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| Self with Tracey Field Photo: Anthony Gray |
A quarter century ago, the year 1998, was heady and dizzying. Among other events, I had been cast to perform the role of French modernist painter Édouard Manet in Eight Impressions of a Lunatic by Sarah Morton. Auditions had been almost an entire year before the planned August production, presented by Red Hen, Cleveland’s Feminist Theatre, providing me ample time to conduct research into a historical character about whom I knew absolutely nothing.
I also stopped shaving and cutting my hair the day another Sarah Morton play I performed, Love In Pieces, closed that March at Cleveland Public Theatre. Five months to cultivate the bushy beard and shaggy mane of the great forerunner of those artists who would be known collectively as the Impressionists.
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| "Berthe Morisot" by Édouard Manet (c. 1869-1873) Cleveland Museum of Art |
The CMA has a few selections from these artists, works from the last couple decades of the nineteenth century. We have one panel from a triad of Water Lilies paintings by Claude Monet (the other two are in Kansas City and St. Louis) and the museum has kindly provided a bench upon which I have sat many times to immerse myself.
To see the lilies, floating on the surface, and to observe the surface. And beneath the surface, all the way down to the grasses growing on the floor of the pond. Seeing through the water, which is not water at all. Calming and fascinating, all at the same time.
Also on display is one of Manet’s many portraits of Morisot and it was interesting to me the extent to which he would ask her to sit for him. I wondered if he respected her as an artist in her own right, or just his attractive colleague.
In the one scene in which Manet appears in Morton’s play, she has a painting which she plans to submit for exhibition, he visits and hie appraising the work, he thoughtlessly begins to amend the work – to add his own touches to her painting. This is a thing which actually happened.
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| "Édouard Manet" by Henri Fantin-Latour (1867) Art Institute of Chicago |
The person of Manet resonated with me as I learned more about his life story. He wanted his work to be respected by the tastemakers and those whose opinions matter about such things, but he was following his own artistic path, refusing to conform to the classical dictates of the time. His work Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) was not accepted into the Salon (the wildly important and official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts) and so allowed it to be shown as part of the first Salon des Refusés or “Salon of the Rejected” which was such a boss power move.
In school there was this actor who would take on the mantle of whatever role he was currently engaged in. First it was Dracula and he started wearing capes. The next year it was Sherlock and he got all tweedy. Finally, he played Percy Bysshe Shelley and things really went off the rails for him. 1998 was my Manet year (you can’t hide that beard) the year I tuned thirty, which was also the year I left Dobama’s Night Kitchen and laid down plans to direct Hamlet with an as-yet unnanounced new company. My head was full of ideas and too much time in which to realize them. Which is to say, I was unemployed.
This past Friday night, on my own, I just wandered. I tried to find galleries I hadn’t explored before, I was surprised to find there are places I’ve never seen since the major redesign took place, well over ten years ago. I also learned that the museum restaurant Provenance is once more open for dinner on Wednesdays and Fridays. It hasn’t been since before the shutdown. My wife and I plan to return sometime next week.
I would like to take more artist dates in the forseeable future, solo time in not only familiar but unusual spaces. I will make a list.
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| Water Lillies (Agapanthus) Claude Monet (c. 1915 - 1926) Cleveland Museum of Art |
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