The exhibition Degas, Impressionism and the Paris Millinery Trade features 60 Impressionist paintings and pastels by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, some 40 period hats as well as photographs, posters and prints of French hats.
Currently on display at the Saint Louis Art Museum (until May 7, 2017), the exhibition will later travel on to the Legion of Honor Fine Art Museum in San Francisco (from June 24 until September 24, 2017).
The outstanding show is the work of Simon Kelly, curator and head of the department of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and Esther Bell, curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. In addition, together with six other experts, they have contributed substantial essays to the elegant catalogue (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr).
The articles focus on: the centrality of Degas’s millinery works in his portrayal of women, fashion and Parisian life, the Impressionist iconography surrounding the production and commerce of hats, highlighting how radical in their experimentation with color and abstraction Degas’s 27 millinery works were (Simon Kelly); the largely female profession of millinery from 1870 until 1910 and the genealogy of the modiste in the French imagination as seen through the visual culture and literature (fashion historian Françoise Tétart-Vittu); Degas’s millinery pictures as one of the artist’s ways to create a tension between modernity and the grand tradition (Susan Hiner); the chronology by Abigail Yoder at the end of the book shows the evolution of painting, culture, history, hats and fashion from 1834 until 1917.
The Saint Louis Art Museum purchased Degas’ oil on canvas painting The Milliners (c. 1898) in 2007 for $10 million. According to media reports, when Simon Kelly arrived at the museum in 2010 and saw this work with its warm palette, he knew immediately that he wanted to create a show about Degas, the Impressionists, the milliners and their hats. Incidentally, The Milliners (c. 1898) represents Degas’s final painting on the theme of hatmaking.
The show and the catalogue examine for the first time the height of the millinery trade in Paris from around 1870 until 1914, as reflected in the works of the Impressionists and exemplified by exquisite examples of period hats, including famed makers such as Caroline Reboux, Madame Georgette and Madame Virot as well as lesser known milliners such as Monsieur Heitz-Boyer and Cordeau et Laugaudin.
In the last quarter of the 19th century until the outbreak of the First World War, there were some 1,000 milliners working in Paris, at the time the undisputed capital of the global fashion industry.
The millinery artists created a rich and diverse array of headwear, including extravagant trimmings such as ribbons, silk flowers, ostrich plumes and even whole birds as well as traditional materials such as straw, silk and velvet. The exhibition and catalogue reflect this with sections entitled Plumed Hats and Flowered and Ribboned Hats. The pages dedicated to Men’s Hats feature for instance a Degas Self-Portrait in a Soft Hat (1857), another Degas depicting a Standing Man in a Bowler Hat (ca. 1870), as well as a top hat and much more.
The hat was an essential accessory of dress for both women and men in the late 19th c. and the early 20th c. The Impressionists not only featured people wearing hats in their paintings, but also the hat creation, display and sale in salons. For Edgar Degas in particular, hats and hatmaking represented a critical area in his exploration of modern urban life and became a focus for his formal artistic experimentation for more than thirty years. He and fellow Impressionists such as Eduard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir appreciated milliners not just as aesthetic subjects, but as fellow artists.
The curators, Simon Kelly and Esther Bell, underline: “The exhibition argues that the representation of millinery became a central theme within the broader avant-garde ambition to showcase the diversity of Parisian modern life.” Therefore, they focus not only on paintings, pastels, drawings and prints, but also on the hats from the start of the Third Republic until the outbreak of the First World War.
Kelly and Bell write: “In the late nineteenth century, the milliners were elite workers in the fashion industry and enjoyed the status of creative artists in their own right. Commentators described their products as works of art, and the objects often had price tags to match.”
“The 1870s and early 1880s saw an eclectic array of headwear in straw, felt, and satin, while the mid-1880s witnessed a vogue for smaller bibis. By the early twentieth century, hats had expanded to enormous proportions. They could be close to two feet in diameter while extensive, and often weighty, trimmings served to highlight the social significance of the owner.”
The catalogue is divided into six sections. The first investigates the millinery shop as a space of fashionable commodities but also host to complex social relationships. The second focuses on consumer culture and the spectacle of hat shopping. The following three sections explore various styles of hats. The final section includes Degas’s late millinery paintings and pastels.
In short, Degas, Impressionism and the Paris Millinery Trade is not only a show fascinating for art lovers, but also for people with a passion for fashion. It is strange that nobody before has thought about focusing on this fascinating subject, present in if not dominating so many Impressionist works of art. Hats off to Degas and the 2017 exhibition curators!
Simon Kelly: Degas, Impressionism and the Paris Millinery Trade. Exhibition organized and catalogue published by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Legion of Honor (Fine Arts Museum) San Francisco. DelMonico Books / Prestel, 2017, 296 pages with 197 illustrations in color and 45 in black and white. Find the book at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr.
The cover shows a detail of the Edgar Degas oil painting The Millinery Shop (1879-1886) from The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.
The exhibition Degas, Impressionism and the Paris Millinery Trade is on show at the Saint Louis Art Museum from February 9 until May 7, 2017 and at the Legion of Honor (Fine Art Museum) in San Francisco from June 24 until September 24, 2017.
Regarding Edgar Degas, we recommend our 2016 MoMA exhibition review Degas: A Strange New Beauty and our 2005 Harvard exhibition review articles Degas at Harvard and Degas biography.
Find beauty items at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
Article added on March 9, 2017 at 17:31 CET. Added to our WordPress pages on April 19, 2022.
