"Manet & Morisot" at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Berthe Morisot
with Bouquet of Violets
etching, Édouard Manet, 1872

Last week, I was out with a friend, it was trivia night at The Bottlehouse. She was talking about the future, I was talking about the past. I have a future, at least I believe I do, but oh man, I have been overwhelmed by the past lately.

For example, on Saturday evening, I caught the Seat of the Pants production of The Book Club Play by Karen Zacarias, playing through May 31 at Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ in Tremont. In the 1990s I performed in a surprising number of shows in Pilgrim, beginning with the 1992 Working Theatre production of Jean Racine’s Andromache, and concluding with Eight Impressions of a Lunatic by Sarah Morton, and produced by Red Hen Theatre in 1998.

  

Lisa Lewis & David Hansen
"Andromache"
by Jean Racine
The Working Theatre, 1992

The Book Club Play takes place in a nice living room in modern America, and as SOTP specializes in site-specific plays, they found a pleasant sitting room at Pilgrim for the performance. This room is adjacent to the actual theater space (with a platform stage and traditionally seating) and was one we used as a dressing room for Eight Impressions.

I shared a bit about that production a couple years ago, one of those experiences I used to have, when I took myself seriously as an actor. I read several books on the character I was playing, Édouard Manet, and on the subject of the play, Berthe Morisot. For the first time in my life, I studied painting. I grew my hair out. I added to my shallow education in everything.

Manet & Morisot
David Hansen & Tracey Field
"Eight Impressions of a Lunatic"
by Sarah Morton
Red Hen Productions, 1998
Photo: Anthony Gray

It is a marvelous thing to be so prepared, so attired, so transformed. And I had it so easy; Morisot and her mother, speaking of my character before I entered, the great man, generating expectation and anxiety in them and in the audience. There is a particular moment, when the charming and confident man appraises the woman’s work, when he is surprised, sees beauty, originality, remarkable talent, and he is amazed, even threatened.

I have a good friend who has told me he was taken with that brief moment, that I succeeded in communicating all of those things. Good for me. What I remember is that no matter how much self-confidence, even arrogance, that I was able to maintain, it was only from the shoulders up. When Tracey Field, as Morisot, handed me a cup of tea, my hands shook so terribly. Every single time. My face can fool people. My hands, not so much.

Berthe Morisot Reclining
Édouard Manet, 1873

Last Saturday, I took myself on an artist date to University Circle. First, I explored the Cleveland History Center. I had been looking forward to checking out the Hollywood on the Cuyahoga exhibit, which held a few surprises (I want to know more about those Cleveland-based lithograph houses that were some of the biggest producers of movie posters during the silent era) but was padded out with a lot of photos of movie stars who grew up – or spent a some time – in Cleveland. That’s not really interesting, that’s just trivia.

But as long as I was there, I decided to just wander around. There's a lovely exhibit on community-based health care. I got fairly lost in the Hay-McKinney Mansion, a large wing of the museum I’d never taken the time to experience before. There were no other people around and I became concerned that I had entered some “employees only” area, especially when I encountered the servants’ quarters. But things were labeled for display, and marked “please do not touch” so I assumed the best.

" ... out of a DeLorean?!"

In fact, I saw the servants’ dining room before I saw the main dining room, and I thought, this is cozy. And there’s a lot of natural light. The Hay-KcKinney dining room was grand and opulent and dark and felt dusty.

And I hit the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum, which I have been to many times (we even attended a wedding reception there in the late 90s) not so much to see the cars, but the peer through the windows of the recreated Euclid Avenue storefronts located along one wall in the lower level.

I was reminded of Yesterday’s Main Street at Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, which my family first visited some fifty years ago. As an eight year-old, every exhibit made an indelible impression, and in idle moments, or drifting off to sleep, I would fantasize about what it would be like to live in a different time and place.

Or maybe just a different time. My kids tease me about my obsession with the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. And it’s true, if you were to use the DeLorean they have at the Crawford Museum, to travel to any time or place in history, I wouldn’t choose the birth of Christ (that might settle some arguments) or Shakespeare’s London (that wouldn’t settle any arguments) I would choose the summer of 1936, Cleveland, Ohio.

For more information, check out the script for my play Cleveland Centennial! or read this blog from the beginning.

The story of Manet and Morisot is one of mutual respect and admiration, and it’s one that still interests me because I seek out such symbiotic artistic relationships in my life.

Morton’s play is a feminist work, one centered on Morisot, and her struggle to create art while also accepting her place in bourgeois society – she wants to be married, to have a child, she also wants to paint and for her work to be acknowledged. Like most of us, she wants happiness.

Self-portrait
Berthe Morisot, 1885

And Manet was just one part of that equation. A mentor, a colleague, even if you will, a muse.

Many of the works currently on display at the the CMA are Manet’s studies and paintings of Morisot, and they are lovely, tasteful portraits of a proper, middle-class woman, often dressed in black, occasionally reclining, though never the subject of a fictional work like Olympia or Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (no, those two aren’t here in Cleveland) though the very best painting of Morisot is the last one we encounter before exiting through the gift shop – a self-portrait, painted when she was forty-four. She painted what she saw in the mirror, a middle-class, middle-aged woman, palette and brush at hand.

She looks happier.

"Manet & Morisot" at the Cleveland Museum of Art continues through July 5, 2026 -- with free admission on Saturday June 6, to celebrate the CMA's 110th birthday.

Eight Impressions of a Lunatic (play)

Self with Tracey Field
Photo: Anthony Gray

Last night, I had an artist date at the Cleveland Art Museum. It’s been on my list of things to do, all summer. Just … go to the art museum. If you are unfamiliar, you should go. It’s free. Just walk in, like always, now and forever. The only thing that’s changed is that apparently they recently added metal detectors. So it goes, ç'est la vie.

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.

"Berthe Morisot"
by Édouard Manet
(c. 1869-1873)
Cleveland Museum of Art

Manet himself was not an “impressionist” (he did not like that term) he was that hipster guy who already had a reputation and who the new kids looked up to (my Millennial friends might relate) if the kids were named Renoir, Monet, Degas or Berthe Morisot. Morton’s Eight Impressions is centered on the person of Morisot (performed for Red Hen by Tracey Field) a play consisting of eight scenes from her life in which few characters, other than she, appear more than once.

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.

"Édouard Manet"
by Henri Fantin-Latour
(1867)
Art Institute of Chicago

It filled me with great pride to play this role, and I thought I looked fantastic. My favorite image of Manet is the portrait by Henri Fantin-Latour, which I had the opportunity to see once at the Chicago Institute of Art. I think I managed to pull off the look very well, thanks also to the costume designer.

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 unanounced 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 foreseeable future, solo time in not only familiar but unusual spaces. I will make a list.

Water Lillies (Agapanthus)
Claude Monet
(c. 1915 - 1926)
Cleveland Museum of Art