a movie scenario. The final section includes pastels of Jeanne posing in Eva's wedding dress and a Norbert Goeneutte portrait of Eva's son, Jean-Raimond, along with Gonzalès's final works, such as Miss et Bébé (1877–78). Cantarutti highlighted the evolution in Gonzalès's technique,“from the porcelain-like finish of compositions in the style of Chaplin toward a more energetic touch,” particularly in her unfixed pastel-on-canvas works held in the United States. These works demonstrate her increasingly bold colors and greater freedom in brushwork. Notably, Pommes d'Api, owned by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, was too fragile to travel to Paris. The exhibition addresses Gonzalès's relative absence from art historical narratives, showing her considerable success during her lifetime and Jean-Raimond Guérard's efforts to preserve her legacy.

We previously reported:

Gabrielle Goliath's censored work, Elegy, originally intended for the South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale, is now on view in London.

Source: ARTnews

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