ART UNBOUND EPISODE 25 TRANSCRIPT MARY WEAVER CHAPIN This is Art Unbound, a podcast brought to you by the Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center. My name is Mary Weaver Chapin and I’m the Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Portland Art Museum. On this episode of the podcast, I have a conversation with Heather Lemonedes Brown, the Virginia N. and Randall J. Barbado Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio. Both of our institutions are members of FRAME, the French American Museum Exchange, which has a rich history of connecting museums in its network through exhibitions and education programs for over 20 years. FRAME provided grant funding for a series of podcast episodes and we are thrilled to be able to tell these stories with FRAME’s assistance. Relevant links can be found in this episode’s description, and at portlandartmuseum.org/podcast where you will also be able to find a full episode transcript. Heather, thank you for joining us in Cleveland. HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN Oh, what a pleasure to be with you, Mary. MARY WEAVER CHAPIN It’s a great opportunity to talk not only about this upcoming project we have together but our own long standing relationship. Getting ready for the podcast, I was trying to remember when we met. Are you able to help me pin down a date? HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN Yes, yes, I am. I know. I started working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Prints and Drawings department, supervising the study room in in the late autumn of 1996. So I must have met you right at that time, or in 1997. MARY WEAVER CHAPIN Oh, I bet you’re right, because I was taking a class with the head of the department, George Goldner, and he brought us in to the prints and drawings study room. So it just depends on which semester that was. But we’ve had a long friendship now, not telling anyone how old we are, but we’ve seen marriages, the birth of children, both of us lost our fathers, and we’ve moved from city to city in pursuit of our careers. HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN Yes. And seeing each other in all of those cities, I think. MARY WEAVER CHAPIN That’s right. HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN Many, many miles of travel. MARY WEAVER CHAPIN Yes. You know, I think a significant part of our meeting at the Metropolitan Museum was, that was the moment where both of us decided that we were going to pursue a career in prints and drawings rather than paintings, which is the typical curatorial path for many people. HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN Exactly. I think we we immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits, or at least I know I felt that way about you because you loved late 19th century European Art and so did I. And we were both working on our PhDs at the time. And in a milieu in which we were immersed in works on paper and both learning every I think by leaps and bounds every week, and recognizing the fact that this was captivating both of our imaginations and and it was an area in which we were both going to want to work. So it was really a special and magical time I know in my life and I think you were in that exact same place at the same time. MARY WEAVER CHAPIN Yes, I think of the major milestones we’ve had together. I remember both of us, discussing our dissertation topics or searching for them. And I think we were both inspired by our time at the Met. I ended up working on Toulouse- Lautrec and you on Gauguin, based on things we saw during those formative years in the department. HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN Oh, absolutely. Wasn’t that department’s collection just an absolute treasure trove? And yes, I’m sure there were works in the print department that inspired you and your dissertation work on Toulouse-Lautrec. And I know, in my dissertation on Gauguin and his Volpini Suite from 1889 that the Met have a full set of impressions of. That stayed with me even after I moved to Cleveland and helped inspire me and I remember you, Mary, in particular, when I was choosing my dissertation topic, you said “Be courageous and choose an important artist. Don’t be afraid to work on an artist like Gauguin.” And so that that helped. MARY WEAVER CHAPIN Oh, that’s so wonderful, I don’t remember that, Heather. That’s great. Well, our longstanding friendship is one of the reasons I came to you first when I had an idea for doing an exhibition about the Nabi Artist, a group of young men who worked together in the 1890s in Paris. And what our listeners may not realize is that forming these sort of partnerships between museums is an important part of our work. So I knew that I needed a partner who would have complimentary work in his or her collection, but I also knew I needed someone I could work well with and you were absolutely at the top of my list. This exhibition will premiere at the Cleveland Museum of Art in July of 2021, and then be on show at the Portland Art Museum in the fall. Together, Heather and I have been working on this exhibition for a number of years. HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN We will be focusing on four of the artists among the Nabi Brotherhood, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, and Felix Vallotton. For each of these four artists, home, family, and the domestic interior played crucial roles in their paintings and prints and drawings of the 1890s which they made as young men in Paris. Our exhibition is divided into five sections. We start out by looking at the interior itself. And then within the interior we look particularly at the role of music in the home, and what role music played among the family, including children. And then also we look at the family itself. We look at romantic love, marriage, we look at children and the cult of the mother as it were, and how children were raised and what their role was in the home. We’ll also be looking at the domestic garden, the space outside the home, that was a kind of exterior living space for the family, where the family drama could sort of spill out of the home and and carry on in the garden. And then we’ll be looking at what we call the Nabi City - domesticated views of the city where we don’t find the sweeping boulevards of Paris. Rather, we see little intimate corners of the city, rainy streets, park benches, quiet moments in the city, views of children with their parents, or nannies, but domesticated views of the city of Paris in the 1890s. So in some ways, I think when we first introduced the theme, the immediate reaction might be Oh, you know what a lovely exhibition. It all sounds kind of terribly charming and sweet, but we quickly discovered and we’ll communicate to the visitors to the exhibition and readers of the catalog that these pictures are more complicated than they might first appear. Of course, home is the site of safety and solace. But it’s also the site of psychological complexity, of fraught situations, sometimes financial desperation, sites of adultery, even. So these views by Bonnard and Denis are often very positive and ebullient and joyous, but the scenes by Vuillard can and certainly by Vallotton have an edge to them, a complexity and often a mystery that makes us wonder what exactly is going on in this interior. MARY WEAVER CHAPIN I think it’s the psychological complexity paired with their very daring, formal means that make these objects so compelling. The Nabi artists were looking at Japanese prints they were greatly inspired by Japanese prints. The new technology of photography was underway. They were taking lessons from Impressionism while also trying to form their own path, and creating really a new visual language that is dominated by flatness, cutoff angles, and in some cases, a very rich textural density. A lot of Vuillard’s canvases almost looked like they were woven, rather than painted. And in other cases, an artist like Vallotton had sort of an icy precision that lends a strange and disturbing edge to many of his pictures. HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN One of my favorite sections in the exhibition, Mary, is our or one of my favorite threads that run through the exhibition are these artists depictions of domestic animals - cats and dogs. I think that the way that artists, particularly Bonnard, but Vuillard as well, depicted animals was somewhat similar in the way they depicted children, where they allowed themselves tremendous artistic license when depicting these beings, pets and children that are less constrained perhaps by society and the mores that we expect of one another as adults, and children and animals are depicted with this kind of wonderful abandon and artistic freedom, that perhaps the artists didn’t allow themselves in the same way when depicting adults. MARY WEAVER CHAPIN You know Heather, I was just thinking about that, in fact, yesterday. We are in the midst of writing our exhibition catalog and I was looking at some of Bonnard’s depictions of one of his little nephews. And he exaggerates the form so you see the big wobbly head of the baby and the staring eyes.